I’ve always been passionate about computers and programming. After seeing some friends play music on a Vic-20, I begged for a computer until we got one of those wonder-machines. I progressed to a Colecovision Adam, Commodore 128D and finally to an IBM PC and through the myriad of both PC’s and Mac’s throughout the years.
At age 14, I became one of the youngest hosts on Quantumlink, the Commodore BBS system that eventually became AOL. There I hosted both a music room and an application room where I wrote music songs based on sheet music I’d pick up at the library, as well as games and utilities like Bash Yer Brains (trivia), Label Magik, and Stat!, a baseball statistics generator.
High School saw me volunteering both as a SYSOP on the school’s BBS system as well as being a camera person and director for the school’s TV channel. College saw me get into the world of gopher before the World Wide Web was born and it changed my life.
I began hearing about a new TV show, Babylon 5, and started helping crosspost news articles from QuantumLink onto a fledgling Usenet. I then set up a mailing list dedicated to the show at the university and eventually figured out how to email both the series creator and the head person at Warner Bros. Television doing publicity for the show. I helped start one of the best resources for the show, The Lurker’s Guide, and was asked to quit college and move to Hollywood to work for the studio. I jumped at the chance.
I did what any kid from the midwest would do in Hollywood and pulled strings to get my SAG card by working as an extra on the show 7th Heaven, which I obtained through contacts from work and just being a good person. I quit WB and became a writer on the game show Pictionary, then begged for my job back when we were canceled until getting laid off in the AOL merger in 2001.
So where does passive income come in?
In the late 1990s, I heard about the Amazon Associates Program and quickly signed up for an account. I had my own “store” online where I listed Babylon 5 novels for sale. I then snuck that affiliate link onto the Official Babylon 5 Web Site under “other links” on a resource page. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was highly indexed. Throughout the years I would try various tactics, including a web crawler that basically put all the products on your own site. I had some success but never put much real thought into it.
Then over the years I heard about Google Adsense and bought the book Adsense Secrets by Joel Comm. Through commenting and email we became good friends. I was making niche websites left and right, and over time got discouraged as the profits would get less and less.
I started hearing about Warrior Forum, Clickbank, and other places info-marketers hung out and I quickly decided it wasn’t quite for me. When you sell a product online for $199 and give $150 back to the affiliate, that just doesn’t jive for me. If anything, I wanted something “white hat,” something that can be done ethically and morally. I wasn’t going to blog or say anything about it until I was making thousands of dollars a month.
So I never created anything.
Until recently.
It’s the Journey
I realized more than the passive income itself, the journey getting there is sometimes more rewarding. Austin Kleon masterfully tells us to “Show Your Work!” and take people along for the journey with you.
It isn’t easy. People will ask “What are your credentials?” Simple: I’m learning. Let’s learn something together.
Whether a strategy or product works or fails, let’s figure it out together. I’ll show you what I am learning along the way.
Sound like a deal? Make sure you subscribe to my youtube channel and weekly newsletter to see how things are going.
Let’s do something >.
Troy