You've probably heard them all. You know, the "make $1,000 while you sleep without doing a lick of work" BS pitches. Well, let me tell you, it doesn't happen that way.

If you want to make money online you must work! There's no way around it. But, there *are* ways to make money with *very little* work. It *is* possible to make a passive income, and a very good one at that.

I'm not talking about "get rich quick" schemes or the current trend, "money doubler" programs. (By the way, the US Federal Trade Commission considers money doublers a form of illegal gambling.) No, what I mean is earning money while doing the work one time, or with very little maintenance on your part.

If you sell memberships to something, for instance, you'll earn a passive income from the recurring commissions of those you sign up. Anything that gets paid to you on a regular basis, such as web hosting services, is a passive income.

It's "passive" because you sold the service or membership once, but you'll continue to get paid as long as the member or customer keeps the service. This kind of income is also "residual," meaning it keeps recurring.

But there are other types of passive income, too. Using programs like Google AdWords and Google AdSense, for example, will bring you a passive income. How?

By displaying Google AdSense ads on your website, you'll earn money every time your visitors click on an ad. And by creating ads for your products with Google AdWords, you'll put your advertising on autopilot. People who visit your website or sales page may become a customer or subscriber to your mailing list.

While both of these can bring you a good passive income, they do have some minor drawbacks.

Google AdSense (https://www.google.com/adsense) ads pay you every time someone clicks an ad, but you may get only a few pennies per click. That means it'll take a long time to add up to the $100 minimum payout for you to collect your money.

Google AdWords (https://adwords.google.com) have the potential to bring you a very large income, but you must have the right keywords to get enough targeted visitors to your site. Once there, you must then convince them to purchase the product you're advertising. Plus, since you pay for each click your ads receive, you have to be sure your return on investment is enough to make those ads worth your while.

But what if you could display ads on your website and, instead of getting pennies for a click, you could earn a commission for the products that sell? That would be another type of passive income, and potentially more profitable, too. It's sort of the best of both worlds.

There *is* a way to do such a thing. It's a simple "copy and paste the code" script called ClickBank Buddy. (http://www.home-business-on-a-budget.com/CBBuddy.htm)

When visitors come to my site, they see ads displayed for various products and services listed in the entire ClickBank database. When they purchase from those ads I get the commissions. Pretty nifty, huh?

While you can't get money for nothing, you *can* get it for almost nothing, by implementing passive income-generating techniques. And best of all, these specific techniques can earn you an income from your unused web real estate, that excess space on your website!

So which method do *I* use to create passive income? All 3, of course. You can never have too much passive income, right?

And earning income from more than one source is called "multiple streams of income," which is how top earners make so much money. They don't put all their eggs in one basket. But... that's a topic for another article entirely.

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