What's a way to make passive income online?

Everybody I know who makes money, say, six figures plus from their web efforts…works their tail off. The whole concept of “passive income” imho, is a myth, perpetuated by folks that don’t know what “work hard, and work smart” really means.

Work hard - you can’t escape it, you have to work.

Work smart - with those hours you are working, analyze what you’re doing: are you getting the most reward, effort, bang, for your hour of labor? If the answer is yes, all well & good. If the answer is no, educate yourself, learn (ask questions ;) ) and figure out what else you could be doing.

For example: our top earning “asker” who posts questions here, makes hundreds of dollars per month. For some people, that’s not much, but if you live in a less expensive area of the US, it’s a lot. By answering questions (which we don’t do revenue share for yet) you also increase the odds of getting a faster answer when you do ask a question.

That’s not “passive” as it takes work, but it takes less effort / hour as it builds than say, digging ditches ;) If you’re a ditch digger, there is no chance you’ll make money, unless you’re at work, shoveling.

Now, to get specific:

purchasing domains

Yes, even though the are very expensive these days. Look at the recent sale of business.com - a few hundred million, when it was bought ~8 years ago for 7 million, people thought the investors were crazy…who’s the crazy one now? :)

creating websites

To a point, yes. However, the net is filled with as many diamonds as lumps of coal, and it takes real effort to create something valuable. If that is your passion, go for it. If, however, you only want to make a few hundred / month, then perhaps leveraging another sites success is a better trade off for your time.

As the others have said, you can make money online, but it takes work, patience and perseverance.

If you haven’t worked online or in Marketing before you’re also going to have to learn some new skills - which takes time and commitment.

The most important point to remember is that an Internet Marketing business is no different from a traditional bricks and mortar business: It has to be well planned, well funded, well managed and worked at!

Having said all that, there are tremendous advantages to having a successful online business. You’re operating in the biggest market in the world (the number of Internet users and people who buy online is growing fast every day).

Because you’re selling from a website, rather than a shop, your business is open 24 hours a day and the technology allows you to handle hundreds of customers at the same time.

So your operating costs are much lower.

But remember that people who tell you that you can earn a passive income online are probably trying to get you to buy their Internet Marketing book, their Internet Marketing software or join their membership site!

The closest you can come to what could be called a passive online income is if you’re selling memberships where you get a portion of the recurring membership fee each month - as long as the people you sign up remain members!

If you’re selling these memberships as an affiliate you could call that passive income because you theoretically don’t need to do anything once your new member has signed up.

But even with this kind of income, I prefer to remain active in the membership site and make myself available to help the people I’ve signed up. That’s just good business.

Long story short: the lure of passive income is usually used by people trying to get your business. To be successful online you need to work at it just as you would any other business.