Passive income is a dream for some, a reality for a select few and a mirage for others. The most common way that most people define passive income is this :
With a little or no effort you can create an income stream that lasts you a lifetime.
The truth, however, is that passive income is the result of consistent hard work after overcoming multiple failures and challenges on the way.
When you hear the saying, “when the going gets tough the tough get going”, you might imagine cowboys in a Western with a backdrop of a dusty setting triumphantly riding away after defeating their foes.
With those earning a living online, the tough are the ones who vanquish their own foe, the doubting inner self.
Stories of passive income earned on the internet reached my ears during the last decade. Like most, I refused to believe that someone could earn money using the internet. To my mind, the computer was only a contraption used in offices for email communication and browsing news portals!
At least, that was my limited view of the worldwide web.
How could someone earn money from the internet when accessing a website on the fastest computer in the office was a 5-minute task?
It was laughable.
So for a long time, I kept hearing about passive income online and continued to dismiss it, saying that it was all balderdash. Much later, I realized that it was a grave mistake, and I was an idiot.
Those were the days that you could quickly create a small website and rank for most search terms, if not all of them. For example, a highly competitive term like weight loss would have been relatively easy to rank for in those days.
Google was giving away money to those who showed their ads on websites and blogs.
Many created successful businesses ranking websites, made a killing with Adsense and laughed all the way to the bank.
In the meantime I was working at least ten hours a day in my day job, waiting for the next pay increase, an event with a 50% probability because it was a time when any company could declare no pay increases by blaming the economic downturn that happened more frequently than before.
The turning point came when a guy named Shoemoney started showing off his Adsense check online and the news became viral even in those days. It was a time when only a select few used MySpace and Facebook had not become popular. But Shoemoney’s blog was one of the more popular ones, read by all those who wanted to earn money online.
I investigated and found out more about Adsense and affiliate marketing.
In those days Associated Content had just about become popular as a writing site. I signed up and immediately published a few articles. None of them had ads on them nor any affiliate links and AC, as they called it then, used to pay-per-view.
The articles must have earned a few cents, not more, but it impressed me.
I wrote a few more articles and this time I included some affiliate links promoting Clickbank products in them. One of them was a product that contained hacks for a popular Facebook game. It was just a test, and I did not expect much out of it. I published them late at night and went off to sleep.
Work kept me busy, and I forgot about the articles for a few days. Over the weekend I checked my earnings report on Clickbank and …
… voila, I had made 4 sales in the week that went by.
I was on cloud nine and was immediately hooked on earning passive income online. I was addicted!
I kept writing articles and continued earning small commissions, though it never reached the level that the guru marketers were earning in those days. It was enough to pay a few bills, but still not a full-time income for me.
I have come a long way since, learning how to create websites, owning a few and even selling them. I have written books, created and marketed digital products and even made designs for the print on demand business.
Online income is not passive, you need to put in the hours and the effort before you see any results.
Earning an income online from a single source is risky. I always diversify my income and advise at least three different sources of income to everyone. The reason being that if one income source dries up it affects only a third of your income.
You will still have enough to fall back on, especially useful if you are the one who puts food on the table in your family.
It is always better to be safe than to be sorry. I had a full-time job when I started online — it was only a side gig. Online platforms can vanish overnight, unlike brick and mortar businesses that tend to disappear much slower than online businesses.
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