Passive Income: Internet Holy Grail or a Real Possibility?

     A quick tour round the web will show you that establishing a passive income stream that allows you to pursue your life instead of having to work to survive, is a quest that many have embarked upon but probably few will ever completely achieve. So is a passive income possible and if so, could you really sit back for the rest of your life and watch the money flow in?  In logical terms, the answer is yes, you could. There are ways of establishing a passive income that will provide a revenue stream for long periods with little or no long term work.

The get-rich-quick, snake oil merchants on the internet would have you believe that a passive income is easy to achieve with their secret step-by-step guides and will deliver huge amounts of money with no effort for the rest of your life.  In reality though, few of the streams these people are pushing could ever provide long term income and most would certainly require significant amounts of long term work to set up and establish, not to mention specialist knowledge of marketing, website design, content production and many other specialist skills that few people possess as a package.

Establishing an internet based passive income is hard work and needs some real outside-the-box thinking if it’s to succeed. Most of the schemes you’ll find on the internet are merely selling packaged information on how to do it in the most general of terms. These income streams spin off others that peddle the same information and before you know it, there’s a circular loop of people all selling information on how to sell information about selling information on how to establish a passive income through selling information. The people who are successful are those who can get outside of this valueless loop and establish a real need for a product or indeed, a piece of valuable information, and can establish a method of getting it to the market without continual effort and expense. As you can imagine, this is a rare occurrence, but ultimately not impossible.

Without doubt though, there is and always will be significant amounts of effort and thought required to establish such an income and that’s where most people will fall by the wayside. The most successful entrepreneurs in the passive income field may not point out to you that they had, in general, to undertake the effort full time, at the expense of all other work. Many try to establish income streams as a hobby but in truth, unless you’ve hit upon a subject that will attract millions of people without effort, you’ll probably find that you just can’t put the time into it that it needs to really take off.

Establishing a truly passive income requires four basic things:

- a valuable product to sell or use.
- significant self-perpetuating demand for the product.
- an automated platform to interact and engage with customers.
- lots of up front work.

As you can see, none of these things are inconsequential and most ordinary people will never be able to address all of them successfully. Indeed even if you did manage to achieve these things, the passage of time alone would mean you would probably have to be working on your next passive income stream while the first one was still popular. Popularity fades and even the best products or services will fade with time.

So hitting on a single passive income stream is unlikely and very difficult to achieve but what about having lots of smaller streams all contributing to your income? This is actually the most likely way to achieve a passive income. Most of the passive income experts on the internet will tell you that volume is what counts. Having multiple business streams and huge numbers of visitors to their websites is what generates small amounts of money in lots of different places which, when added together, might represent a decent income.

In short, a passive income is possible, but no one should ever believe it could come in ‘five easy steps’ or that you could be ‘up and running in minutes’ – all things you’ll have seen written already no doubt. Establishing a real and successful passive income can only come about through having inspired ideas, consistent outside-the-box thinking and no small amount of hard work.