From the 4 Hour Work Week:
* Create a product worth $50-150
* Advertise online and in niche magazines
* Sell product online
* Outsource order fulfillment (delivery)
* Outsource customer support
Really, you want to read the 4 Hour Work Week. It goes through how to do this step by step.
The 4HWW is not about working 4 hours a week, it's about designing your lifestyle to be as enjoyable as possible. The way the title was decided upon was via a Google AdWords campaign (4HWW performed best). The original title was Selling Drugs for Fun and Profit (or something like that).
It's cemented a lot of ideas that I had about time management, focusing on generating income and outsourcing as much non-essential stuff as possible. I've started to use eLance a bit more for non-programming tasks, and I'm hoping to hire a part time virtual assistant this next year.
I tested a selling a database via adwords as suggested in the book, and I got a decent enough response that I'm outsourcing the the database development in the next few weeks. It's not going to make tons of money, but it might make $300-1000 a month in passive income. That's worth the effort for me.
His sections on time management don't translate extremely well to developers, but focusing your time very narrowly on what's essential and most productive makes a lot of sense.
Yes, there's a tone of self aggrandizement throughout the book that can get annoying. But there's a lot of really helpful ideas which are worth the read.
> Yes, there's a tone of self aggrandizement throughout the book that can get annoying. But there's a lot of really helpful ideas which are worth the read.
The only big thing I got out of the book was the idea of generating passive income any which way how. Otherwise, it read like a long self-aggrandizing pat on the back. But I gotta give him kudos for at least getting me to take the bait.
edit: the chapter on virtual assistants was also interesting, but if I recall, he didn't write that chapter.
Really, you want to read the 4 Hour Work Week. It goes through how to do this step by step.