8 ms·

* Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral u

by edent 11y ago

* Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral usefulness. * Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment, but stable income and you reduce your own energy bills. See http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar * Renting out property. Needs a much larger initial investment, and requires ongoing maintenance. On a good month I only hear from the managing agent once per month with details of how much rent is being paid. * Stoozing. Find a credit card with 0% interest on balance transfers. Stick the money into a savings account. Or, if you like risk, on a horse. Need a good credit rating and decent savings rate to make more than a few hundred a year though. * Affiliate marketing. If you can find a good theme (e.g. Halloween) and a decent place to put the links (somewhere that wants them - not spamming them everywhere) it's possible to get a moderate passive income. Well... not quite passive, requires upfront time commitment of selecting links and locations. * Hosting / simple websites. Again, little bit of up-front commitment. Works best if you can find a local niche of people who want a friendly face to host their websites. Usually as simple as buying a domain, setting up WordPress, and turning on automatic updates. In general, the best passive schemes require a large initial outlay and/or a dubious moral outlook. A better way to enhance your income is to eat out less, stop buying stuff you don't need, and shop around for deals. Boring but true!

Confiks 11y ago
> Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment (...) It also required upfront confidence in the sustainability of the government subsidy. In The Netherlands a lot of now-solar panel owners decided to invest because of subsidies, but last year the government decided to stop the subsidy for 2016. Especially with the low energy prices, that makes it a net loss for a lot of people.
- navbaker 11y ago
  Nevada just did the same thing.
- jsingleton 11y ago
  The UK Conservative government has also just cut solar feed-in tariffs. The new scheme starts on Monday. http://keepfits.org/news/so-we-have-our-response http://keepfits.org/news/so-we-have-our-response https://www.gov.uk/feed-in-tariffs https://www.gov.uk/feed-in-tariffs
phpnode 11y ago
In the nicest possible way, your post reads like "Passive income suggestions (2006)" - e.g. I can't really believe that stoozing still works when interest rates are so low, and getting new affiliate sites ranking is very difficult these days.
- beeboop 11y ago
  Using the free credit balance transfer for a savings account seems like a bad use of money. At best you're going to get something a little below the rate of inflation. You're better off investing it into a conservative index fund portfolio, but at that point you may as well just do the same thing but trading with leverage.
pitchups 11y ago
>Stoozing. Find a credit card with 0% interest on balance >transfers. Doesn't really work anymore : Most balance transfer credit cards charge a minimum fee of 1% to 3% on the transfer amount AFAIK. Savings account pay less than 1%.
- benmanns 11y ago
  True. You're better off shifting 100% of your spending to the card and keeping what you'd otherwise be spending in savings/investments.
orrinward 11y ago
* Also UK focused - Matched Betting. Exploiting Bookmakers signup/recurring offers for a guaranteed profit. This is good for an early surge of ~£2k followed by a pretty easily achievable £200-£500 per month for <5 hours commitment per week.
- tomarr 11y ago
  Any guides or links to get started on this kind of thing?
  - conceit 11y ago
    Either he means exploiting bonus programs for new members, which is hardly sustainable and unless there's an endless supply of those. Or it's your regular arbitrage gaming, which is also hardly worth the effort and not free of risk. If it's an arbitrage scheme in an exchange, where the quotes might vary over time, your are gambling and at that you are probably playing the bookie who always has the better latency.
    - lexicality 11y ago
      There are various sites such as oddsmonkey that do a lot of the effort of finding price disparities for you, so you can arb with confidence. Regarding bonus arbing, as long as you don't get banned lots of places perform regular stunts with free bonuses for inactive accounts to try to drag punters back in. (Disclosure: I work for an exchange)
    - orrinward 11y ago
      It's a combination of both. Initial signups is not sustainable, for sure, but there are some regular offers from a lot of bookies that are exploitable not for guaranteed profit, but "EV+" opportunities. This is where my consistent side income comes from.
    - orrinward 11y ago
      "arbitrage scheme in an exchange, where the quotes might vary over time" - The nature of arbitrage is that the profit opportunity is available at a single moment. What I interpret your explanation as is more akin to trading - Buying backs at a time and waiting for odds to fluctuate at an exchange for a sale. Although there is no (simple) way of doing a pure arb between a bookie/exchange, all the popular exchanges expose existing liquidity in a market and you can quite safely reduce the risk by double checking available liquidity at the exchange in the seconds before placing your back bet.
raesene9 11y ago
UK Solar isn't a good idea any more, the current government has slashed the payments and it's only going to go down more...
- guy_c 11y ago
  Feed in tariff dropped, but the installation costs dropped significantly too. I've not done the calculations for a while but it still might be profitable.
wtracy 11y ago
> Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral usefulness. I assume that by apps you mean native mobile apps. Anyone know how ad-supported mobile apps stack up against web apps? On the one hand, there's no such thing as ad blockers for native apps. On the other hand, web apps run on more platforms out of the box including desktops, and desktops in general seem to be easier to monetize via ads. > Hosting / simple websites. Again, little bit of up-front commitment. Works best if you can find a local niche of people who want a friendly face to host their websites. Usually as simple as buying a domain, setting up WordPress, and turning on automatic updates. Does anyone here have experience with this? It's an awfully saturated market, and there's not a lot of ways to differentiate yourself without turning it into a full-time job. That said, if it is as easy as edent makes it sound, I'd love to dive in as an excuse to get some system administration experience (and try out some ideas I have in that area).
- shanecleveland 11y ago
  I don't have direct experience on the hosting question, but I have often though that if you could come up with the purely simplest way to allow a small, local business to create a one-page website, they would pay $30 a month for the service. Better yet, target a specific niche – Restaurants, spas, landscapers, etc. You could then have a dead-simple template they could type their info into. Not gonna win any design awards, but so many small-biz sites suck badly because the tools available aim to do too much and become complicated or encourage the user (probably non-technical to begin with) to get too fancy and do too much. Piggy-back off this and up-charge: https://picnic.sh https://picnic.sh Biggest challenge would be gaining traction.
  - markyc 11y ago
    maybe a facebook page works better these days though
    - shanecleveland 11y ago
      Good point. Probably the best option for many types of local businesses.
ryan-c 11y ago
> Stoozing. Find a credit card with 0% interest on balance transfers. Stick the money into a savings account. Or, if you like risk, on a horse. Need a good credit rating and decent savings rate to make more than a few hundred a year though. I remember doing this in 2007. I wasn't aware there was a specific name for it.
- kangman 11y ago
  also called arbitrage
bkjelden 11y ago
Renting out property is a lot more than a large initial financial investment. Most people I know who do well in that space do so after several years. Once they learn how to be a landlord, learn the quirks of the market they invest in, etc, it can be pretty low stress, although not necessarily hands off. But if you're just starting out, you should expect to make some mistakes and run into some headaches as you figure things out.
- koide 11y ago
  You can hire landlords to do the work for you though.
shellerik 11y ago
I have had some success in affiliate marketing using an approach that I think many on Hacker News could duplicate. I launched my Amazon affiliate site about a year-and-a-half ago and its earnings have increased by about $100 per month with December being the first time I earned over $2,000 in a month. The approach is to find a type of product where Amazon has thousands of listing but the specifications are not very accurate and the filtering criteria are limited, and where there are highly active forums with people talking about and asking about these products. Then you build a proper searchable catalog for the products. Include lots of search criteria, sorting criteria, side-by-side comparison, recommended accessories, anything that would be useful for people looking to buy them. Once my catalog contained over 1,000 models I started replying to posts on forums with a link to my site that provided what they were looking for. People loved the site and it wasn't long before they were posting links to it to answer each others questions. That's all it took to start ranking on Google which is now responsible for 3/4 of my traffic. Initially this is not passive income. The first few months are a lot of work for very little money. Eventually the balances shifts to the point where additional work is only needed if you want to keep growing. Amazon's product advertising API allows you to get current prices, availability and popularity (sales ranking) to keep everything fresh.
- rompic 11y ago
  Did something similar for gifts. was a little hacky, but fun to build.
- akavlie 11y ago
  Did that entail a lot of hand entry of product information? (considering that Amazon was, as you said, lacking specifications)
  - shellerik 11y ago
    Yes it did. I have spent a lot more time researching and documenting specs than I have writing code. The good news is that I don't mind that type of work. I often build spreadsheets for fun to compare things I'm thinking of buying so I just took that to another level.
odonnellryan 11y ago
Regarding your closing statement: http://slickdeals.net/ http://slickdeals.net/ is awesome.
- tmaly 11y ago
  http://hotdealsclub.com/ http://hotdealsclub.com/ is another one but without the pictures. It is done by a friend of a friend. I still check it out for black Friday and Monday to see what tech deals are out there.
suresk 11y ago
"Stoozing" (hadn't heard it called that before) hasn't been profitable in a long time, unless you're willing to take huge risks (in which case, there are better ways to make leveraged bets). I haven't seen a balance transfer offer with a transaction fee of less than 2% in quite a while. Even at 1%, you'd just break even. Even if you are willing to take on a moderate amount of risk, most people - even those with good credit and decent incomes - are going to net a few hundred bucks per year off this thing, max. It is a really poor way to make extra income.
greggarious 11y ago
About how much qualifies as "moderate" passive income?

by edent 11y ago

Confiks 11y ago

> Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment (...) It also required upfront confidence in the sustainability of the government subsidy. In The Netherlands a lot of now-solar panel owners decided to invest because of subsidies, but last year the government decided to stop the subsidy for 2016. Especially with the low energy prices, that makes it a net loss for a lot of people.

navbaker 11y ago
Nevada just did the same thing.
jsingleton 11y ago
The UK Conservative government has also just cut solar feed-in tariffs. The new scheme starts on Monday. http://keepfits.org/news/so-we-have-our-response http://keepfits.org/news/so-we-have-our-response https://www.gov.uk/feed-in-tariffs https://www.gov.uk/feed-in-tariffs

phpnode 11y ago

In the nicest possible way, your post reads like "Passive income suggestions (2006)" - e.g. I can't really believe that stoozing still works when interest rates are so low, and getting new affiliate sites ranking is very difficult these days.

beeboop 11y ago
Using the free credit balance transfer for a savings account seems like a bad use of money. At best you're going to get something a little below the rate of inflation. You're better off investing it into a conservative index fund portfolio, but at that point you may as well just do the same thing but trading with leverage.

pitchups 11y ago

>Stoozing. Find a credit card with 0% interest on balance >transfers. Doesn't really work anymore : Most balance transfer credit cards charge a minimum fee of 1% to 3% on the transfer amount AFAIK. Savings account pay less than 1%.

benmanns 11y ago
True. You're better off shifting 100% of your spending to the card and keeping what you'd otherwise be spending in savings/investments.

orrinward 11y ago

* Also UK focused - Matched Betting. Exploiting Bookmakers signup/recurring offers for a guaranteed profit. This is good for an early surge of ~£2k followed by a pretty easily achievable £200-£500 per month for <5 hours commitment per week.

tomarr 11y ago
Any guides or links to get started on this kind of thing?
- conceit 11y ago
  Either he means exploiting bonus programs for new members, which is hardly sustainable and unless there's an endless supply of those. Or it's your regular arbitrage gaming, which is also hardly worth the effort and not free of risk. If it's an arbitrage scheme in an exchange, where the quotes might vary over time, your are gambling and at that you are probably playing the bookie who always has the better latency.
  - lexicality 11y ago
    There are various sites such as oddsmonkey that do a lot of the effort of finding price disparities for you, so you can arb with confidence. Regarding bonus arbing, as long as you don't get banned lots of places perform regular stunts with free bonuses for inactive accounts to try to drag punters back in. (Disclosure: I work for an exchange)
  - orrinward 11y ago
    It's a combination of both. Initial signups is not sustainable, for sure, but there are some regular offers from a lot of bookies that are exploitable not for guaranteed profit, but "EV+" opportunities. This is where my consistent side income comes from.
  - orrinward 11y ago
    "arbitrage scheme in an exchange, where the quotes might vary over time" - The nature of arbitrage is that the profit opportunity is available at a single moment. What I interpret your explanation as is more akin to trading - Buying backs at a time and waiting for odds to fluctuate at an exchange for a sale. Although there is no (simple) way of doing a pure arb between a bookie/exchange, all the popular exchanges expose existing liquidity in a market and you can quite safely reduce the risk by double checking available liquidity at the exchange in the seconds before placing your back bet.

raesene9 11y ago

UK Solar isn't a good idea any more, the current government has slashed the payments and it's only going to go down more...

guy_c 11y ago
Feed in tariff dropped, but the installation costs dropped significantly too. I've not done the calculations for a while but it still might be profitable.

wtracy 11y ago

> Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral usefulness. I assume that by apps you mean native mobile apps. Anyone know how ad-supported mobile apps stack up against web apps? On the one hand, there's no such thing as ad blockers for native apps. On the other hand, web apps run on more platforms out of the box including desktops, and desktops in general seem to be easier to monetize via ads. > Hosting / simple websites. Again, little bit of up-front commitment. Works best if you can find a local niche of people who want a friendly face to host their websites. Usually as simple as buying a domain, setting up WordPress, and turning on automatic updates. Does anyone here have experience with this? It's an awfully saturated market, and there's not a lot of ways to differentiate yourself without turning it into a full-time job. That said, if it is as easy as edent makes it sound, I'd love to dive in as an excuse to get some system administration experience (and try out some ideas I have in that area).

shanecleveland 11y ago
I don't have direct experience on the hosting question, but I have often though that if you could come up with the purely simplest way to allow a small, local business to create a one-page website, they would pay $30 a month for the service. Better yet, target a specific niche – Restaurants, spas, landscapers, etc. You could then have a dead-simple template they could type their info into. Not gonna win any design awards, but so many small-biz sites suck badly because the tools available aim to do too much and become complicated or encourage the user (probably non-technical to begin with) to get too fancy and do too much. Piggy-back off this and up-charge: https://picnic.sh https://picnic.sh Biggest challenge would be gaining traction.
- markyc 11y ago
  maybe a facebook page works better these days though
  - shanecleveland 11y ago
    Good point. Probably the best option for many types of local businesses.

ryan-c 11y ago

> Stoozing. Find a credit card with 0% interest on balance transfers. Stick the money into a savings account. Or, if you like risk, on a horse. Need a good credit rating and decent savings rate to make more than a few hundred a year though. I remember doing this in 2007. I wasn't aware there was a specific name for it.

kangman 11y ago
also called arbitrage

bkjelden 11y ago

Renting out property is a lot more than a large initial financial investment. Most people I know who do well in that space do so after several years. Once they learn how to be a landlord, learn the quirks of the market they invest in, etc, it can be pretty low stress, although not necessarily hands off. But if you're just starting out, you should expect to make some mistakes and run into some headaches as you figure things out.

koide 11y ago
You can hire landlords to do the work for you though.

shellerik 11y ago

I have had some success in affiliate marketing using an approach that I think many on Hacker News could duplicate. I launched my Amazon affiliate site about a year-and-a-half ago and its earnings have increased by about $100 per month with December being the first time I earned over $2,000 in a month. The approach is to find a type of product where Amazon has thousands of listing but the specifications are not very accurate and the filtering criteria are limited, and where there are highly active forums with people talking about and asking about these products. Then you build a proper searchable catalog for the products. Include lots of search criteria, sorting criteria, side-by-side comparison, recommended accessories, anything that would be useful for people looking to buy them. Once my catalog contained over 1,000 models I started replying to posts on forums with a link to my site that provided what they were looking for. People loved the site and it wasn't long before they were posting links to it to answer each others questions. That's all it took to start ranking on Google which is now responsible for 3/4 of my traffic. Initially this is not passive income. The first few months are a lot of work for very little money. Eventually the balances shifts to the point where additional work is only needed if you want to keep growing. Amazon's product advertising API allows you to get current prices, availability and popularity (sales ranking) to keep everything fresh.

rompic 11y ago
Did something similar for gifts. was a little hacky, but fun to build.
akavlie 11y ago
Did that entail a lot of hand entry of product information? (considering that Amazon was, as you said, lacking specifications)
- shellerik 11y ago
  Yes it did. I have spent a lot more time researching and documenting specs than I have writing code. The good news is that I don't mind that type of work. I often build spreadsheets for fun to compare things I'm thinking of buying so I just took that to another level.

odonnellryan 11y ago

Regarding your closing statement: http://slickdeals.net/ http://slickdeals.net/ is awesome.

tmaly 11y ago
http://hotdealsclub.com/ http://hotdealsclub.com/ is another one but without the pictures. It is done by a friend of a friend. I still check it out for black Friday and Monday to see what tech deals are out there.

suresk 11y ago

"Stoozing" (hadn't heard it called that before) hasn't been profitable in a long time, unless you're willing to take huge risks (in which case, there are better ways to make leveraged bets). I haven't seen a balance transfer offer with a transaction fee of less than 2% in quite a while. Even at 1%, you'd just break even. Even if you are willing to take on a moderate amount of risk, most people - even those with good credit and decent incomes - are going to net a few hundred bucks per year off this thing, max. It is a really poor way to make extra income.

greggarious 11y ago

About how much qualifies as "moderate" passive income?