Got distracted by passive income
Several years ago I had an idea for a website called the Breakup Site. It would be very simple: a single page listing links to advice columns and personal essays that addressed breakups. It would be optimized for search so you could find it easily when searching for things that people search for after breakups (“how to get over a breakup,” “why does my heart hurt”). I figured if I could just get in a room with the head of marketing of an ice cream company, I could get them to put banner ads on it for a year, a line item on their marketing budget. Ka-ching.
Later I learned that this — the niche website that kicked out regular advertising income — was a classic of the passive income genre.
I found this out during a period of my life when I didn’t like my job or much of anything, really, and spent a lot of time fantasizing about checking out. At the time, though, I was paying back credit card debt, and so I figured that even if I were able to get a plane ticket and a room and an under-the-table job in Mexico, I’d still need several hundred dollars a month to pay my creditors. (Practical even in escapist fantasies, me.)
And so while googling, “how to make money without working”, “how to make an extra $500 a month”, “how to get free money,” I found my way to passive income blogs.
These blogs use the term “passive income” interchangeably with “side hustle,” and much of what they’re proposing isn’t passive at all. What they’re actually talking about is money that you make outside of any formal employment situation, and often what they’re really talking about is money you make from money you already have. (Of course, if you have enough money, you can just invest it, and it’ll kick off interest and dividends, money from nothing, the most passive income there is.)
These blogs can be mesmerizing, and they do make it seem easy, making an extra grand a month. While reading them I got caught up in this fantasy of, wow, why do any of us have jobs, we can all be so rich, if we just …. buy this guy’s $299 ecourse.
The passive income ecourse: another classic of the genre. What you learn on these blogs is that the path to passive income is through keyword research. Find something that people google a lot, create a webpage and optimize it with regular content, create products that you can sell to those people, like ecourses and ebooks, or recommend other products, and link to them with affiliate links that give you a cut, sell ads.
An example of this strategy in action — in fact, the example that all passive income bloggers have capitalized on, or tried to — is the passive income blog selling a passive income ecourse and a passive income ebook.
Especially now, that I’ve had some jobs and experience across businesses with brand building and commerce and website building and search engine optimization, I know that doing what they say is so easy is actually not easy at all. There are companies with dozens of employees and million-dollar marketing budgets that are struggling to succeed in doing the thing that the passive income bloggers say is super easy to do in your downtime.
I stopped googling passive income when I started a job that I found engaging, that paid me enough to pay my bills and then some, when I stopped looking for an escape because I started to like the quotidian of my good job, my good relationship, my good life.
The Breakup Site was a good idea, and remains a good idea. If I put my passive income hat on, it is an even better idea than I originally thought. The target demographic — desperate people who want an easy solution — is the same audience that has made many of these passive income blogs so successful. It’s an audience primed to want a quick fix, and to pay for it: get over your ex webinar, feel better after getting dumped ecourse, breakup bootcamp.
To really get my empire going, all I’d have to do is flip whatever switch one has to flip in their brain or heart that turns “taking advantage of people’s pain in order to sell them things” into “fixing people’s pain by selling them things,” and I could do it. I could be a breakup influencer, a passive income success story. Sign up for my ecourse to learn more, it’s only $299.
Watercolor by Matt Davis