The truth about passive income

For many, many years now, I’ve been studying money. (Have I mentioned I have always been a bad student?) Specifically, I’ve studied business. But only in the sense of the whole “Get Rich Quick” theme. What I’ve learned about money and business is that the best way to make it–unless you are doing something you love to do and that in itself is a reward–is to earn passive income.

I’m sure you’ve heard of it before but in case you haven’t, passive income is money that comes in without you having to pull it in. Pretty sweet right? So you can be on a cruise and your money is making money. Or you can be sleeping and still making money. This is a way cool system. But here is the naked, full frontal truth. Passive income isn’t passive. In many cases it takes as much or more work than making it the old-fashioned way. Let’s take the latest trendy example of passive income. I’m talking ebooks.

No I’m not knocking ebooks, because I love them and I sell them and they are awesome for making passive income. But here’s the thing. You create an ebook, you create a landing page, you get everything set up so that all someone has to do is find your page and buy it. You’ve done all the work up front and now you can sit back and reap the rewards. In a sense yes, because you can sit back and ding, someone can buy from your website and it’s autopilot. Ding, there goes another sale, etc.,

But all is not what it seems you are lulled into thinking that but then what happens when the dings stop after the initial launch? Oops, did you even have a launch? See you have to push the thing. You have to market and network online and get the buzz going. You have to guest post on the blogs of big, influential muckety muck bloggers. You have to get people to retweet wonderful things about your book. You have to get people to read it and give you testimonials etc., etc., So suddenly it’s not very passive is it?

I mean it is passive in the sense that you are not pushing each sale, and you can work your own hours and you can outsource some of those duties and all of that. But there is still lots of work that needs to be done to create that passive income and to keep it coming.

I don’t say this to dissuade you from going after passive income. For me, though, passive income is more about designing your life than it is about sitting on my duff and letting the money roll in, and roll in and roll in. It’s really about being able to make money in the way I choose with efforts that I a excited about putting forth. So roll your sleeves up and go forth and make some passive income. Just be aware it will take some effort.