My new strategy to generate +$1k/month with micro-startups while maintaining a full-time job
Hello solopreneurs. This time I’m here to share with you my new strategy to start generating new income streams while maintaining my full-time job.
Hello solopreneurs. This time I’m here to share with you my new strategy to start generating new income streams while maintaining my full-time job. As I have mentioned in the past, I am currently an Engineering Manager at a large company. I am happy with what I do, I love the company, I love my team and the way the company treats its employees.
Still, I regularly seek to generate passive income during my free time. I do not do it with the aim of getting rich quickly, but above all, for the pleasure of generating my own income and somehow creating my financial independence (regardless of whether I leave my current job in the future or not).
If you follow my blog, you must have noticed that I have already started some side projects, some with almost immediate return and others that were an utter failure. But above all, I am enjoying the process of developing, improving, and launching new products. At this moment, I feel I need to dedicate myself to projects with immediate return and feedback, rather than developing a Saas solution with the aspiration to become a successful product in the market, but then find that the competition is so strong that my solutions are just one among several (which was the case with CoMaker.ai). Adding to this, I aim to develop income-generating methods that do not require a team for their development, so they will always be relatively small or not very complex products.
The characteristics of the products I seek to develop
In particular, I aim to develop products more focused on creating and providing content. Content with one of these two characteristics, educational content (for search consumption) or automatically generated content. The form of monetization will depend on the value that this generated content will have for the end-user. In this case, educational content will be monetized through advertising and affiliate marketing, automatically generated content can be monetized through subscription.
As I mentioned in previous posts, I developed a base project where I can quickly develop websites that offer some functionalities at no great cost, for example, user authentication, sending emails, allowing users to create content on the site, payment mechanism, etc… Some examples of the possibilities of this base project are SideHustlify.com and AIProductHub.com. I plan to implement more features, but in practice, I can create a fully functional website in just 1 hour (and yes, I’ve thought about creating a website builder to use the features of this base project, although I will do it, it won’t be for now).
Educational/Informative Content Ideas
When I refer to educational content, I do not intend to create sites to train people in a specific area, but rather, to make known tools, useful information, comparisons between tools, etc… on a specific topic. For example, as I did with AIProductHub.com, where I sought to provide a website to promote and research AI tools. It actually had some organic traffic, but I’m not satisfied with how the site’s content is being generated and organized. Just like SideHustlify.com, it was meant to be a website to aggregate ideas and tools for creating side hustles, but I feel it’s a topic too broad and unfocused. I feel these websites should be focused on a specific niche and clearly identify what value users intend to get from that website. For example, instead of having a site focused on Side Hustles, it should be a website focused on a specific way of making money, for example, Dropshipping, or Cryptocurrency, or Affiliate Marketing, etc… Being too broad, takes the focus off the website and thus the target audience is a bit vague (because it can be someone who wants to create a side hustle to make money in their locality, as someone looking to perform isolated tasks in exchange for money, etc…). Although I have received some organic traffic, I do not feel this product will scale. Therefore, for educational/informative content websites, I will focus on creating content directed to a specific theme/area, and people regularly look for information on the subject. The type of content will focus on:
Sharing tips about that theme;
Tools Comparison;
Questions and answers (from users);
Sharing of indexable media content;
For example, they can be websites directed to users who are looking to share and explore tips about React development, or no-code platforms, or AI solution developers (although the AI topic is becoming too saturated in my opinion, there is a lot of competition for this theme). Anyway, I am looking for something that does not need to reinvent the wheel to provide value to users, and I want to use user engagement to create even more content organically (even if it is through questions and answers).
Ideas for automatically generated content
The other solutions I intend to develop, but still through the same base project that I developed in the past, are websites where they aggregate data from the internet, and I will process this data to draw conclusions for the end-users. For example, a website where it aggregates football data, processes betting tips from other websites for a particular game, also aggregates tips from the users of my website and automatically generates a prognosis about a certain game. Obviously, these will always be just forecasts, but they can help users to make their bets with more criteria. Another possibility could be, aggregate lists of properties for sale, keep their characteristics in a database and process this data to provide indicators to users (for example, price evolution, whether the value of the property is fair or not). These types of solutions end up providing direct value to users, without the need to generate content manually or wait for user-generated content.
In conclusion, these will be my focuses for the next few months, I have some product ideas that I want to move forward in the short term and as always, I will continue to share these ideas, successes and failures with you (we are here to learn together how to build our financial freedom). What do you think of these ideas? Do you have any suggestion of an idea to be implemented? Share it with us.
Have a nice week everyone.
Cheers,
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