[gravitronic]

Hi Patrick,

Good luck. I've been doing app dev since Jan of this year. I blogged about the profits I experienced in the first few months here:

[http://burnsmod.com/business/2012/04/23/My-First-2-Months:-A...]

What you have right, in my opinion:

- you have low expectations to start

- you haven't quit your job

- none of your plans sound crazy

- of your proposed ideas, writing wordpress themes is probably the most potentially lucrative.

What you (may) have wrong:

- passive income in my experience (app development) is constant work. Whether its blogging to keep traffic up, answering customer support requests, to adding features or new revenue-generating products, etc.

- Blogging for ad revenue is not going to be very successful unless you start a porn blog. Blog for SEO gains and to funnel to your product sale pages.

- If you really want passive income, try to come up with something that is a subscription service people will pay you monthly for. It's a lot easier to maintain a service for existing customers than have to bring new customers in the door every month.

[mmuro]

passive income in my experience (app development) is constant work. Whether its blogging to keep traffic up, answering customer support requests, to adding features or new revenue-generating products, etc.

I sell a WordPress plugin and I can agree 100% with this. "Passive" income isn't for selling software.

[vern1]

> Blogging for ad revenue is not going to be very > successful unless you start a porn blog.

I have a successful porn blog but have not monetized it. How can I do that? Which ad networks will provide me with the most revenue? Any advice would be very much appreciated...I've been mulling this question for a while but don't know much about ad networks outside of AdSense.

[gravitronic]

When I did this for about 2 months in college (before meeting my wife and deciding to exit the 'seedy' business) I made about $2000 if I remember correctly.

The money is in affiliate networks that pay you a fee for signup/purchases. Fleshlight was about 70% of my revenue, and paysite affiliate networks was the rest.

I was hosting my blog on blogger at the time so I just integrated banner ads into the template and submitted my links to FARK at the time for views.

[pa7]

hey, thank you for your this comment. Regarding the point that based on your experience passive income means constant work: Yes, I agree with you, passive income is constant work, my target will be to reduce this constant work to a minimum (e.g. a maximum of 2-4 hours per week) and optimize the revenue with the least work. I'm curious whether there are good strategies for doing that otherwise this will just be an empirical experiment :)

[gravitronic]

My approach thus far has been to not invest too much into a single idea before monetizing it, so I can "fail fast" without losing too much time.

It's a double-edged sword as I have people who paid for my DJ app and are expecting many new features. Which is good as it drives my efforts, but its bad because I can't spend that time working on new revenue-generating products.

The other approach I have when writing code is to try to have plans to sell each code module I write at least twice. For example the UI engine I wrote for my DJ app also powers my little iOS app released yesterday [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drinkpacer/id522224281?ls=1&#...], and I plan on using the audio engine for more audio projects. I call it the "combo effect".