To give my summary of the article by Lisis:  she was saying that too many people are advocating that we should follow our passion and the money will follow.  Lisis’ analogy of the people who write about giving up the day job to pursue our passion is: ‘Snake oil salesmen.’

She made some great points about how making money from our passion is hard work and that we still need business acumen to make it a business and make money from it.  Lisis goes on to explain that being deeply passionate about something doesn’t equate to it being a viable income source and that these ‘snake oil salesmen’ can be dangerous leading us to believe that it’s not okay to have a traditional job and we should go out and leave our jobs and work the 4 hour week.

This is a great article and I can totally see Lisis’ point of view.  I have my own thoughts on what the ‘snake oil salesman’ is really saying:

‘If you’re unhappy with your job there is another way to make money’.

They are speaking to one type of person.

Two types of people

(S)He is speaking to a few people, not everyone, just a comparative few who think ‘I don’t like following the rest of the crowd.  I want to make it on my own, I want to set my own hours, I want to make my work contribution count, I want to say ‘I made a difference in the world.’  Yes you can make a difference in the world working a 9-5 job, but the people who don’t want the 9-5 job feel they are not making a difference which is part of the reason they want to follow their passion and their dream of going it alone.

Now, there are very few people in the world like this, most people are happy with their jobs and that’s great.  The world needs the two types of people: the person who likes making a difference in the world and getting paid by an employer at the end of each month, and also the person who says ‘No! I don’t want to be part of the machine, I want to build my own machine.’ The likes of: Bill Gates, Seth Godin, Richard Branson, Eben Pagan, Michael Dell, Leo Babauta, Darren Rowse etc

It’s not being unrealistic to have a goal like this, however, what is being unrealistic is to think that it can happen overnight and that it’s easy.  The ones who give up their day jobs in pursuit of the dream without having tested their theories are the ones who will fail miserably and they are also the ones who were laughed at when they bought the snake oil to cure their baldness or make them more attractive to women.

The ones who have a day job and transition over to making their passion their main income are the ones who know there is a market for their work, they have a bit of money to fall back onto should it not work out, they have more income from their passion than they do their day job, they have a business plan, they have the business sense to make it work.  They will also, more than likely, have someone behind them, their partner, who is bringing in money to support the transition.

The School Funneling System

Quitting the rat race is a phrase I hear a lot and it’s about empowering oneself, saying to everybody I don’t have to have a traditional job to make a contribution to the world, and I don’t want to be a sheep.

The reason traditional jobs, in the western society,  are so popular is because we are funneled into them and slotted into jobs like a jigsaw piece, according to our grades at school and how much money our parents had.    The schooling system breeds little cogs that will fit nicely into society and that can do jobs according to abilities and grades at school.

The problem with this is that the school system teaches us to be cogs, they don’t teach us to be free thinkers and think about the alternatives in life, it’s all about ‘Get good grades, you’ll get a good job’.  They don’t teach us entrepreneurship, business skills, writing a business plan and all the other skills we need to make a business of our own.  They also emphasis left brain thinking and leave right brain thinking to a few token classes like art, philosophy, drama studies, and even these classes are left brain structured.

Now I can hear you say that a lot of schools are teaching business skills and how to run a business and all the skills needed, yes you are right but how many of these schools are privately funded?

Conclusion

To end this little rant, I would like to say that making money from your passion, and the people who advocate this way of living, is an alternative.  It’s an attractive alternative to a lot of people but you definitely need more than having a passion to make it, you need marketing skills, business skills, accounting skills, networking skills etc. Is it a viable alternative? without a doubt yes.  Is it okay to have a traditional job and be happy? without a doubt yes.

When you are in the mindset that you want to work for yourself and follow your dream I don’t think it is feasible to say ‘Love what you do’, there needs to come a point when you have everything you need behind you, all the skills, the money pot etc and just go for it, if it fails, at least you can say I went for it.

I would like to thank Lisis and Alison for the inspiration for this rant   check out their blog Quest For Balance for more thought provoking articles.

Is money the root of all evil?

We have been programmed to believe that the pursuit of money is bad and it’s not good for the soul.  This is without doubt one of the biggest lies we have been told as children, that and Santa Claus (I was gutted when I was told that Santa was a lie and I was 23 imagine how children feel!)

You’ve more than likely heard these sayings in your life:

• ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees you know’
• ‘We can’t afford it’
• ‘Money can’t buy you happiness’
• ‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer’
• ‘To make more money you have to work harder’
• ‘Money is the root of all evil’

Until you rid yourself of the guilt of trying to better yourself financially you can’t begin to create more money into your life.  We’ll speak about four steps to creating more money in your life a bit later but for now I’d like to speak about the difference between greed and making more money.

Greed and money

Thinking of some of my heroes I used to think why would they try and make more money when they obviously don’t need it.  I am thinking of people like Richard Branson, James Dyson, Warren Buffet and Tony Robbins to name but a few.  However when reading their biographies, watching and listening to them on interviews it is clear their goal is not to make more money but to feel alive by building on their brand and their customer loyalty, with the possible exception of Warren Buffet who is an investment genius.  So their goal is not to make more money it is a by-product of their goal of achieving more in their life.  They are also philanthropists and they give back a hell of a lot to the world in the form of donations, settings up schools, giving knowledge and time to the younger generation.  This is not greed it’s a desire to reach their potential, which is what Abraham Maslow speaks about in his ‘hierarchy of needs’ theory.

Greed is a different animal altogether.  Greed is defined in the ‘New Oxford English Dictionary’ as: ‘Intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power or food.’ If your goal is to create more money into your life simply for your own selfish needs then life will be empty after a while.  Giving back something to the world in the form of money, knowledge, education, and time is something everyone should strive for, I believe.

Four steps to creating more money in your life

I have learned these lessons the hard way and it has taken me over twenty years to finally be able to understand them, from the beginnings of selling sweets in the playground to where I am now.  I still want to make more money and be financially able to do whatever I want but I am closer to my goal than when I first started out.

Step one – Blasting through your limiting beliefs

As I said in the beginning of this post we have been programmed to believe the pursuit of money and wealth is not good.  Get rid of this thought as quickly as you can for it will hinder you from making progress in your life’s goal to create more money in your life.  Money is the pathway to freedom for yourself and for others in your life.  You will have the ability to help more people by being wealthy than you will be by being poor.  Think of this for a moment:

More money in your life will mean you will buy more, when you buy more it means small and large businesses can stay in business, when they stay in business it means the banks can lend more money to them to expand therefore keeping the banks in business, when the banks are healthy financially it means they can lend more to people for loans and mortgages, when mortgages are purchased it means house builders are thriving, when house builders thrive it means more choice for house buyers and more social housing stock, when there is more social housing stock it means people getting out of poverty and bad housing conditions…………………….this could go on and on.

Look at the situation just now and what has happened to the whole economy because the banks have made poor decisions.  However we as a nation are perpetuating the situation by not spending the way we used to and if we are really honest our situation has not really changed we still earn the same monthly income, the price of food is the same, the price of clothes has gone down, the price of cars has gone down so we should be spending the same to keep the economy afloat.  However because a global financial crisis is great news for newspapers they print their horror stories and suddenly people have stopped spending, small businesses are going bust, house builders have stopped building and banks have stopped lending.  Do you think if the ‘Global Crisis’ was never reported on TV, on the internet or in newspapers we would be in this situation right now, I definitely believe we wouldn’t.  Yes this is an overly simplistic view of how the economy works but believe me when I say there are people out there making millions because the herd have listened to the media.

You were born to reach your full potential and that certainly does not mean living in poverty and scrimping and saving to get by in life.  There is enough money in the world for everyone to thrive and that includes you.  It’s time to open up your mind to the possibilities of making more money.

Step 2 – Creating your future

You can’t row your own boat until you know your destination.    You can certainly row someone else’s boat and that is what most of us do in life.  We go to school, leave and then go to university, leave and then row someone else’s boat by working for them, then we jump off the boat after 45 years service and retire when it’s almost too late to really enjoy life.  That’s not a life it’s an existence.

Rowing your own boat means controlling your own life.  yes it also means taking more risks and failing more but you will learn a hell of a lot about the world works and how you work and how to better yourself.  To do this you have to know what you want to do with your life, you need dreams to follow, you need a vision to hold and passion to drive you.

Start small, think big and build yourself up from there.  What do you want in life?

Now you know what you want you need to know how you get it.

Step 3 – Help someone create their dream

Yours dreams are undoubtedly different from mine however the key to making more money in your life is to help people realise their dreams.  What I mean by this is create something or pass on knowledge which will help someone else realise their dream.  Now, the dream the other person has might not be huge but if you help them and they are willing to pay for it then you have helped yourself and someone else at the same time.  When one person has a dream there are some others who have the same dream.

A fantastic example of this is someone who is selling an ebook right now, you can check it out on Google, called ‘How to build your own chicken coop‘.  You might think this is a crazy idea, but the owner of the ebook thought ‘If I wanted to know how to build a chicken coup, there must be others too’.  And now there are hundreds of happy people who had a tiny dream to build their own chicken coop and found someone willing to impart their knowledge for a small fee.  This book is doing great and making the owner a lot of money.

So you see, people have all different kinds of dreams big and small and if you can help people realise their dreams, big or small you can help yourself create more money in your life and help people around the world.

Step 4 – Once you’ve made it it’s time to share it

I am nowhere near this stage yet but it is my ultimate goal that when I have become wealthy enough to have anything I want in life I will share my successes and teach people how they can emulate my success.  And I will do this freely to people who have not made it yet and charge for it to businesses who are in the latter stages of step 3.  This way the knowledge is always going round and being shared and I cannot think of a better way to enrich the world than by sharing knowledge on how to better create more money in people’s lives.

As most of my regular readers will know I have been making money with affiliate marketing and producing my own ebooks, writing for other blogs and selling them via adwords, article marketing and banner ads etc.  In 2007 I made around $1000 profit, this year I have made around $5000 profit so far.  However in the last 3 weeks I have produced another product for clickbank which will be the start of a new business venture for me and it has already brought in around $500 on top of earnings of $1000 for other products I promote and writing I do for other blogs.

Me at the centre

The trouble I had in starting a business was that I was doing every single thing myself which included designing web pages, sales pages, opt in pages, graphics for banners, learning about and installing scripts on websites, videos, adwords, affiliate promotion, writing articles, writing sales materials, copywriting, answering emails, troubleshooting, every single little thing you could think of in a business and I was doing it.  This is on top of a full time job and spending as much time with my family as possible.  I wasn’t the business owner,  I was the business!  without me nothing would happen, if I fell ill nothing would get done and the money would start drying up pretty quickly.   So, in effect I was creating another job for myself and not a business.

Now my mindset has changed from creating a new job for myself to becoming a business owner where I have other people helping me do the most time consuming jobs.  Yes, I have to pay them but it frees up a lot of my time to concentrate on producing my own products.  This has only happened in the last few weeks and I can see a difference already.  No longer am I worrying about all the things I need to get done and ultimately falling behind schedule as I have other people around the world helping me produce web pages, sales pages, my writing etc.  I can concentrate on building a business up rather than being the business.

I have started to outsource a lot of the work using a service at www.elance.com for my sales page design and for my writing.  In the next few months I hope to pass most of my work to people I come to trust from elance this will include, graphics, writing, adwords management, cd production, email screening etc.    don’t get me wrong it will take some time to find people to trust and who can work well with my work philosophy but it is a start and will make a huge difference.

I am already seeing a difference in my energy levels.  I still get up at 5am to wok a few hours before getting the children ready for school and then going to work and still work in the evenings but I work on producing more products rather than dealing with other more time consuming issues like sales page design and writing emails for autoresponders ad all the other little jobs that are so time consuming.

Mastermind group

I have even created time to join a mastermind group with Brian McElroy and Rachel Rofe to drive the business forward.  This will last for 10 weeks and I will report back here with progress, it’s the first mastermind group I have joined and am really looking forward to it. I am hoping the lessons i learn and the contacts I make will more than outweigh the initial investment.

The reason for this change in mindset from creating a job for myself to becoming a business owner was down to a video I watched a few weeks ago from Rich Schefren.  I have  posted the video below so you can watch it.  It’s 90 minutes long but if you are looking to create a business online or offline it will be 90 minutes of pure gold.

Failure is a part of life and learning. Even the greatest baseball players in the world fail more than they succeed. They fail to get a hit 7 times for every 3 times they do get one. Does a baseball player think about quitting the game every time he gets out? Is he afraid to go to bat because he might fail? No. He knows he will probably fail 7 out of the 10 times he goes to the plate. He knows that failing is a part of the game. We, too, must learn that failure is part of the game of life. Babe Ruth holds the record for the most strikeouts, but he is considered to be one of the greatest athletes of all time because of the home runs he hit. He struck out 1,330 times and hit 714 home runs during his career.

Tom Watson, Sr., IBM’s founder, called into his office an executive whose mistake had lost the company $10 million. The nervous executive entered the office and said, “I guess you want my resignation?” Watson replied, “You can’t be serious. We’ve just spent $10 million educating you!” (Warren G. Bennis, Burt Nanus, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) p. 70) We must come to view mistakes not as failure but as learning. Some seek to eliminate the chance for failure and by default eliminate the possibility of success. “Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has said, ‘I like to hire people who have made mistakes. It shows that they take risks.’” (Michael Pearn, Chris Mulrooney, and Tim Payne, Ending the Blame Culture, (Brookfield, VT, Gower Publishing, 1998) p. 11–12)

A lesson every man must learn is that he must persist even when it is difficult. When we experience defeat and rejection, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. However, if you give up during the struggle, you will never experience the victory. The formula for success is trying until you succeed. With this view there are no failures only those who quit before success. How many tries do you give a baby to learn to walk? Do you give him five tries or fifty tries and after that say you’re done? “You failed fifty times, no more trying to walk for you.” Is that how we do it? No. We encourage the baby to try until he or she walks. It is a formula that works and so everyone learns to walk.

Sylvester Stallone—The Real Life Rocky

When Sylvester Stallone was first trying to launch his acting career, failure seemed to be the one thing he had success with. By 1973, he had been rejected by every casting agency in New York City, with more than 600 rejections total. In order to keep his days open so he could circulate among casting agents, he worked an assortment of odd jobs, including fish-head cutter, lion cage cleaner, usher, and bouncer. Also, in an attempt to make ends meet, he began writing screenplays.

Stallone recalled of his first screenplay, “I had written one hundred and eighty pages of garbage . . . but even though the script was bad, it gave me a sense of accomplishment . . . I did sit down and I did complete a story from beginning to end. For better or worse, it’s there. This was something new for me because I was a man who had never passed an English course.” During the next year and a half, Stallone wrote eight screenplays but was unable to sell any of them. Stallone decided to move to Hollywood and try his luck there, but he still had no success in selling his scripts.

In 1975, Stallone had $106 ($398 in 2006 dollars) in the bank. His beat-up car had just blown up, so the struggling actor/writer had to hitchhike. To make financial matters worse, his wife was pregnant with their first child. Even though he’d managed to pay off four month’s rent with the $700 ($2,600 in 2006 dollars) he’d earned on Death Race 2000, things were looking bleak—so bleak, if fact, that he was forced to sell his dog and best friend, Butkus, a 135-pound bullmastiff.

He stood outside a store and tried to sell his beloved dog to strangers for $50. Finally, someone bought the dog for $25. Stallone cried as he walked home from the store. The day he had to sell his dog was one of the lowest days of his life. Stallone recalls that day saying, “It was either the dog or us. Trust me. I thought it was over.”

Shortly after selling his dog, Stallone saw a fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner in which Wepner was a 30:1 underdog. Inspired by this fight, Stallone began developing the Rocky screenplay. For the next three and a half days straight (without sleeping), Stallone and his wife, Sasha, wrote the first draft of Rocky.

Stallone took the finished script to his agent and received an offer of $75,000 ($281,000 in 2006 dollars) from United Artists. This was a huge sum of money to Stallone who had no money and a baby on the way. Stallone wanted to play the role of Rocky, however, and United Artists wanted a well-known actor such as Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman, or Al Pacino to play the lead role. United Artists came back with an offer of $200,000 ($750,000 in 2006 dollars) for the script, without Stallone in the leading role. Stallone refused. The offer went up as high as $340,000 ($1.3 million in 2006 dollars), to which Stallone said, “I would sooner burn the script . . . than to have anyone else play Rocky. Even if the price goes up to a million, no sale.”

The producers at United Artists finally gave in and allowed Stallone to play Rocky. However, they also lowered the budget for the film from $2 million to $1 million ($7.5 million to $3.75 million in 2006 dollars). Stallone received $20,000 ($75,000 in 2006 dollars) for the script and the SAG minimum of $350 ($1,300 in 2006 dollars) per week for his acting duties. Stallone also negotiated to receive 8 percent of the film’s net profits.

After Stallone received the $20,000 for the script, he returned to the store, hoping the stranger he sold his dog to would return. After three days the man did return and Stallone offered to buy the dog back for $100. The man refused, saying he loved the dog and would never sell him. Stallone then offered him $1,000 for the dog, to which the man replied, “No amount of money is going to buy you this dog.” Stallone, determined to get his dog back, eventually paid the man $15,000 ($56,000 in 2006 dollars) and also gave him a part in Rocky for the return of his dog. In the movie, Rocky’s dog is played by Stallone’s real-life dog, Butkus.

Rocky opened in theaters on November 21, 1976 and took in $117 million ($389 million in 2006 dollars) in U.S. box office sales, with Stallone making more than $5 million ($16.6 million in 2006 dollars).

There are no failures in life, only those who quit before success. Failure is a part of learning. The formula for success is trying until you succeed.

About the author

This post is an excerpt from the book Does Your Bag Have Holes? 24 Truths That Lead to Financial and Spiritual Freedom by Cameron C. Taylor. www.DoesYourBagHaveHoles.org

Ask yourself, right now, how much you think you are worth in terms of your employment. I can almost guarantee you the figure you came to was based on your current salary. Now add a ‘0’ onto the end of the figure you came to; how does that make you feel? If you thought ‘there is no way I am worth that’, then you are a poor thinker.

This article will show you 10 ways to get out of the ‘poor thinker’ mode and open up a wealthy mindset.

1. Get used to the higher figures in your life. You are surrounded by high figures; your mortgage, your car loan, your credit card statements, etc. These figures are all debt figures and are figures that you dread when you look at them. Now it’s time love the high figures, not the debt, just the figures. Ask yourself every day how you can pay off each debt, one at a time and learn to love making that £10,000 to pay off the loan, or that £15,000 to pay of your car loan. When you learn to love paying off your debt as quickly as possible you will be thinking in big numbers and get used to them. When your debt is cleared you will already be used to thinking big and start living the life you want.
2. Think of 1 way every week to make an extra £10 per day. Believe me there are a million ways to do it; sell your old junk on eBay, write a report and start selling it, take your neighbours dog for a walk every day and many more, and much more creative than what I’ve just mentioned.
3. Take action; don’t spend too long thinking about making that extra £10 per day, pick a few and take action, if it doesn’t work leave it and move on.
4. Although it might not be possible to start socialising with wealthy people it is possible to start interacting with people who are taking action to become wealthy. These people are online and reside in a place called Forum City. Join a forum to start mixing with wealthy thinkers and wealthy action takers. These forums can be inspirational and get you thinking wealthy thoughts.
5. Believe, truly believe, that you can become wealthy. Truly believing you can become wealthy takes a lot of hard work, especially if you have had the ‘poor thinking’ mindset for a long time. More than likely it started in childhood and continued on through adulthood, so don’t give up and keep believing and taking action to becoming wealthy.
6. Become committed to becoming wealthy, don’t take it light heartedly. Wealthy people are thinking about building their wealth every day. Becoming committed means thinking about it often and taking action on those thoughts.
7. Right now, you are worth more than you get paid from an employer. You are used to trading your time for someone else’s idea of how much your time is worth. It’s time to start setting your own rates. I don’t mean pack your job in and start a business. I mean start doing something on your terms and on your rates. If you think that your babysitting is worth £20 an hour instead of £5 per hour, set the new rates and start advertising.
8. Becoming wealthy means giving up the time you spend watching TV, getting up early, and stop wasting time ‘faffing’ (faffing means wasting time doing insignificant activities).
9. Becoming wealthy also means thinking wealthy thoughts. Get rid of the ‘faffing’ thoughts and concentrate more on how to make more money. I would rather think about living the life I want than thinking about what I watched on TV last night.
10. Think long term when it comes to wealth. When you have started making money and getting used to the bigger numbers start making your money work for you both in the present and the future. Then when you have all bases covered start making your money work passively for you, meaning less input from you and more money.

Other articles you might enjoy:

Secrets of the millionaire mind

4 Steps to becoming wealthy

Is becoming wealthy inherently evil

10 ways to make money

www.johnchow.com

20 Passive income resources

‘Anybody could do it!”’

Anybody could do it!

When I first heard this I thought it was a joke. I thought you have to know hundreds of people who would help you, I thought they all have time on their hands and no family to consider. However this is not the case. Most of the people who have made it, have had families, started part time, and due to their persistence have been able to give up their 9-5 and start their online business.

That’s another word I keep hearing from internet business owners is:

‘Persistence’

It is the key to making money online, you never ever ever ever give up. Sometimes you will strike it lucky on your first shot, sometimes you will have to fail 10 times before you get a success.

Changing your psychology

The trouble when I first started trying to make money was that I was aiming high. I was looking at earning $140,000 to pay off my mortgage and give up my 9-5 job and concentrate on making a sustainable living online. The problem with this type of thinking is that $140,000 seems insurmountable and my unconscious mind almost gives up before it’s even started.

I read an eBook that changed all that called ‘5 Bucks a day’ by Dennis Becker (Don’t worry I am not going to put my affiliate link here, if you are interested you will find it). What this guy said, and it’s very simple, is aim for earning $5 per day profit and then ‘rinse, lather and repeat’.

Rinse, Lather and repeat

This is the phrase internet marketers use when they are explaining the process of making money.

Basically when they find a winning formula they repeat this formula over and over again.

For example, imagine having a blog that makes you $5 per day in adsense you then repeat the process and build another blog, and another and another and pretty soon you are earning $100 per day just from adsense. No, it’s not that easy as you have to drive traffic, however you now have a network of blogs which link to each other which means your search rankings are higher which means more traffic which means more adsense earnings. So the first blog might be hard to build as there is a steep learning curve but now you have learned about driving traffic, SEO, interacting with readers etc you don’t have to learn so much for the second blog so there is not as much effort. That was only a quick example. There are literally hundreds of ways to make money online.

The route I have chosen is affiliate marketing and it’s now starting to work out for me. Undoubtedly the biggest thing I have done is join affiliate marketing forums and I would strongly suggest finding a forum in the market you are interested in. For example if you are interested in building blogs as a way of making money join one of the big blogging forums, if it’s affiliate marketing then join a well subscribed affiliate marketing forum. This will increase your learning curve dramatically, in fact there will be a period of information overload as there is so much great information from a good forum.

Free reports and making money list

I know a lot of readers are not interested in the topic of making money, which is why I don’t post a lot about it. However, for those of you who are interested I am putting together a mailing list where I will be sending lots of great links, free reports and free online videos. If you would like to join this list please put your name and email address in the box below and you can start your learning curve immediately.

To start off I will be sending you a free report called The Million Dollar Briefcase’ written by Karl Warren.

10 ways people make money online

Blogging – There are plenty of six figure bloggers out there who are making it big with their blog; Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, and John Chow all come to mind. What they did was to give great information to their readers and then monetised their blog with affiliate links, adsense, chikita ads, etc. It took them time to build up their readership but look at them now, I am sure they would all say it is worth it.

Membership sites - There are a lot of people making money by starting membership sites. Basically this is where you start a site and for a monthly fee you give information on your chosen niche.

Writing – With the internet almost anything is possible and writing is a skill in demand right now. If you are good at writing then there are people willing to pay you. If you are a good writer you can make a lot of money online and offline. Sites like www.elance.com , www.rentacoder.com all advertise for writers. there is one drawback to using sites like this and its the competition. People want writers on the cheap, however if you have very good English and know your topic you can command higher prices.

Selling affiliate products – This is the method I prefer when making money online. There are tons of affiliate networks now; www.clickbank.com www.cj.com , and www.linkshare.com to name but a few. You have no physical product to ship out. I like to sell instant products whereby the buyer can download their product immediately after their purchase like an mp3, or an eBook.

Write your own eBook – If you go to www.clickbank.com you will find thousands of ebooks and it should give you an idea on the breadth of topics that people are writing about. If you have a specialist skill, can write and have people to sell to then this is a good way to make money if you put in the effort. It’s not as easy as writing it and then hoping people will come to it, you have to promote it, this is where joining a forum comes into it’s own.

Sell your skill – Do you have a particular skill? Are you a whiz at blogging? sell you skills to people who know nothing about blogging. Are you a qualified counsellor? sell your services online. Can you build a website? There are still thousands of small businesses who do not have an internet presence and are willing to pay someone to build a site for them. Truth is we all have skills that we can sell it’s just a matter of who can promote themselves the best.

Start a directory – There are a ton of directories out there and a lot of them charge a fee for inserting a link to their site. If you have a niche blog or website you can start your own directory. It might take some work initially to set it up and promote it but a $20 annual insertion fee could bring in a recurring income for you all of it passive income after the initial setup. There are lots of free scripts out there to help you do this, just have a search on google for them to find the best one.

Website flipping – If you know what you are doing and are good at SEO and getting links you can start a website and sell it on a few months later. A lot of people are now doing this with blogs. To make it worthwhile you would have to have a few on the go, build them up and then sell them.

Putting ads on your site – This is an obvious one but not one to be overlooked. Adsense and link ads are the easiest ways of making money from your site but you can also have affiliate links to the products you are promoting like the ones I have in the sidebar.

Write an eCourse – A lot of people have made big money from writing an e-course on their speciality. Again, all the work is done at the beginning. You write your course, a quality one, add some audio, video or other ways to make your presentations professional and sell it to a niche audience. Once your course is written, you can set up an autoresponder account at somewere like www.aweber.com and split the course into 7 -12 parts. The beauty of the auto responder is that you can send out emails on a timed setting i.e. send part of the course out once every 2 days or once a week, whatever you want. Then all the work goes into promoting the course, not easy but if you have a skill it could be a good money earner.