Let me confess up front – I didn’t do a lot of research on this. So it’s not truly a historical piece. But I have lived through several phases of Passive Income history, so I feel qualified to speak on the subject.

The Early Days

I’m sure that as far back as history goes, people were dreaming of Passive income. Imagine, sitting in your cave, having foot delivered to you – even having cooked food delivered. Without ever having to venture out in the summer heat or the freezing cold.

So even though no money was exchanged, there was that dream of having everything you needed provided for you – with no effort.

Additional Disclaimer: My passive income experience does not date back to the early days, just in case you were wondering.

Royalty

While historical scholars may disagree, it’s possible that Royalty may have been the next best thing to passive income. After all, you sat there, others served you, you didn’t really have to work – other than to pronounce a few laws here and there. Definitely a passive lifestyle, once you got past the conquering and fighting for your kingdom phase.

Additional Disclaimer: I am not royalty.

America’s Frontier

Fast forward a few hundred years and picture yourself in the early twentieth century. By then everyone recognized what Passive Income meant – it meant having your own oil well, cranking out profits for you, day after day. To current times, it’s still mighty handy to have your oil well royalties pouring into your banking account.

Full Disclosure: I own OnlineOilWells.com

Recent Online Passive Revenue

There have been several periods of Passive Income explosions online. Here are some of the highlights:

Automated Sales Process – With the growing Internet of the mid-1990′s, marketers could now set up a sales page and a download page – and know that their customers could get their product, even if the marketer took a vacation! The revenue just kept coming in – with no outward effort on their part.

This was probably the first use of the phrase “I couldn’t turn it off if I tried.”

Associates and Affiliates programs – In 1996 Amazon was the first to announce a way for “regular people” to get paid to refer customers to them online. That method of revenue has exploded to a multi-billion dollar industry.

Whether you earn passive revenue as an affiliate – or you are the business owner with affiliates sending you business, it’s often a no-effort method for earning revenue.

Autoresponders – With the invention of email-based autoresponders in the late 1990′s marketers now had a way to send automated sales messages. That meant that they could pre-schedule messages to go out, even when they were not in the office. This led to the ongoing stream of “I can’t turn it off, even if I try.”

Full Disclosure: I own AutoresponderBasics.com

Adsense – Google shook the world of Passive income with the announcement of the Adsense program in 2003. Suddenly you could put ads on your website and earn revenue when someone clicked on them – with no effort on your part. It was totally passive revenue.

The checks from Google skyrocketed with the advent of site-building software that rapidly churned out one site after another, each dedicated to earning Adsense revenue, quickly and passively. While the rules for the types of sites required to pull off this seemingly effortless feat continued to change, many people made a fortune from Adsense in these early days.

Then came the First Google Slap. People who were making 5 figures per month, saw their income drop to zero overnight. The rules had changed.

And the rules continue to change. But many of us continue to use Adsense revenue to augment our other income.

Automated Income Streams – Currently the Holy Grail for Passive Income, many programs purport to have the perfect system. All say they involve a little bit of work on your part up front, then “set it and forget it” and the checks start pouring in.

Is it a myth? CAN you create passive income online? I’ll let you be the judge of that.

As for me – while I have enjoyed all of the methods released in the modern era, I believe there is always room for improvement. So I’ll be teaching a new course on automated income starting Tuesday, October 11th.

Join me as we add the latest passive income tactics to your arsenal of online revenue.

Information comes to you in multiple formats. You’re listening to teleseminars, the audio replays, watching webinars, reading email, ebooks and articles. There is rarely a moment when you are not consuming some type of information. And all of this leads to information overload.

Information coming in is great when you are in a learning mode. All of us have had the experience of getting excited about a new topic – then consuming everything we can get our hands on to learn more about it. It may have been your new puppy, your new car or your new computer. Regardless of the topic, you recognize the symptoms – insatiable curiosity and appetite for information.

The problem with that behavior comes when you don’t step out of the learning mode into the action mode. You see the symptoms in every area of interest – someone becomes a Learner – but never seems to take action. Particularly in money-making endeavors like real-estate investing, business opportunities and making money online, this is a self-defeating pattern seen in a lot of “newbies.”

So what is the cause of this problem – that someone continues to learn but never earns? In fact, it seems that the longer they are in a topic, the less action they take.

Their information pipeline is full. And until they can clean it out and “reverse the flow” they are stuck.

Your information pipe is a predetermined size. When you first start learning a topic, new information is flowing in. But it doesn’t fill the pipe, so you still have some information flowing out in the form of action.

But when your actions don’t yield the results you want, you go looking for more information input. The cycle repeats until your pipeline is so full of incoming information – that there is no space for outgoing information.

The best thing you can do is stop the input! Stop reading emails, stop buying products, stop reading sales letters, stop listening to new ideas. You cannot move forward until you have stopped the influx of new information.

Once you have stopped the flow inward, start the outward flow. Write an article. Write a blog post. Post to a forum. Answer a question. Get into the habit of sharing *your* information with others. The information doesn’t have to be perfect – it just needs to be outgoing information.

When you begin to practice flowing information out, you will be amazed at the results. You’ll get more traffic to your website. You’ll generate more leads. You’ll find people who want to do business with you. You’ll start to make money.

The key to this process is to step out of your comfort zone. You are comfortable learning and absorbing information. You’ve been conditioned for years to be a good student. You’re in the zone of being a learner.

But no one pays you to learn. No one pays you for being a walking encyclopedia of knowledge on a topic. It’s only when you begin to share your knowledge that you get the recognition you deserve – and the money along with it.

Resolve today to “reverse the flow” of information in your life. You will see results almost immediately, both internally as your attitude improves. And externally as people and profits come your way.

Clean out your Information Pipeline and watch the profits flow.

We talk a lot about the “possibilities” online – how you can become rich and famous practically overnight. Yes, a lot of it is Hype – but you know what I mean. Everyone is trying to get you to achieve at your top level.

Under ideal circumstances we all WANT to be the best we can be – but what if you just can’t do it all right now? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else address this, so I wanted to give you what I consider the “minimum” you can do online and still keep up.

Here are the things you MUST do every week to be sure you are still participating.

1. Check your email daily. I am always amazed when people tell me “I missed that offer because I didn’t check my email.” If you want to be considered as “doing business online” you MUST check your email at least once a day. Things move too fast to miss a day.

With smart phones, ipads, constant connectivity everywhere, there is no excuse to not check your email. And not just some of it. ALL of it. If you can’t get through all of your email in a day – you’re getting too much.

If this is the case, then you need to
- Unsubscribe from anything you don’t read regularly
- Get a spam filter to get rid of the junk you’re wading through
- Learn to sort faster, using automated rules in your email program

2. Post to your blog weekly. I’m setting the bar pretty low, but you need to be put OUT information at least once a week. If you are doing it less frequently than that, then you either have nothing to say (I doubt that!) or you’re still hung up with fear and perfectionism.

Get over it! If you’re afraid to publish your own articles on your blog, at least add a PLR article each week. Basically no one knows you are IN business online if you’re not putting out some sort of content.

3. Connect socially once or twice a week. Your preferred connection may be blog comments on others’ blogs. It may be participating in a forum. Or it could be Twitter or Facebook. Regardless of what you choose, you need to post something at least a couple times per week – just to let people know you’re still “out here.”

We’ve all gone through periods when we had personal issues to deal with or for one reason or another couldn’t actively build our business. If you’ll do just the Minimum for a while, you’ll find you won’t have to start again from scratch when you do ramp up again.

Credibility is defined as “The quality, capability, or power to elicit belief.” No place is credibility more important than online.

After all, when you visit a website you don’t know anything about the person behind the site. Are they honest? Do they provide quality information? Will they deliver what they promise?

Obvious credibility takes on added importance when you make your living as an expert. You must assure your site visitors that you *are* an expert – and that you are *the* expert with whom they want to do business.

So how do you assure the site visitor that you are credible – that they can believe what you say? That you are the expert they seek? Here are five ways to get started.

1. Publish articles in your area of expertise. Not only should these article appear on your website, but they should also be on others’ sites. That means you want to distribute them via article sites, such as EzineArticles.com Articles are an easy way to display your expertise – and build your credibility.

2. Provide questions and answers on your site. People love to get advice from an expert. Not only do your prospects return to read your advice, but the search engines do too!

3. Host teleseminars and webinars. By serving as the host you can tailor the content to your target audience’s needs. You can invite the guests your prospects want to hear from – and you’ll automatically gain credibility by being associated with these guests.

4. Offer an online course. Whether it’s via email, teleseminar, webinar or an online learning system, a course puts you into the role of instructor – and expert. Your credibility automatically rises.

5. Write a book. Polls reveal that one of the professions held in high esteem is “author.” When you introduce yourself as an author, there is an automatic rise in your credibility.

Start today to implement these five steps – and watch your credibility climb.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to help more people become successful online. You see, my background is as an Instructional Designer. In that profession, we interview experts to determine how they think and how they do what they are an expert on. Then we take what we learn and turn it into good instructional materials – to teach other people to do what the experts do.

That’s why I love helping people get started online – because I’m helping them recreate what the experts (aka the Internet millionaires) do.

So you can imagine the amount of time I spend on this question:

Why do some people come online and make money – and other people spend years and thousands of dollars NOT making enough money to cover their costs?

Obviously I have some ideas of my own, but let me ask YOU – why do people NOT make money online? What holds them back?

Please share your ideas and comments below

If you’re considering setting up your own membership site, here are five easy steps to follow.

1. Choose a membership model. There are at least four different models you can follow for your member site. From free to unlimited monthly recurring, there is a variety that will fit your market and your message. The key is knowing what your target market wants and expects – then giving it to them.

One thing you can do to start the process is to find other member sites in your niche and watch what they do. See how they market their site. Check their fees and member levels. Even join their site to see what type of content they offer and how often. Take notes as you go so that you can refer back to them.

2. Choose your delivery method. While most people think about the traditional “fat content” library membership site with lots of articles and other resources, there are actually several different delivery methods you can use. From delivering your content without a website to offering multiple types of specialized content, you can follow successful models being used by other member site owners.

And while you do need a way to protect the member resources you deliver, there are numerous choices for delivery websites and the member software to use. But those choices are easier when you have all of the other planning decisions outlined.

3. Create content. One of the biggest fears people share when it comes to setting up a member site, is not having enough content. But when you leverage what you already have and find creative ways of adding more, you’ll be amazed how easy it is. In fact, you may find yourself creating multiple member sites with all of the content you create!

4. Make the money decisions. If content is the big fear, the decisions on fees, pricing strategies, free or paid trials and retention calculations seem to be the big hangups. But rest assured – there are guidelines for all of these decisions, once you have the other items in place.

5. Sell memberships. It always comes down to the sales and marketing. And while you market your membership site just as you do any other service or information product, there are some specialized tactics you can use only with member sites. It’s just a matter of working them into your existing marketing tactics.

These five steps will start you on your way to creating your first membership site. And I predict just the first of a string of sites, once you see how much you enjoy the member site model of business.

Find out if you’re ready to set up your membership site at One Hour Membership Site

My grandson JR is an active Cub Scout. Each year his pack sells popcorn to raise funds for all of their scouting activities. 70% of popcorn sales goes to support local scouting, with 40% of that going directly to J.R.’s unit.

This money pays for the family campout, the pinewood derby, the blue and gold banquet honoring those cub scouts moving to boy scouts, and many more activities for his pack.  Cub scouts has helped J.R. understand the meaning of being a productive part of a unit – be it family, den, pack, or community.

He values his time in the pack and has enjoyed participating in the ropes course, learning to camp, earning badges, and winning a prize in last year’s pinewood derby. It has taught his the value of giving back and honoring our heroes, as they did  on Memorial Day, when they placed flags on every grave at the Ft Sam Houston National Cemetery. I believe in the values scouting teaches to young men like my grandson as well as other boys nationwide.

Popcorn sales from the cub scouts offers a special advantage. Not only can you enjoy the popcorn for you and your family (we do every year). But you can also order popcorn as a gift for a member of our military. It’s another way that the Scouts are serving.

If you would like to help support J.R. and his pack – or gift a military person – by buying some popcorn or making a donation to support the scouts and our military, please click on this link to begin shopping: Popcorn Sales