Passive Income vs Active Income

It might be easiest to explain passive income in terms of what it is not. It is not active income. Active income is what many people are familiar with: a regular 9-5, eight plus hour-a-day job. With active income, you must continuously work for your income. In a passive income situation, you might work, perhaps very hard, for a short period of time and then continue to receive income for that work.

Examples of Passive Income

Some examples might include:

  • Sales from a published book or ebook

  • Ad revenue from a blog

  • Ad revenue from an information aggregation site (perhaps a news or special interest site)

  • A website that directly sells a product or service

  • An iPhone or Android app

Essentially, anything that you can work on (perhaps furiously for a short time) and then continue to receive residual income from, could be an example.

My Plan

My plan is currently to attack this from four different, but perhaps similar, directions:

  • Ad revenue from this blog

    • So far it has been extremely minimal, but this blog is quite new and will need some time and content to ramp traffic.

  • Ad revenue from my special interest/news aggregation site: Suburban-Survival

  • Future revenue from my self-published ebook (if I ever get around to finishing it)

  • Future revenue from a few service oriented websites that I will be launching soon.

    • I will link to these as they become completed.

SMART Goals

I read recently about SMART goals. SMART is an acronym from: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant and Time-bound.

  • Specific – specific area, interest, website, idea, etc.

  • Measurable – determine how you will know when it's complete.

  • Achievable – something that can actually be accomplished.

  • Realistic – kind of goes along with achievable; must be do-able.

  • Time-bound – make hard deadlines to push yourself to completion and measure progress.