How? Here are a few things that have helped:

1) I got lucky - I jumped on something early and got picked up quickly and rode on the back of a giant gorilla as it kept getting higher and higher - right place, right time

2) I keep costs low - I use Tumblr (free) and cheap, pluggable services like Campaign Monitor, Wufoo, Buffer, and IFTTT to automate a lot of the process.

3) Don't be afraid to ask for money - I started doing this very early on, but even that wasn't soon enough! People will pay if there's a benefit, so don't be afraid to ask.

4) Keep it simple - I write brief emails, I don't respond to everything and I only spend a few hours each week on the site - updating content, checking stats, emailing etc.

5) Get multiple sources of revenue - I use a number of affiliates as well as offering traditional advertising.

6) Be social - Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+ - BWB is on all of these. I try to engage with people and respond to things

7) Start a mailing list - this is not to be overlooked!

I hope this gives you some helpful ideas :) don't be afraid to ask any questions.

I would buy/read it! (Just brainstorming here...)

I think 6 is the hardest for me. Keeping up a social media presence is such a slog.

If not that might be a good ship to jump on now, as it's the buzzword for tech recruiters. Most of whom have no clue what it is.

This is actually on a public repo on GitHub I believe & curated by the Angular team iirc.

I had to turn it off to see anything.

(That said, it worked on me.)

I have played a little with direct advertising, but paying for adverts that link to a site that sells adverts seems a little too much like a self-defeating loop. Normally paid ads are done during promotions.

Can I make a suggestion? Most people who say "passive income" spend a lot of time fantasizing about the lifestyle relative to actually producing value. It is not terribly difficult to produce value as a programmer. Concentrate on producing value. If you achieve that, you'll trip over $500 a month. Most of the straightforward ways involve identifying a problem for a class of business that you're positioned to solve and then solving it in return for money.

If you want concrete suggestions with regards to markets and form factors, in lieu of repeating myself I'll post a link to an old comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5904316

Generally, completely passive income is massively harder and more time intensive to generate than minimal-time-investment income (which is what Patrick suggests above). I have both completely passive and minimal-time-investment income sources, and the passive ones have been MUCH harder and longer work per dollar over the last few years.

Focus on optimising your $/hr (and your hr/month) rather than going for hr == 0 and you'll likely hit your goal much faster.

I first heard about Machinima in the Seananners' videos, and now they (you?) appear to be dominating the game market on Youtube. I was surprised the other day when a brazilian (talking in portuguese) had a Machinima affiliation in his video.

Most of my income is residual, and I love it, but there was a big hump to get over at the start.

Random ideas:

- Start something like skoshbox.com, but with Indian goodies. You may not realize it, but foreign countries crave Indian tastes and flavors. I would probably pay for a monthly delivery of Indian spices and sweets.

- Start a podcast on a passion of yours. Offer free newsletter and video lessons, then charge for premium content or up-to-date episodes and consulting.

- Omegle meets paint. A collaborative canvas for children of different nationalities to meet on the Internet. No chat, no video/audio – just the canvas. Revenue may come from ads, sponsors, educational programs within the platform.

EDIT: to whoever downvoted my post, may I ask why?

Would you be selling small kits of spices to prepare a meal, with a recipe delivered at the same time?

This is a time intensive operation. As of now, I m not convinced the returns would be high enough.

The best way to figure out what to build is by thinking about what YOU would find useful, and then build that. Don't get too big with the idea, though. Just analyze your day-to-day routine and ask yourself what kind of little piece of software would make your day 1%-5% less annoying.

For example, I'm a developer but also a startup founder. I've wasted entire days doing repetitive email follow-ups to investors, partners, customers, etc., which means I wasn't committing code. So I put aside a weekend and built a system to automate my email follow-ups. After it worked well for me, I showed it to some colleagues, they started using it, too, and before I knew it, I had a nice little SaaS app going. With another weekend of work, I added a frontend and billing system, and I launched it as https://autopest.com.

(I'm including the link at the suggestion of some of the other folks in this thread, and also to show how it matches well with their advice -- target B2B, build a SaaS app, keep it simple, rely on quick solutions like Bootstrap and Stripe, etc.)

Step two is getting people to it. Best way I found for that is social media -- especially Twitter. It only takes me 15 minutes a day to be "active" on Twitter, I can easily target BizDev people and GrowthHackers (my target audience), and slowly but surely, they start signing up. It's been a few months and I'm on pace to hit your $500/mo target in the next 30 days.

Best of all, because I built something that I REALLY WANTED, even if no one ever pays me another penny, I'll still come out ahead because the thing I built works really well for me.

Have you any ideas what tools might make your (dev) life easier? You can create a small productive/utility SaaS app. Use bootstrap if you don't have any design skills. Use PayPal/Stripe to setup a (recurring) payment system in a day.

Test using lean methodology, buy a domain, create landing page with bootstrap, pricing page, and a fake sign up page. Takes max a week. Then spend another one week driving some traffic from Google/Facebook ads to see if there's any interest. Usually Facebook, if targeted well, is way cheaper. Start using Google once you know your LTV (Life Time Value of customer) and conversion. Start by spending for example $20.

One tip: Don't target US customers in Facebook for polling interest, they are harder to convert, and from my experience around 10x/20x more expensive than Asian/Spanish speaking countries.

After you see interest, try to find a quick way to see if people are willing to pay. This might not as easy as most users want to use your product before paying. You might explain the product in better detail after the signup and ask what they want to pay for it.

After you are able to confirm if people are willing to pay for your service, only then spend serious time building.

You can apply the same tactic if you're selling an e-book, maybe the spices idea as someone mentioned before.

Good luck!

(1) I would say focus first on value rather than money. I delivered my service for free or on trial basis for almost 6 months before clients signed up to pay.

(2) As a freelancer, focus on long-term retainer relationships, built on your value-proposition. And work with clients who have solid reliable cash flows. This way, your income would be guaranteed via 1-2 year contracts.

(3) Please stay away from consumer focused businesses/services if you are looking for small side income (this can be your focus for your big main start-up idea). B2B is always better. The only exception I think is if you get lucky in the app economy or if you could build 1m+ page-view site (Amit Agarwal)

Also it is an SEO experiment, all my traffic (97%) is Google organic.

It's ~4 months old, has 75k hits/month and generate USD 60. It still growth 100% month over month.

I need some months to return the money I invested (designer, domain, ...), but I don't even count my time. I'm learning more from this project than with anything else I already did.

Here's a better way to look at it:

You want to earn $500/month? As a good Ruby developer, you can earn that much in two days doing contract work. And no, it doesn't matter if you're based in Bangalore, you could be based in Belgaum and it wouldn't matter, as long as you had a good internet connection.

You can make more money while doing work you enjoy, instead of trying so hard looking for passive income. And you can save up, invest that money and buy solid chunks of time to totally focus on your crazy startup ideas.

Contract work, like 9-to-5 employment, is the opposite of what people have in mind when they say "passive income". The goal of passive income isn't to get something for nothing. It's to create something that generates income that isn't linked 1:1 with your time.

But I think people get a kick out of chasing passive income, because it gives them a sense of having "hacked" the system.

This isn't "The System". It's just the labor market.

    > My point is that if it takes so much effort...

Know what else takes effort? Building only what others pay you to build despite your ability to build anything. Not everyone is content with that. I reckon most of us don't consider that the height of our life ambitions, but the alternatives aren't as straightforward as dropping our CV into a dropbox. Hence this Ask HN submission.

Your posts are just selling some brand of status quo that we're already familiar with.

I'd be the last person to say don't build a business! I'm saying the opposite. Selling time does suck and selling a product or service is much better.

All I'm saying is that if that's what you want to do, then do it properly. Don't waste time on "passive" stuff. Actively build a business.

There are about a 1000 ways to do it. But you have to actually do it.

(I mean, if I loved marketing, I would have become a marketer).

Pair us with someone who loves marketing. S/he finds high-paying consulting jobs, I build awesome sites and/or mobile apps, and we split all the income 50%/50%, minus fees for the company.

Have some kind of rating system, where both your peers and customers rate your work. The higher that you are rated, the better marketer you can get paired with. I imagine the top marketing experts could find clients willing to pay $1000/hr rates for the top developers.

Mediocre developers are often charged out at $1000/hr rates by big name tech companies to their big name clients, who themselves sub-contracted to mid name developers under quite careful contract terms (client liability). Sub-contractors sometimes sub-contract themselves.

I'm thinking from an enterprise type technology stack: A smaller startup offering PaaS or SaaS to enterprise clients, perhaps replacing an in-house system could benefit from the indirectly acquired knowledge and expertise pool of enterprise developers, where the barriers to entry are sometimes slow and expensive.

I am not nitpicking, just sharing that what you've suggested works only for very experienced people with a big network. I am still in University.

And contrary to your belief, being in university is a great advantage. You can say you're a student doing some research/looking for help, and people are generally much more willing to help.

If you can contract for $80/hour for US/EU clients (really possible), you'll need to work only 40 hours to cover a 6 month expenses.

But that won't probably be enough for one month, once you start earning it. You've been warned ;)

Do you have more info/advice about that? I've often flirted with the idea of online freelancing for overseas companies... But a lot of the freelancing sites either seem too dodgy/cheap, or elitist about "github" commits and the like.

Now how to get the clients. I'll leave you to figure out that part on your own.

Those clients will then give you repeat business or they might bring new contacts for you.

Finding good devs in India is a big pain for the guys in US/UK. So if your client is happy with your service, he will recommend you to others.

I used to be a freelance PHP dev sitting in India back in the old days of rentacoder.com

What the OP wants is a higher pay, so he gets more free time.

- Take advantage of growing e-commerce in India - sell other peoples product ... buy directly from manufacturer and sell it to consumers thru platforms like Flipkart, Snapdeal, etc. ... most of the manufacturer in tier-2 and 3 cities dont have a clue about e-comm selling so help them out and make a good return...

- Start affiliate business (selling other people's products/service) online...

- Create your own product/service and sell it thru your own e-comm store or thru Amazon or Ebay or Yahoo stores.

- Start writing a blog and make it so popular with your amazing content that you can make money thru Ads, affiliate marketing and/or by email marketing.

- You can also start a drop-ship store and sell to the consumers in north-america, europe and/or australia.

- there are small businesses on sale on Flippa (however you need to learn how to find a good one) that can easily make you $6k a year .... find a business that is of your interest/passion ....

Good Luck!

Same with "buy from the manufacturer" - unless you have a lot of storage space, and enough money to hold a lot of inventory, you can't even get into that business. That's assuming the product can even be stored for long periods of time without depreciating (pretty much all of electronics is out of the question then).

Many of Flippa businesses have fake numbers, be very careful. They buy traffic to get Analytics, and when they get a few months of it, they post it on Flippa.

Buying from Manufacturer: again its a haven if you can find a niche product ... there are millions of manufacturers in small cities in india who create fantastic products ... you do little bit of research about what is selling or trending and start with small inventory .... some investment for trial and error is required but not difficult to catch a niche in couple of months ...

Flippa: now a days flippa has become more careful about listing fake sites - there are many tools ... one of the is services offered by Centurica ... they do thorough due-diligence for you (especially revenue and profit claims)...

Such as?

For some types of purchase I do a lot of research to find the right item for me. I actually enjoy the researching process so an affiliate site is a good match for me. A big part of the work is providing useful content which you can only do after performing good research.

My site is a huge searchable catalog of products with affiliate links to Amazon if they're for sale on Amazon, otherwise I provide non-affiliate links to wherever they are for sale. Most affiliate sites are based on product reviews but my site's approach is to provide more search options with more accurate data (data that is often incorrect on Amazon).

If I estimate the hours I've put into it so far I'm surely making less than $1 per hour for my time but as the earnings increase and my new hours decrease it might eventually be a wise investment.

Professional affiliate marketers have multiple niches/sites with multiple ways of revenue generation from each sites ....after some success they have a very good idea which niche is really a big profit maker if spent more time/energy on it and based on 80/20 formula they get rid of the niches that is not profitable compared to effort required.

Then you sell exclusive, limited access to the list. The internet is virtually littered with small SaaS applications which are targeted toward small businesses. They are selling software for bookkeeping, time tracking, shift planning, appointment reminders, practice management, etc. These SaaS products have LTV numbers such that direct calling is worth their time.

Offer a maintenance contract of $50 per month for the server and the software to the good customer. A year later you will have 4 or 5 contracts paying half of your bill, for doing backups once a week, installing security updates, writing invoices, and perhaps sometimes writing an email to the customer or even patching a bug.

You can play around with own ideas, once you have a semi passive income. I would try to solve a problem with a software as a service.

So a stock priced at 100 doller-pounds and a yield of five percent could be expected to hand a stockholder 5 doller-pounds a year.

Obviously, this is an instantaneous snapshot, based on the price now and the dividend then, trying to give an idea of something that might be expected to happen in the future. So it's by no means any kind of guarantee; it is, however, an easy starting place before looking deeper into the stock to see if you really could expect a good yield going into the future.

I rent my parents' house in a medium-sized midwest US city; I get around $650/month after property management expenses. After taxes, insurance, maintenance expenses, and the occasional empty period, I'm not getting anywhere near that out of it. But it is still profitable, passive, and the investment needed to increase my income (in other words, buying more property) would not really be excessive.

Pardon me, but that is more or less the opposite of the traditional received wisdom.

High dividend stocks come in two varieties:

* Low-growth, mature, typically capital-intensive companies, especially those in highly-regulated industries. Think power generation, some real estate investments, and so on. Since stock price appreciation is not in the cards, dividends are the only returns an investor can expect and thus are higher. These are typically the safest stocks, although "safety" is relative; stocks are more risky than most other investments.

* A dividend-paying company whose stock price has been depressed, typically due to specific events: poor management decisions, a bad environment, competition, or what have you. These are typically considered "value" investments; the stock price has been pushed down, usually for good reasons, but also usually, too far. The dividend on these is unlikely to be maintainable---management will usually reduce it as part of doing something to get the company back on its feet or whatever. However, the investment itself is not particularly unsafe, in my personal opinion. See Buffet's "The Superinvestors of Graham-Doddsville" for some other people who feel likewise.

The second group is probably not what the poster wants and I would be uncomfortable focusing solely on the first since those kinds of industries are typically economically linked.

On the other hand, you do have to know what you mean by "high dividend". Thanks to the "dividends are doubly-taxed" lunacy, and double thanks to the "growth is everything" mentality, dividends are very low or non-existent. Anything above, say, 4% (to pull a number out of my flying monkeys) is probably a return of capital, not a return on capital; the money you get as dividends includes a partial payment of your original investment and you cannot expect to get your original investment back when you sell it. In fact, it will disappear entirely over time. And anything over 1.5% to 2% (again with the flying-monkey-numbers) probably represents the value investment situation rather than something sustainable. The 6% mentioned by the grandparent probably is indeed pretty risky.

Also, the bond market is usually considered safer than stocks, with a higher interest "dividend". But I don't really know much about that.

This should not be considered financial advice, I'm some random dude on the internet. Look carefully before you leap, try to learn what you're doing before you try to do it, and try to stick with reputable instruction. There is a crap-ton of bad information out there.

[Did I write something particularly controversial?]

Royal Dutch Shell gives a yield of 4.3%. http://ycharts.com/companies/RDS.B/dividend_yield

In 2010, it's yield was 6.5%.

It isn't inconceivable in 18 months time it'll be back near 6%.

It's all about timing.

I'm sure there are other high dividend stocks which are similarly non-risky, high yielding and produces a non-volatile source of income. 6% is on the high side, but isn't impossible.

You also don't have to look for USD denominated investments. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (Australia's largest bank), gives a dividend yield of close to 5%.

https://www.commbank.com.au/about-us/shareholders/shareholde...

The share price had risen over 50% over the past 4 years so if you had bought it 4 years ago instead the yield would be much more attractive.

Yields are low currently only because the entire market is currently on the high side of the cycle. When it turns back down, that's when you go in and pick up your 6%, which may be 18 months from now (though could be more, or less).

EDIT: If you're really going to do this I recommend diversifying your investment into 3-4 high dividend stocks in different industries - since dividends do vary as the economic cycle in each industry moves up and down.

2) Promote the website a bit

3) Profit.

The trick is working out what your niche is that hadn't already been done by someone else.

I lucked out with some websites in the UK about fuel consumption (for cars) a few years ago. I invested a weekend of my time and a little promotion effort and it snowballed - initially it made maybe £1 a month for the first year to 24 months but now I get about 150,000 hits a month which with ads earns a decent amount of money (more than you are looking for)

Granted it's not truly passive income, rather semi-passive. That said, with minimal monthly efforts, the money comes in each month.

So my main advice is start somewhere and don't find yourself so indecisive you do NOTHING. There are lots of opportunities in small niches especially. Pick one you love and try to tap into something. Myself, outside of being a developer I know signs and graphics pretty well, so it was a logical direction to go.

#2 Study other micro-businesses carefully.

#3 Apply an existing model to a brand new area or technology.

Personally I think the passive income concept is crap. It is real but is a concept that people who don't want to work hard eat up so is used in business opportunity marketing heavily.

There are things that can produce revenue for a long period of time after your initial upfront investment where you work really hard for a while for free or at a great loss (investing money in assets vs just your own time.) However, the nature of traffic flows online & technology mean if you use the revenue for personal consumption rather than re-investing it in the business one day a few years from now you will wake up no better off than the day you started. In some circumstances where the individual increases their standard of living or takes on debt, they will end up much worse off.

Not speculation, I have watched this happen to friends.

As a programmer your best opportunities are most likely writing tools and code that can be resold multiple times. Huge chunks of redundant work is done by freelance developers.

Alternatively, You can try to write your experience for others like DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean will pay you $100 for per approved article. You can try DigitalOcean here https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write

And if you are not interested in writing for others or writing as a freelancer, Why don't you start your own Ruby on Rails tutorial blog. A blog can make you more than $500/month by using Google Adsense or Affiliate Marketing. As a blogger, I believe that, Blogging is the best ideas to make money online and the possibilities are endless. But here, In blogging at first you will have to spend around $50.

Now choice is yours.....

Tough this is not passive income this might give an idea: Billing $20/hr (that's what we get in Bangalore), getting $500 a month from a single client is very easy. But finding few more clients will get you more than what you want. You will also get a lot of time. Toughest part is getting the client, good clients usually come from your contacts.

Another thought, finding customers for your SaSS product will not be difficult if you have a good circle, attend conferences and workshops in Bangalore which will build you this circle.

I do a day job as openstack dev, freelance on django, and also working on my own ideas - I am doing this to pursue my passion of traveling(digital nomad). :)

Just one correction, it is not because you're in Bangalore, but because you're asking $20/hr. I suggest next time ask 4-5x more and see what happens...

Also, you aren't limited to Bangalore or India... especially if you're a webdev. Try finding some remote gigs.

This advise is good as as 90% from the other postings i read here ;-)

if anyone interested in helping it get to profit email me at HNhandle at gmail.com

I spoke with the owner over Skype about it, he'd run the site for a couple years, had invested a lot of time into getting the licensed mosaic software tuned correctly, but had put virtually nothing into marketing and was still printing orders himself with a giant industrial Canon printer. Not surprisingly he was tired of it. I realized the printing process could be automated and business could potentially be expended by integrating with Facebook and offering a free digital option if the customer allowed a post on their wall. Long story short I bought 80% of the business a few weeks ago and I'm working on those things right now. I'm sure there will be snags in the road but I'm on my way toward my primary goal of getting a product on the market that will not require my time to run on a day-to-day basis. Currently income is less than 1000/month but I hope to see that grow.

My advice when thinking about a project like this yourself (and it's fine to start from scratch, though that's not what I did) is to take the basic tenants of running a startup to heart and just apply them on a micro scale:

1) let the real world inform your choices. In my case I happened upon a product that already had some validation. In your case maybe you just need to find that one pain-point you can help solve. Always be thinking of ideas, ask your friends, read a lot.

2) be efficient. get good at rapid prototyping and shipping ideas for validation. Always be asking yourself this question: is this the most valuable thing I can be doing with my time right now? Force yourself to move fast. You'll get better at learning what works and what doesn't.

3) Consider finding a partner who you can join forces with. Two people can be more effective than the sum of their parts. Not to mention expanding your network of friends and contacts is in many ways more valuable than wealth.

4) follow the money. It sounds crass but after all it is the goal and it's also the most tangible effect of providing value to someone. Even at a micro scale if you're not converting customers it's a red flag.

5) my personal style is to be be wary of saturated markets like social networks, mobile apps, etc. on the flip-side i personally feel there's potential in the blogging landscape and popular product integrations (like widgets).

Sorry that ran a little long, I'm on a road trip right now (not driving), just some stream of thought ideas. Good luck!

I've been searching for a simple income generating idea too for the past few months . I'm torn between trying to build a well paying freelancing career vs building a Saas product/service that's going to pay over time .

I tried to contact you but your email isn't public. Ping me if you wanna bounce some ideas regarding this sometime !

http://www.stansberryradio.com/James-Altucher/Latest-Episode...

Selling apps? Ad based revenue? SaaS?

As an EU citizen can't I just relocate there and collect without ever having contributed to french social security?

Doesn't seem to make much sense...

Note that how much you get is barely enough to live (but it fulfills its goal which it to reduce poverty).

(and there's a good chance the program will be scraped at some point, since while it fulfilled its goal with reducing poverty, it didn't have much impact in term of employment and there is still a ceiling effect even so it was supposed to remove them).

(and I'm not sure which part of reducing poverty doesn't make much sense, and as a EU citizen you can profit from any wellfare system within the EU)

Make a beautiful webpage with a mystic style and offer all kinds of incense, scents, shivas, buddhas, elephants, spiritual stuff all over the world.

In no time you'll be as big as amazon.