Passive Income Series

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be blogging an extended series on how to earn passive income.

Passive income is money that comes to you even when you’re not actively working, such as royalties, investment income, and revenue from automated business systems.

I started earning passive income in the 1990s by creating, selling, and licensing computer games. Once those deals and systems were established, I continued to earn money from those products year after year.

This approach soon became a habit. Consequently, most of the money I’ve earned during my lifetime has come from passive or semi-passive income source, not from a salary, wage, or hourly rate.

It took me many years to figure out how to make a living this way, and I went bankrupt along the way, but eventually I learned what I needed to learn. It works, and I definitely appreciate the benefits of it.

The truth is that it’s much, much easier to earn passive income today than it was when I first began on this path. There are such ridiculous opportunities out there, especially online, that if you’re at least halfway intelligent, you can surely do this. There are ways to earn money online now where you don’t even need your own website, nor do you need to have a lot of money to start earning passive income.

Earning passive income is not difficult. The how-to part — the actual doing of it — is fairly straightforward.

The difficult part is wrapping your head around it, unloading a lot of false conditioning, maintaining a constructive mindset, and shedding illogical fears. The challenge here is your own self development… to grow into the man or woman who won’t block themselves from doing this.

Instead of writing my classic Steve mega-posts, I’m going to break this series into frequent, bite-sized chunks, so you can expect much shorter posts spread over many weeks. I think this is the right way to do it. I don’t want to get a bunch of “great article” feedback from people who just want more info-crack. By the end of the year, I want to see feedback like, “I’m now earning $X per month in passive income thanks to your series.”

First I’ll share some ideas to help you understand the right mindset for earning passive income. People have a lot of B.S. beliefs in their heads with respect to earning income, and I want to squash some of them (the beliefs, that is, not their heads), so they don’t get in our way later. This part may be more emotional than logical, but the truth is that the motivation to earn any kind of income is largely emotional, and we need to address that. There’s no logical mandate to earn income; it may feel like it’s essential for survival, but our species supposedly managed without money for most of its existence.

Then I’ll share a great deal of how-to information. Some of these posts will be fairly general, so they can be applied to all forms of passive income. But I’ll also give you more detailed how-to info for the forms of passive income that I’m most familiar with, which is mostly going to be in the online realm.

I can’t teach you real estate or stock investing, nor can I teach you how to create a blog as successful as mine has been. But I can still teach you how to create your own streams of passive income, first in a general way and then specifically in the methods I’ve used.

I may also do some interviews with friends and/or business associates who’ve created significant passive income streams as well, so you can gain a broader perspective on this.

Finally, I’m going to walk you step by step through a process of creating a stream of passive income from scratch. This is where I invite you to follow along and actually do this with me. So I’ll actually create a new stream of income for myself, such as creating and launching a new product or service, and I’ll blog about each step as I go through it. At the same time, I’m going to encourage and support you in creating a new income stream for yourself as well, so if you wish to do something similar, you can essentially mirror my steps and do them as I do them.

I’ll do my best to make this part of the process easy for you to follow, so you’ll be able to create a stream of income without needing to spend a lot of money, and I’ll make it so you don’t even need a website either. Obviously my website gives me a major marketing advantage, so I’ll share how to do the marketing aspect if you’re starting from scratch. I want to make it so that even a high school student working from home in his/her spare time could go through this process with me.

I’m also going to maintain a very moderate pacing here, so you can follow along in real time without needing to work on this full time to keep up.

If you want to read this series just for educational or for entertainment purposes, that’s fine. But I’m really not writing this series for the casual dabbler or the wannabe. I’m doing this for those who’d really want to get started on this path now. Consequently, we’re going to take it nice and slow and build a solid foundation. I’m not just going to throw a bunch of information at you and hope you make sense of it.

If you simply follow these steps with me, including getting into the passive income mindset, then this year you’re going to create at least one new stream of passive income for yourself. This series will focus on helping you create that specific result. If that’s a result you want, then we’re on the same page.

I’m undoubtedly going to weave personal growth lessons into this series because passive income ties in with personal growth in such amazing ways, especially with respect to setting and achieving goals, self-discipline, and overcoming limiting beliefs.

Logically this is an achievable goal. It’s not like we’re trying to figure out how to mine space asteroids. People figured out how to earn passive income thousands of years ago. Surely with all the additional knowledge and resources available to you today, you can do this too.

At this point I don’t expect you to commit to anything. I’m simply hoping you’ll be curious enough to follow along for the first week or two. Then decide if this is a part of your life you’re ready to upgrade.

Lastly, if you have any friends or family members that you feel would benefit from this series, be sure to share this post with them, so they can follow along.