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Re:ASK:HN Recommendations on new sources of income by zazpowered on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @02:01PM (#13813474)
Build a mobile app. An app I built a few years ago is still making money on auto pilot. If you rank high on the App store you will get a steady stream of downloads.

Build a website. Because of SEO traffic this can be pretty passive. I have a few websites that are making income that I stopped working on years ago.

Invest. Investing is a great way for passive income you can look for dividend stocks, REITs or just plain real estate. Take a look at some options here https://senzu.io/investing/compare

For actively making money you can try to do contract work in your free time

Re:ASK:HN Recommendations on new sources of income by kennu on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @07:42PM (#13816765)
Did you put a lot of effort in writing original text content for the website? My experience has been that, even if a website might be useful for other reasons, it needs to have lots of original text e.g. to be approved for Google ads.
Re:ASK:HN Recommendations on new sources of income by Jugurtha on Sunday March 12, 2017 @02:05PM (#13852037)
I'm not sure this is true. I had a one article blog where ads were approved. Though it had 800+ comments and ranked better than the thing it talked about (card options in an underbanked country where banks suck at making their products known). I'm almost certain very few of the people who got a card didn't visit the site(and it's the very reason I wrote it: it was hard to find any pertinent info in one place when I wanted to get a card that I felt the effort should never be repeated by anyone).
Re:ASK:HN Recommendations on new sources of income by herbst on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @08:39PM (#13817052)
Once you are approved they dont really seem to care a lot
Re:ASK:HN Recommendations on new sources of income by sova on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @04:00PM (#13814826)
Hey that's a great list, thanks for the encouraging words.

So SEO is probably an important aspect of your passive website income. I have a site that's live now but it is totally javascript (clojurescript on the front-end) and there is absolutely no SEO yet because there are no persistent URLs or server-side rendering yet. Your message makes me throw this back up top on priorities. Make magic and make sure people can find it!

Re:ASK:HN Recommendations on new sources of income by zazpowered on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @05:18PM (#13815601)
This is a video that drilled into me the importantance of SEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUwNgxwN_pE

Obviously it depends on the type of business you are starting but even on mobile people use search so SEO can be a huge source of traffic

Re:ASK:HN Recommendations on new sources of income by averageweather on Thursday March 09, 2017 @12:20PM (#13830797)
I am getting a lot of traffic in the past week to http://www.averageweather.io yet my SEO doesn't seem to change. I'm the #2 most upvoted post on r/weddingplanning in the past 24 hours. I did 2k visitors yesterday.

Any advice? Current revenue is 100% AdSense.

Re:ASK:HN Recommendations on new sources of income by matbram on Wednesday March 08, 2017 @03:39PM (#13823566)
Really good advice.

I especially resonate with the whole SEO traffic for building websites. I had a niche website a few years ago that made around $40 a month passively without touching it for a year.

It can be a good source of income and not a ton of work involved if you're able to outsource the content generation.