Thalasar Ventures

One of the persistent selling hooks to many people selling one Internet marketing package or another is the “passive” income potential of a web site. Indeed the phrase, passive internet income returns a hefty 1.2 million results so it’s a pretty common search term. It’s also a term you should immediately strike from your vocabulary and your mindset.

So many people seem to think that once you set up a site, it’s easy enough to attract users make money etc. This language seems to come from the real estate seminar markets where people are “taught” how to buy properties and then rent them out and generate “passive” income. As anyone that owns rental properties will tell you, while the income doesn’t require you to go to a job everyday, there are numerous things to be done for rental property that include maintaining the property, dealing with tenants and the other problems of running a business. It by no means is passive. There aren’t a lot of passive opportunities on the net. Any business worth running requires work to keep it running. Yet many people seem to think that starting a blog is any easy way to “passive” income.
Here’s a hint about running a blog. It’s time consuming task. Writing a solid blog takes a lot of time and research. It’s so far from being passive income it’s pretty silly. In fact running a successful blog might generate roughly the same income you might get as a manager in McDonalds. So why the fascination with blogging as a form of “passive income”. It’s because a few few brand name meta bloggers who have spent several years building a large blog such a Darren Rowse and others and it seems so easy. What is missing of course is the years spent writing content, acquiring readers and links that make your blog worthwhile. Of course this work is done largely without compensation. It takes time and whole lot of time to be successful with it. Most people don’t realize that you can’t monetize a blog too early since it interferes with growing your readership. I myself tested how inline contextual advertising converted and I came to that conclusion pretty early on.
The key to success with a blog is passion. You need to have a passion for the subject in order to really capture readers. If you have passion, readers and then perhaps some income will follow.