Any advice to a skilled developer who wants to build up long term residual income?

I must be doing something wrong, if today I am here in this forum seeking advice. This isn't meant as an insult of course, if it were, I wouldn't be here. To make matters worse, I'm about to give a short summary of myself, which is meant to be accurate, rather that trying to sound big headed, if it does convey negatively, then I apologise in advance.

Let me summarise myself first, I am a web developer, who technically, has pretty much reached the top of his game - over the past decade I've worked my rear-end off for other people / commercial entities, much to their gain rather than my own. I'm a member of several standardization groups at the w3c and help create the specifications on which the web is built. I'm a member of several open source communities and work on multiple projects, and as far as I know, am well respected.

I've created 1000+ websites and systems for varying clients, from small blogs up to ecommerce sites for multi nationals, knowledge management systems for the united nations, and the biggest site I develop and technically manage myself receives over 5 million page views a day (2million u/v).

Over the years I've worked with hundreds of businesses, from startups through to well established businesses, helping them with systems, workflow, efficiencies, and of course various technical and online needs. I came from a hacking background when I was younger, specialised in black hat/hole seo for a while, have created all manner of bots and scrapers, and also know a fair bit about white hat SEO, since I help write the metadata specifications for w3c, and indeed have been doing it every day for many, many years.

However, I've always worked for other people, and spare time has always went in to enhancing my technical knowledge and understanding. I don't know everything (nobody does), but I have went about as far as one feasibly can.

What I'm saying is, I've been a "worker", I don't have any assets which work for me in order to build long term residual income, I do not operate as a business, only as a me, and I'm not an employer, or one with money, I'm one who works to get just enough money to cover the families needs - or should I say sometimes too much, and often not enough, certainly nothing stable and long term. I move from project to project, sometimes things work well, and sometimes they don't.

At this time I find myself with a 2-3 month gap, and want to create some websites and products which will bring me long term residual income. I've done the research and trial runs, quite familiar with just what I can do, and have realistic expectations. The problem is, that I also don't really have any income for these 2-3 months, and from march 75% of my time will be gone to the next project.

I'm interested to know:

- do you think I should forget the long term and focus on the priority of doing quick jobs over these few months to ensure that I have income for the family? (3 kids!)

- do you think I should try to seek an investor to help get some residual income ventures going, if so using 50% or 100% of my time over these months?

- long term, if you had my skillset and experience, what would you, personally, do with it?

 

Create a SaaS, find an affiliate, bring it to market, sell, split test, refine, relaunch v2.

Repeat with v3

etc etc etc...

Find someone to acquire you for $1-5 million.

????????? collect monies

Buy a luxury motor yacht, and sail away into the sunset.

 

Pretty simple, certainly makes sense - primary problem is getting going in the first place, finding the time to do it unpaid - else I would have done it years ago, and truth be told I have many not yet completed SaaS which could be turned in to products if given a bit of love.

 

well I think you can go two ways from here maybe even parallel

I bet setting up small sites for affiliate won't take you to long and doing the SEO only requires few time a day so you could spend the spare time of your gap trying to find some small jobs to make atleast some bucks as a freelancer maybe here on dp or on odesk or elance.

The question for me is, if you have any great idea for a script you can develope and sell or if it will be better to use the time to set up some sites that will create passive income when they are running

 

I really took some time to think and provide a good answer for your situation, I think your problem is that you haven't started this long time ago while working for others, you should have explored more into creating some steady profits from a product or as an affiliate, But! not everything is lost and with such huge skill set you can create magics.

You should keep working for others but alongside try to get a better understanding of marketing, product creation and having a business or managing a business, this is what distinguishes a failed product with a successor.

Your best bet would be to setup few affiliate sites, try to SEO them or outsource SEO work, try to market them, see what works and get a better understand of marketing and so forth. Once you did that, try to scale it upwards with more sites so you can get a grib of it.

Later, if you think you know something that thers don't, for instance, a niche hat has demands for a product, or rather if yu can create a product better then competition, before doing anything else, try to explore and create a good business plan that will specify exactly, where profits can come from and the all process with 15-20 pages or more of useful researched information.

At this point maybe you can take a loan to work on your product or maybe to outsource it.

Good luck!

 

I think you got it in one there, thank you. Will take your advice and do some calculations, and quite possibly return here soon

Thanks again!

 

Thought it may be worth updating you, I started making my own sites - released the first one on the 7th Jan, it's got 2.5 million pages sitting about 4k visitors a day now - just launched the second one a few hours ago which should do much better - things are looking good

 

it already has 2.5 million pages of content?

 

yes, 1.8m of them are indexed so far. I'll pm you the url so you can see

 

Hey, I know it's been a while since you posted... I run a program at http://bookafy.com/refer-a-friend/ that you might be interested in. Big market (Small businesses that book appointments) and we pay 25% of monthly fee for life. All of the metrics are monitored on the affiliates own portal (we use Ambassador). Super simple to sign up as a simple affiliate. But, with your skills you could essentially white label our product and I would be willing to discuss that with you. We have two other people doing this now, and they are doing very well. Its essentially an affiliate program, on steroids Feel free to send me a PM or Let me know if you have questions!