I\’ve seen it. It\’s a glint in the eye, an intensity in the look, a feverish scribbling of notes during a talk.
It\’s the desire for passive revenue – to set up a system that produces money while you spend the rest of your life on a beach in Cancun, occasionally checking how much you made today while doing nothing.
I love to see that desire because, frankly, I have it too.
That\’s why it\’s so hard to pop the bubble.
Internet publishing can produce passive revenue. But only for a time. Getting passive on the Internet is a bit like taking your foot off the gas in a car. It will keep coasting forward for a while but unless you put your foot down again, you will eventually grind to a halt.
On the Internet, that happens for all sorts of reasons.
It happens because your content gets old – or if you\’re buying content, your writers do.
It happens because the revenue systems change – Chitika introduces new rules, Google introduces a new ad format, the price of your most important keyword plummets.
And it happens for all sorts of reasons that you just can\’t put your finger on.
Earning through advertising is never completely passive. You have to produce new content and you have to keep an eye on your revenues, your strategies and what the advertising systems are doing.
It doesn\’t have to be a huge amount of work. Just as the speed of your car depends on how hard you push so the amount your site earns depends on how hard you push the conversions. Take it easy – add a post a week and don\’t experiment much with different placements – and you won\’t have to sweat but you won\’t have much income either. Work hard and you\’ll have higher income — and the ability to coast for longer when you want to.
We do like to talk about passive income on the Internet but mostly we like to talk about the opportunity the Internet offers. One of those opportunities is to decide for yourself how hard you want to work – and how much you want to earn.