There are three things involved when it comes to making money online. Two of them are goals and/or dreams, and one of them is the reality behind those dreams.
Making a mistake with what you’re doing and how you’re going for these things is where a lot of internet marketing guys go wrong.
The two goals of internet money making generally fall into these camps:
- Long-term passive income
- Immediate cash flow
Both of those things are great goals to have, and you can do either of those things with internet marketing, website design or writing. However, there’s one thing that people tend to overlook. It’s the key ingredient to these things:
- Time Commitment.
Unless you’ve got a lot of money to start with and you’re only looking for small returns, you’ll need to commit a lot of time to getting passive income. To get an immediate cash flow, you’ll also need to put in the hours.
A place where a lot of guys go wrong with internet stuff is that they think they can mix and match the above in different ways:
- Get passive income in the short term
- Get immediate cash flow and passive income from one project
- Get passive income without putting in the hours
- Get immediate cash flow without putting in the hours.
Having websites with passive income is not a short term project unless you’re paying for traffic and sending huge amounts to a fine-tuned sales page (which takes time to put together and test anyway.) Passive income trickles in slowly. I have a website that makes about a pound a day in advertising fees. It adds up over the course of a year, but if I needed immediate cash then it’d be useless.
If you’re taking the niche site challenge, you’ll be building lots of niche websites. Niche websites are great for passive income, because you write a few sales letters and over time you get a sale now and again. This adds up if you’re making $10 a sale, and you’ve built twenty sites that all make a sale a handful of times a month. But it’s not immediate cash flow, and you’re putting in a reasonable amount of time to get to that point. With a niche site, the majority of the work is up front. In fact, with any website you’re doing the work upfront. Even a single affiliate sales page has to be written and tweaked before you can send any traffic and make any money from it.
You simply can’t get passive income without putting in the hours. You certainly can’t do it with internet stuff because you have to have a website/content before you make the money. The Tim Ferriss guys who want you to buy their course, sign up as an affiliate for their course and then spam your friends list with their course in the course of a day aren’t going to get you to that place where you can live off the passive income dream: They’re just selling that dream, nothing more.
Now let’s talk about immediate cash flow: It’s the same as passive income in the sense that you’re putting in hours. However, you’re getting paid upfront for those hours. This is a welcome relief and it’s why I love freelance writing and copywriting for clients: I do the work, I get paid, they get their service and it’s all win-win.
The issue with this is that in the long-term I don’t gain as much from doing a $20 article as I do writing a sales letter for my own site. If somebody is paying you up front for a project, then the chances are they’re doing that so they can earn the income generated in the back end. Sometimes you can negotiate a commission or percentage for your copywriting, but most business owners will shy away from that if they can. You wouldn’t let the kid who you give $20 to mow your lawn have a percentage of the profits from the sale of your house, would you?
My point with this tangent is that you’re probably going to have to choose between immediate cash flow and long term passive income. I suggest deliberately working out a ratio which you’re comfortable with – if you need money to pay your bills; you’re going to be spending the highest portion of your time working on short-term, immediate pay jobs. If you’re comfortable; dial back the cash flow jobs and work on long term projects.
Final Thoughts
 The key underpinning between the two different approaches is that you’re going to have to make a time commitment. I haven’t even talked about the time it takes to learn enough for these things to be successful, which makes a big difference as well.
Most guys see the shiny dream and think they’re going to make immediate passive income which will give them 10k a month without them doing anything so they can go and chill in Bangkok or wherever. Because of slick internet marketers, this is the first thing they see when they look into making money, so they go in with wide-eyes and no leverage-able skills. This is a problem.
Instead, if you want to make a living through passive income, you should think about the skills you can offer which will give you seed money. Then start building more skills with that immediate income. Gradually, you’ll get enough business sense and skills to see where there are passive opportunities. Over time, swap out working for immediate income and replace it with longer term plans to make money.
This will take time. It will mean putting in hours of work. Realistically though, that’s what it takes.