1. "Find or create one proprietary data source"
Any other examples & how do you monetize on this?
2. "you want passive options but more active options, like selling consulting, are things that might well fit"
You're doing a great job at it looking at your year in review, but don't you need an established name with years of blog/material to get these sorts of rates?
Thank you!
http://catalog.data.gov/dataset?groups=consumer9350
The very first data set is health insurance estimates broken down by zip code. There's a super-lucrative market for you, but that one might be a bit competitive for you trying to crack it in 2013. Let's see, scroll down a few results...
ftp://ftp.cfda.gov/datagov/programs-full-datagov.csv
That's a full listing of government programs which are designed to give people money. You could transform that opaque, disorganized CSV file into an easier-to-consume .org site to educate people on how to apply for government grants, right? And you could run ads on that site, right? (I think it is likely that the type of ads you'll get on that specific site would be scummy as heck, but there's another 75,000 CSV files listed on data.gov, so do a bit more searching and find a better one.)
1b) Assuming you have picked good questions to answer, you monetize by connecting people who have demonstrable interest in spending money to people they can spend that money with. That could be directly with you, if you have a product which answers their needs. It could be with other folks, via selling leads. It could just be with Big Daddy G, by putting AdSense on the site, bankrolled by people who have the business model that you haven't implemented yet.
2) I actually wound down the consulting business. Long story, but short version is that I want to focus more on my own stuff. Having years of material and successes I could point to certainly helped me land gigs, but way back in the day, the only thing I had going for me was that BCC appeared to work and I could explain why. If you hypothetically had a successful side project, that can probably be parlayed into "I could do something like this for you, where it will be substantially more effective because it will take advantage of the X, Y, and Z advantages your business has that mine didn't."
This.
If you have a side project that's bringing in, say, $5000/year, and you do a few things to it such that it's now bringing in $5250/year, you've boosted revenue by 5%.
Now, go find a prospective client with a business bringing in $5MM/year, and explain to them how what you will do for them has the potential to increase revenue by $250k/year. Sure, it might not scale 1:1, but boosting it by even $100k/year should justify paying you, oh, $50k for the engagement.