There’s a reason why it’s a lot harder than most people think to start earning decent money online and it doesn’t have to do with all the scams either. The true reason is that earning money online happens in a way that is completely alien to most of us: passively. Those who can’t wrap their head around the concept of passive earnings eventually go back to trading their time for dollars, read on for more.

When’s the last time you earned money when you weren’t working? If you’re one of the vast majority of internet marketers or ‘internet dream seekers’ chances are you’re not quite living the so-called internet lifestyle that everyone keeps talking about; the ability to go where you want, when you want and earn the type of money that others only dream about. If you’re like me the thought of earning money for work you did a week or a month ago that continues to pay you for the rest of your life sounds pretty good doesn’t it?

Earning money like this is called earning passive or residual income; work once and get paid over and over again for it. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of and it’s probably the best reason to get into whole internet marketing racket. There are other forms of passive earnings, like buying and holding stocks or real estate and selling for much more than your purchase price, but the internet is so damn cheap to get into which further reduces the barriers of entry for all those dreamers out there with no money to spare.

So while passive income is the big allure to making money online with an internet business – it’s also one of the biggest reasons why people give up on the internet before they have a chance to start earning some money passively.

Most of us have been raised to trade our time for dollars, and to learn this lesson we had to suffer. You see, having to stay inside and do chores or cut the grass while the other kids were having fun and ice cream at the beach felt a little unfair didn’t it? However, we eventually got used to trading our time for money to the point where it’s business as normal. Working for an employer introduced a comfortable routine, work x number of hours for x dollars an hour and get paid for it every one or two weeks.

However, once you start attempting to earn money online that all goes out the window. There are many factors online that you don’t have direct control over and could vary across niches all over the web. To start making even small amounts of money you need to do something virtually unheard of – work for little to no pay at all! Results (especially if you’re dealing solely with organic traffic) come slow and sporadically. You could easily invest 40 hours of your time and have not any earnings to show for it. Since we’re conditioned to expect to be paid one hours pay for one hour worked, not earning money may disturb you to the foundation of your core, whether you realize it or not. If you’re new to internet marketing you’ll be wracked with self doubt – maybe you chose the wrong keywords or somehow pissed off Google? You’ll wonder if you should quit while you’re ahead, if you’re just not good enough to make it all work. Another popular choice is to assume that you were ripped off by whoever sold you a product or software because if it really worked then you should be making the big money right away…right?

If that isn’t bad enough, friends and family may also give you a hard time since if haven’t gotten a financial return on all of the time you invested thus far. You may even convince yourself to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on must-have software or courses to speed the process up and dig yourself into a deeper hole. Sooner or later, quitting just seems to make a lot more sense then flogging a dead horse.

Makes sense to me, why should you persist when you’re not making the amount that you make per hour at your day job? The reason is because of what I hinted at earlier; you need to evolve your entire mindset to a new way of earning money and break through the security of the regular pay cheque. You need to suffer again, like you did when you first had to give away time for money when you were a kid.

Back then you didn’t have a choice about accepting the fact that in order to earn money, you had to spend your time working for it first. As an adult, there’s no reason for you to have to go through the pain of earning money passively if you don’t want to, and since most of us are programmed to expect the security of the weekly or bi-weekly pay cheque, it’s all too easy to give up on earning money passively before we’ve ever even given it a proper chance.

Earning money passively comes down to being able to delay your gratification. In a culture that is becoming increasingly spoiled with entertainment, food and fun ‘on demand’ having to wait for something for payment indefinitely is cruel and unusual punishement. The only way to push through the disappointment is to take a long range approach; learn how to savour the small victories along the way and perhaps most importantly – learn to stop translating all the hours that you spend into their dollar equivalent and measuring them against the earnings of your little web property.

Making money through passive income streams takes a lot of time initially to get up and running, during this time you’ll make little to no money at all. There’s not much of a way around this process either until you know how to select the right niche with some solid keyword research practices.

So why go through the hassle of putting in all of this work to build a passive income? Because if you hang in there and play your cards right, you’ll eventually build a secondary stream of income that comes to you daily or weekly regardless of whether you actively promote your site or not. You can then run tests to optimize the site further to earn even more money and then start up a second site while your first one continues to earn money.

Repeat this process and you’ll eventually have several websites that are all generating income for you on a frequent basis that can start approaching the money you’re earning working for someone else. This is where the internet lifestyle starts to happen because you have money coming in from more than one source whether you actively promote your sites or not. This is the holy grail of the internet marketing community – this is what we all want to achieve; abundance and ease in our affairs so that we can do whatever we want, whenever we want. This is the promise of passive income – but first you have to overcome the doubt and worry from a lifetime of trading your time for money.

It isn’t easy to do, but if you’re aware of what you have to go through to start achieving success, you’ll be more inclined to be able to handle it when you start building your first passive income streams.