The Myth of Making “Passive Income” on the Internet

February 14, 2025

As a website designer, I often get people coming to me with ideas of building a website that is designed to make them money “on autopilot”.

Usually, these people have read books or been to seminars by Internet marketing gurus (trying to sell some over-priced course or seminar) painting a rosy picture of the Internet lifestyle. While your website is making “passive income” you are sitting on a beach or yacht somewhere, checking your bank account each morning, counting the money that has come in overnight.

Now, it’s certainly true, there are people who have achieved this dream of autopilot income – for a short time. If you’re smart, focused and work hard to set up an online business in the right niche market, you can certainly reap the rewards for a while, with very little day to day work required.

But… and here is the real crux of the matter… it is simply not viable for any source of “passive income” to keep flowing in forever.

Firstly, if you really have discovered an autopilot money-making goldmine, you can be sure other people will also find it before long, and set up in competition. While you are sipping cocktails on a tropical island, they will be taking over your market share and you’ll be out of luck before you know it.

Furthermore, for any business to be successful long term, your customers have to feel that you care about them. If your main goal is to make money with as little work as possible, your customers will quickly pick up the vibe that you don’t care – and they’ll find another supplier who does.

Above all, as most people who’ve pursued the passive income dream have discovered, life can become meaningless pretty quickly if you’re not actively engaged in adding value to the world through your work.

Truly successful business owners, without exception are following a totally different type of dream. Instead trying to make passive income with as little effort as possible, they are living, breathing, eating and sleeping a vision that they are truly passionate about.

They wake up each morning eager to get to work. And they spend their days giving something of value back to the world. If you focus first on creating value through your business, you can then look for systems and processes that will allow you to create even more value, so you can scale up and grow the business.

In this way, you can create a genuine type of passive income. But it all starts with creating value first and foremost.

1 thought on “The Myth of Making “Passive Income” on the Internet”

  1. Hey Chris, good post but from my experience, passive income does exist. Yes, you have to do work upfront in order to generate the passive income stream, plus possible backend maintenance work, however at some point it can be automated, especially if you hire someone to manage the maintenance work. Cheers!

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