I have a passion for passive income, although in practice its presence has been elusive. When I was at the stage in life when little money was big money, I didn’t do too badly. My parents taught me about stocks and bonds, and I learned myself about real estate investing. So I bought a piece of property with help from various family members, enjoyed the rent money, forgot about it until it was too late, well after it peaked and started nose-diving. And then I sold it and put the money in Fidelity and Vanguard, when in the 90’s things were great for stocks and mutual funds.

Until, BAM! Until the stock market got clobbered, and I shifted into the stage of life when what I called “big money” back then, became merely a month’s budget.

I never really worked for a living. I had a job once over the summer, and I worked for my uncle for a year or so, but I am certainly not eligible for Social Security, I am lacking the vast majority of the required quarters. Most of the time my involvement was in ideological pursuits from which I received a monthly check not even able to cover the food, never mind rent and clothes and everything else. But I made do, my wife worked a bit after our marriage, and what wasn’t covered, I just wrote a check from Fidelity to cover it.

After the turn of the century my teenagers became young adults, and then came the gigantic life expenses, “putting them through college”, so to speak, and otherwise getting them situated on two feet so that they can be ready to get married and start their own life.

That is when I turned to the computer to try to find sources of passive income. I never learned about business, but I certainly knew about investing. I was drawn to all kinds of different programs for a number of years, the majority of them turned out to be ponzi scams, and other such chain letter strategies, which only last until they hit bottom and then start fizzling out upwards. I never lost “big time”, actually I had one big gain which offset all of the small losses, but there was certainly no source of consistent passive income in all of these things.

Then in the mid-2000’s, I latched on to a mentor who seemed to know his stuff who I stayed with for three years. He worked with traffic exchanges in order to get leads, and from him I learned most of what I know today of html, css, and php, and graphics, and setting up websites and working with blogs. But after three years it because obvious that all that he was training me for was to set up websites for other people, i.e. client work, which I tried, but I didn’t like. Mainly because I had to “sell myself”, something that I detest, and the demands of the client were always overwhelming, and the pay inferior. And it also wasn’t the passive income that I was looking for.

After that, in the late 2000’s, I started elementary affiliate marketing and lusting after every silver button that was offered. I said to myself, “if this made for him and for him and for him $100,000 a month, well, if I only make 1% of that I’ll be thrilled, and it’s hard to imagine that if I follow the instructions to the “T” that I won’t be able to do 1%. I don’t think that there was a month that I didn’t purchase a $7 product, or a $17 product, or a $27 product.

Sound familiar? Onward ho.

It was during this time that I met John Thornhill and entered his Marketing Masterclass. That was interesting, and I actually grew to feel a certain fondness for John even though we had no real connection. But again I got stuck in the middle of the product that I was developing, and being the naturally lazy character that I am, I went for another silver button that someone else flashed out, and I left him for greener pastures, for the streets paved with gold.

What I really wanted to do was to put up money making sites for which I wouldn’t need to deal with selling or customer relations. I found a well known guru who was doing this, and I ran after him begging him to take me on as a private student, and indeed after a waiting period I was accepted, and he did exactly what I asked of him.

But during that time Google changed the rules of the game and after a year of producing 5 or 6 potentially valuable information sites, and spending thousands of dollars doing so, both on tuition and on SEO, today all six sites are making me about $3/month from Google Adsense and $0 from Clickbank.

At this point, in 2013, a good friend of mine offered to hire me for his business, so I bit the bullet and said yes. This friend is someone who had been telling me for years that business just doesn’t work that way, and urging me to do something that I am good at, and so over 2014 and 2015 with his help I produced a product of my own with a membership site. This site makes me today about $300/month.

Not bad for 10 years’ work, eh? $300/month.

There was not a moment over the last 10 years where I couldn’t have said, “listen, I know that until now I have had no success, but I changed things and now you’ll see, now the success is going to come.”

And I say the same thing today. But don’t smirk. In my first post, My Journey From Rags To Riches, I wrote about the inspiration that I received from one of Omar Martin’s webinars, and that which I am considering entering John Thornhill’s inner circle, and from my experience at already producing a product and managing a membership site for over year, I think that now I have the tools to finally go and actually do it, to start making a consistent online income, (if not actually passive in nature).

If any of this sounds familiar, similar to your story, please sign up for the mailing list so that we can succeed in this together.