Hale Dwoskin, author of The Sedona Method and one of the teachers from the movie The Secret has created a free 19-minute audio program for me to share with you.

Our intent in providing this freebie was to help people who’ve been following my passive income series by giving them some simple techniques to release limiting thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, especially those that can interfere with success and abundance. However, the recording is also general enough that anyone can benefit from it. It will teach you how to release blocks, obsessive behaviors, negative patterns, and more.

Get the free audio here: Sedona Method – Free Audio

I first met Hale in 2009, but I was introduced to the Sedona Method years before by my friend Vicki, a Sedona Method trainer. If you’ve attended one of our first two Conscious Growth Workshops, you may have met Vicki since she was one of our staff helpers.

I’m not an expert on the Sedona Method, but so many of my friends swear by it that I’ve decided to give it a more in-depth look. I’m currently going through the Sedona Method Supercourse, which includes 20 CDs worth of material. It teaches the basic Sedona Method techniques, and it has 3 other modules to applications to improve your finances, relationships, and health. I’ve only gone through 2 CDs so far, but I’m already finding it pretty interesting.

If you like the free audio and you want to explore the Sedona Method in more depth, we’ve set it up so you can get the Sedona Method Supercourse for a 46% discount off the regular price. The ordering links are at the end of that page, but the page itself is a lot more educational than salesy. It shares a lot more detail about the Sedona Method, including some how-to steps… and there’s a free 6-minute video from Hale as well.

Please let me know if you like this freebie since Hale is willing to create and share more free audios if there’s enough interest. I’ll probably be hanging out with him next month in British Columbia, and I’ll be happy to share your feedback with him.

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In December of 2010, Steve Pavlina released all copyrights to his materials.

Recent data from 1189 publishers shows that ebook sales have overtaken hardcover book sales and will overtake paperback books soon.

In comparing the same sales period for 2011 vs. 2012, hardcover sales increased by 2.7% while ebook sales increased by 28.1%. It’s difficult for the supply of quality ebook offerings to keep up with this kind of growth rate, so ebook sellers are likely to see stronger than normal demand for their existing ebooks for quite a while.

Paperback books are still #1 in terms of sales, but this lead isn’t expected to last much longer.

One category in particular that’s been skyrocketing (both for ebook and hardcover sales) is young adult and children’s books. This genre has been seeing triple digit growth rates.

As I mentioned in a previous post about passive income systems, the data clearly points to some major opportunities for selling ebooks.

What’s driving this rapid growth in ebook sales? Tablet computers and ebook reading devices like the iPad and Kindle.

Tablet Computers Driving Ebook Sales

Let’s take a quick look at the projections for tablet sales.

Deutsche Bank projects that 97 million tablet computers will ship in 2012, increasing to 124 million in 2013. That would be a 28% increase year over year. This isn’t for the same year as the ebook sales, but does this number look familiar?

iPad sales alone are expected to pass 60 million units in 2012, increasing to 74 million in 2014.

Even Microsoft has broken with its previous business model, bypassing its hardware partners to create its own tablet hardware, called Microsoft Surface. The tablet space is clearly heating up with competition. Billions of dollars worth of tablet computers are being sold every month now.

Most of these tablet devices are geared for consuming content rather than for creating content. This is creating a big surge in demand for apps, games, and of course ebooks.

A Golden Opportunity for Ebook Authors

These numbers suggest some major opportunities for ebook authors. It’s really not that difficult to create and sell an ebook these days, even if you’ve never written one before. A good place to start is Vic Johnson’s program that teaches you how to create and sell ebooks; his intro video also shares more data about why this is an unusually good time to sell ebooks. Vic also shares contact info for the vendors he uses, so you can get help formatting your ebook, creating a nice cover for it, and so on.

I spoke to Vic again last week, and he noted it’s a very workable strategy to create decent passive income streams just by focusing on the three major players (Amazon, Apple/iBooks, and Barnes & Noble). It’s great if you have a website to sell your ebooks too, but these days that isn’t necessary. My book Personal Development for Smart People was published by Hay House in 2008, and it has ebook versions for the Kindle, iBooks, etc., but I don’t sell any copies directly through my website.

I’m most likely going to create and sell an ebook for the walkthrough I do later in this passive income series. The writing on the wall is too clear to ignore. This is a juicy opportunity that isn’t going to last forever. With the rapid growth of ebook and tablet computer sales, this is a great time to get into ebooks. It’s possible to see increasing sales for a while just from watching the market expand. This reminds me of the opportunity I saw in 2004 when I started blogging; many bloggers were able to see significant traffic increases from the general expansion of the blogosphere.

I’m planning to stick with nonfiction since that’s my strength, but there are some serious opportunities if you think you can crank out a kid’s or young adult book. Teens and tweens just can’t get enough of those vampire stories.

Vic also generously offered to help out with some additional Q&A since he can see that hundreds of people from my website are currently taking his course (I expect it to get into the thousands as we continue this series). He suggested that we invite people to send us their questions about creating and selling ebooks. Vic and I will select about 10 questions and have a phone conversation to discuss and answer them, record the call, and share it here. So if you have a question you’d like to submit to us, especially one you feel isn’t already answered by Vic’s program, feel free to send it to me.

I’m really looking forward to going through this process myself. On the one side, I enjoy teaching people about passive income, and I have about 17 years of experience making money this way, so there’s plenty to share. On the other side, I also love trying new things since I get bored easily if I keep doing the same thing over and over. While Vic has created and sold many ebooks very successfully (earning more than $7 million from ebooks), I’ve barely dabbled in this. It’s going to be fun!

As a final piece of advice, try not to get so worked about about whether or not your first income stream is a homerun vs. a flop. Passive income is a skill to develop for the long run. The only way to really know how well a given idea works is to test it. You can do some market research to put the odds in your favor, such as Vic explains how to do in his program, but it also helps if you can go into this with a beginner’s mind and stay open to all possible outcomes without succumbing to feelings of neediness and desperation. I found it especially helpful to adopt this attitude when I was just starting out.

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Just a quick reminder that your free access to the Ultimate You Mindfest (a free online personal growth audio series) ends on Monday morning, so if you still want to listen to it for free, this is essentially your last day to do so before it converts to a paid-only program.

You can still get access to all 6 sessions and the bonus session until Monday morning at 7:30am Pacific time (10:30am Eastern) for free. After that you would have to purchase the recordings. The recordings are on sale through July 1st, after which the price will increase.

Even if you haven’t listened to any of the Mindfest sessions yet — and if you haven’t, the Mindfest includes a session on overcoming procrastination just for you — the entire program is available online now, including free access to a half dozen Paraliminals. So if you still want to listen to it for free, it would be wise to do so now. Each session is about 30 minutes, so you could go through the whole program in a few hours. It’s not a bad way to spend part of a weekend.

This Mindfest has been extremely popular with my blog and newsletter readers — tens of thousands of them have signed up to listen to it — and the feedback about it has been terrific. So due to its obvious popularity, I’ve been giving it a lot of attention to make sure people who could benefit from this don’t miss out. It’s not particularly difficult to take advantage of something that’s free.

You can get free access to the Mindfest here: Ultimate You Mindfest

And you can see my blog posts about it here: Free Online Event – Ultimate You Mindfest and Ultimate You Mindfest Update

I listened to the entire Mindfest and quite enjoyed it. I also re-listened to the first session this morning and got more out of it the second time.

What I Gained from the Mindfest

While many of the core ideas in the Mindfest weren’t new to me, I still find it valuable to reinforce these ideas. Being exposed to similar ideas in new ways helps me understand them better. I also feel a renewed call to action each time.

The main idea I got from the Mindfest was the importance of subconscious training. I’ve been using Paraliminals for this since 2006, but the Mindfest also gave me the idea to make the habit even more personal.

A few days ago, I decided to type up some personal affirmations — positive, present-tense statements to reinforce inspiring goals, desires, habits, relationships, and more. I ended up with a list of 152 items. This list includes items like I use my time well; I keep my technical skills fresh and sharp; and I create, maintain, and enjoy a rich and rewarding social life.

Then I used a voice recording app to record them with my iPhone. Most smart phones come pre-packaged with such apps. It took 10 minutes to read the list, so this produced a 10-minute recording.

Now when I have some extra time, like when I’m driving to the gym or going for a walk, I listen to my recording. I aim to listen at least once a day. The first day I was able to listen to it about 6 times, so once a day is definitely doable.

The idea here is to program these ideas more deeply into the subconscious mind. You can think of it as a form of self-hypnosis.

You don’t even have to consciously listen. You can tune out and let your subconscious process the information while you’re doing something else such as cooking, eating, exercising, driving, etc.

Since advertisers are trying to drill their messages into your subconscious mind with repetition to alter your behavior, like making you order a Coke with your meal, why not use this process to condition your own consciously chosen desires and behaviors?

I think the Paraliminals are a nice companion to this approach. There are Paraliminals on many different topics, and they’re excellent in my opinion, but you’ll always have some interests and desires that aren’t covered by them. I also like the idea of packing every positive idea I can think of into a single recording.

I’ve used this method in the past, and it really does help. What happens is that you start modifying your behaviors in subtle ways over time, and you also start noticing opportunities that you might otherwise have missed. Paul shares some incredible examples of this in the Mindfest.

Catch the Mindfest

If you listen to some or all of the Mindfest, I think you’ll also get a sense of just how much power your subconscious thoughts and behaviors are wielding over your life. The good news is that you can use your conscious mind to alter your subconscious inclinations, so that your automatic behaviors are aligned with your goals and desires. This means less frustration and overwhelm. When your subconscious is on your side, you feel like you’re in the flow. You decide to do something, and you soon catch yourself doing it.

Paul does a great job of explaining these ideas with stories and examples, so the Mindfest is an easy listen. Even if you can’t listen to the whole thing, I’d suggest you try to squeeze in at least a couple of the lessons, perhaps Day 1 and Day 6 at a minimum.

You can even access the Mindfest on your cell phone, so listen to it while you’re out running errands if you’d like.

You can sign up and listen right away at the Ultimate You Mindfest page. Once you sign up, you’ll be emailed the instructions to access the recordings. It’s very straightforward.

If you have any technical issues with the Mindfest, please drop an email to info at learningstrategies dot com, and I’m sure they’ll be happy to help you out. As far as I know, there haven’t been any notable technical problems with the Mindfest — the technology worked great — but occasionally people have browser issues that need to be corrected to get access.

Have a terrific, growth-filled day!

Update: Free access to the Mindfest is now closed. This was a very popular event. If you wish to purchase the recordings, they’ll be on sale through July 1st. Learning Strategies says the price will increase on the morning of July 2nd.

One of the simplest ways to start earning passive income right away is to request donations. Just invite people to give you money.

The Kindness of Strangers

In rare situations donations can really take off. Consider the recent case of Karen Klein, the New York bus monitor who was filmed being bullied by students on the bus. A guy named Max Sidorov started a campaign to raise money for her to take a vacation, via the site Indiegogo, with a goal of raising $5000.

As the abuse video went viral, racking up millions of views on YouTube, and news of this campaign spread, donation pledges came pouring in. Last time I checked, Karen’s donations were well in excess of $500,000, and there are still 28 days left in the fundraising campaign.

On top of that, someone started an Indiegogo campaign to raise some “love money” for Max as well, perhaps to reward him for coming up with the idea. The initial goal was to raise $2500 for Max, and that campaign is already past $4400.

Before this is over, Karen Klein could very well be a millionaire. And she didn’t even ask for this.

Apparently Karen’s normal salary as a bus monitor was $15K per year. At the rate her donations are increasing, she’s probably earning a year’s salary in a few hours now.

Ask and It Is Given

My results with donations are nowhere near as explosive as Karen’s, but I do invite and accept donations as one of many passive income streams. Donations are one of my smallest streams, but they can add up over time, and this stream is very easy to maintain.

I first began testing donations in 2005. I’d been blogging for several months but wasn’t really making money at it. I started getting emails from people telling me they wanted to pay me something for all the value they’d received from my free content. One of them asked if he could PayPal me some money. I said sure, and he gave me a donation.

Others encouraged me to make it easier for them to donate, and taking their advice actually saved me time. Otherwise people would have kept asking. So I put up a donations page with a PayPal link. PayPal can automatically generate the HTML code and donation button for you, so this is very easy to do.

The amount of money I’ve made from donations has varied over time. At its peak several years ago, I would see $1-2K in donations per month. These days it’s around $500-700 per month on average. Although it’s not a major income stream, donations still bring in thousands of dollars in income per year.

If you already have a website that provides some decent value for free, I encourage you to at least try putting up a donations link and see what happens. If at least a few people want to pay you back in some small way, why not make it easy for them?

I’ve received many donations for $100, $200, and even $300+. It’s nice to receive this extra financial support, especially when providing so much content for free.

Effectiveness of Donations

Donations help, but I wouldn’t suggest basing your entire income strategy around donations unless you’re creating a non-profit enterprise and you have someone in charge of fundraising, or if you have a truly massive audience like Wikipedia. For a normal web business, donations can provide a nice little income stream, but I wouldn’t count on them to cover all of your expenses.

On the other hand, if you have the ability to create a major viral campaign around your fundraising efforts like Max Sidorov did for Karen Klein, then a donation-centric strategy may be worth a try.

If you want to start generating some passive income, meet the universe halfway. Ask!

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In December of 2010, Steve Pavlina released all copyrights to his materials.

Fame is attention. With enough attention you can generate passive income.

Monetizing Fame

Monetizing fame is actually pretty easy. Consider the Oprah effect. When Oprah recommends a book, it sells like crazy. If she wanted to, she could leverage her fame to promote products, businesses, and more in exchange for a cut of the sales. Lots of companies would be happy to pay her for an endorsement.

The Catholic Church is excellent at leveraging fame to make money. The Church has many supporters who go out of their way to market it. This generates new subscribers who are in turn encouraged to go out and spread the “good news.” By taking the form of a non-profit, they also avoid many taxes. L. Ron Hubbard copied their model to create the Church of Scientology, which is also quite wealthy.

Celebrities commonly generate income streams by endorsing products and services. With enough leverage they can be granted a cut of the sales they help generate, stock options, and additional perks. Their endorsement may not involve much direct effort, maybe a photo shoot or some filming, but it can produce significant income if the celebrity’s recommendation carries a lot of weight in terms of generating sales.

Many celebrities have millions of Twitter followers, even though they often share mostly personal updates that no one would ever want to read if it came from a non-celeb. With such large audiences, they could recommend all kinds of things that make them money, such as William Shatner did by appearing in Priceline commercials. Movie stars can promote their own movies too, which puts more money in their pockets if they can help sell more movie tickets.

Fame provides many benefits because attention begets more attention. A famous movie star gets more movie offers because the star’s fame can drive more people to see the movie. More movies means even more fame and recognition.

You don’t have to become a major movie star to enjoy some of the benefits of fame. Even a little fame can help. For instance, due to the popularity of my website, I’ve been quoted in the New York Times three times. My website has been mentioned in quite a few books as well as on TV. I’ve never paid for any of this extra publicity. More exposure can generate more web traffic, and that’s something I already know how to monetize. I don’t have a good way to measure how much this helps income-wise, but I’m sure it has some effect.

You have to be careful when monetizing fame because there’s always a chance of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. If you do something stupid that kills your reputation and turns everyone against you, your fame will become infamy. Interestingly, you can still monetize infamy, but you may need to use different strategies. The greater risk to your financials is muddying your reputation and being forgotten.

Public vs. Private Life

Some famous people are really into brand and reputation management. Quite often their real lives differ significantly from their public personas, but they keep playing up those personas, partly because it makes them money. One of the best examples of this would be pro wrestling, where the public characters can be so bizarre and conflict-driven. Drama sells more tickets.

When I realized that my web traffic was likely to give me a small dose of online celebrity, I made a conscious choice that I didn’t want to have to manage two different characters in my psyche. Whether in public or private, I do my best to behave the same way… and not to hide aspects of my personality, regardless of how people may judge me. But many people don’t feel good about doing this, so they separate their public and private selves.

Whether you invent a public character to portray or do your best to be your same self in both worlds is a matter of personal preference. However, you can run into problems when you pretend that your public persona is your real private self as well. Many speakers have fallen into this trap.

How to Become Famous

How do you become famous in the first place? I’d say the #1 rule is to violate expectations. Fame is attention, and to get attention you need to stand out. Copying what everyone else does only makes you invisible. To become famous you must do something exceptional, unusual, or extraordinary. Flaunt your uniqueness. Learn what other people did to become famous, and then discard their solutions and do something different. It’s okay to model someone’s general approach, but don’t copy their personal style or technique unless you want to be labeled “So and so, junior.”

I gained some degree of fame by publicly sharing so many of my interests on my blog, including my experiments in polyphasic sleep and raw foods, my interest in open relationships and D/s play and threesomes, my explorations of subjective reality, etc. Of course there are many people who share these interests, so I’m not particularly unique in that regard. But not many people were willing to share such details in public, especially people in the personal development field. Writers in this field had a tendency to whitewash their lives and present a sanitized public image. I shared the more experimental side of my life, and when I did so, people would thank me for it. People with similar interests or challenges could relate to what I was going through and learn from my failures and successes. They encouraged me to continue. I also felt good about doing this.

I recognized early on that if I kept up this approach, it would surely turn some people against me, such as people who get upset by articles like 10 Reasons You Should Never Have a Religion or How to Graduate From Christianity, but on balance I’ve gained much more traffic and income than I’ve lost by writing on such topics openly. In some media this would backfire, but with blogging people tend to place more value on honesty and authenticity than on needing the writer to clone their values.

Fame is a mixed bag. While it can open up a lot of doors, it can also do weird things to your social life. If you can feel congruent with this path, it’s not that difficult to become famous. The hard part is reaching the point where you can accept and welcome the whole package. Most people could appreciate the benefits of fame but definitely wouldn’t want to deal with the drawbacks such as the loss of privacy, endless solicitations, and the public criticism they’d have to deal with, and so they reject the package as a whole; this virtually ensures they won’t become famous.

Even the people I know who seem pretty comfortable with fame still generally keep it at arms length as much as possible. For them fame is a byproduct of pursuing other interests, but it’s not a particularly worthy end in itself.

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In December of 2010, Steve Pavlina released all copyrights to his materials.

The Ultimate You Mindfest (a free online personal growth audio series) that I mentioned in an earlier blog post kicked off on Monday, June 18. I’ve already listened to the first two sessions, and the third one just came online today.

Don’t worry if you haven’t started yet since you can still listen to the whole series for free from the beginning for free if you want, but you only have a few more days to do that.

First Impressions

My impression of the Mindfest thus far is very positive. Paul Scheele’s coaching sessions are around 30 minutes each, so it’s not a big time commitment. Rachelle and I listened to Day 2′s session last night while having dinner, and we’re going to listen to Day 3 very shortly.

I’d say the overall theme of this program is about using simple techniques to enlist the cooperation of your subconscious mind to get what you want out of life. This is something I’ve barely addressed even after years of blogging, probably because I’ve been doing this for most of my life without really being aware of it.

For example, when I was in high school, I used to get excited before any math test. Before I even took the exam, I’d imagine the end result I wanted. I visualized the teacher returning our graded tests and smiling as he gave me mine with an A+ on it, highest grade in the class. I even imagined the other nearby students moaning when they glanced at my grade, realizing that I’d blown the curve yet again. And that’s how it turned out most of the time.

I rarely ever studied for exams all through high school. While other students studied, I simply imagined that I’d ace my tests and tapped into feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction. I figured that since I went to class and did the homework, there was no need to study. Surely the information was already stored in my brain somewhere. I just had to “get out of the way,” as Paul described.

Most of the other top students I knew in high school and college rarely studied for exams either. The ones who studied usually generated excess stress and anxiety for themselves, which hurt their performance. After a test was over, when their minds were more relaxed, they’d realize where they screwed up and what they “should” have done instead.

This is one reason I was able to take lots of extra units in college (as explained in articles like Do It Now and 10 Tips for College Students). I didn’t have to waste time studying. Studying is a conscious preparation approach, but it’s just too slow in practice. As Paul explains on Day 2 of the Mindfest when he tells his golf story, it can be much more effective to enlist the help of your subconscious mind to meet your performance goals. While other students were cramming for finals, I did a few minutes of mental prep and then played poker and video games to relax and have fun.

I’ve often emphasized the importance of focusing on your desires, but Paul’s advice is a little different because he explains how to skip to the end and imagine the end result you want. That too isn’t unique advice, but he also explains what to do afterwards. This process sets up your subconscious mind to watch out for opportunities and shortcuts to your end result.

If you don’t enlist the help of your subconscious, you don’t necessarily get self-sabotage. You usually just experience a level of performance that’s nowhere near your best.

Our conscious mind makes choices, but the subconscious is more like a computer that obeys its prior programming. If you don’t insert your own code telling it what you want, it will probably be programmed with conflicting ideas, so you’ll typically get something in the realm of GIGO — garbage in, garbage out. This means unnecessary stress, wasted effort, and weak results.

The Lessons

Here are the specific lessons covered in the Mindfest:

Day 1 – Succeed by Design: Eliminate procrastination and hesitation

Day 2 – Activate Your Automatic Pilot: Vaporize negative self-talk and self-sabotage

Day 3 – Believe in Yourself: Whisk away limiting habits of mind

Day 4 – Follow-through with Unwavering Consistency: Hardwire inner drive and amazing self-discipline

Day 5 – Feel Great about Yourself: Remove the negative influences of other people

Day 6 – Open the Flow of Prosperity: Use the immense power of your mind to attract what you choose

For each day of the course, you get two programs — one lesson from Paul and one Paraliminal to listen to.

Currently we’re on Day 3 out of 6, so in addition to the sessions that are already available, new ones will be released on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

What if You Missed the Start of the Mindfest?

Not to worry if you missed the first couple days. You can still catch the whole Mindfest from start to finish — for free — even if you’re starting late.

Initially I thought that each session would be online for a 24-hour window, but it turns out that all of the sessions will be available until Monday morning, so there’s still time to catch up and digest it all. The Mindfest sessions will be online until 7:30am Pacific Time (10:30am Eastern) on June 25th.

I encourage you to listen in because it’s not a big time commitment, and the content focuses on teaching you simple methods to improve your results. Plus you get to listen to a bunch of the Paraliminals for free as well. The Paraliminals are audio mediations that you listen to, about 20 minutes each, and they help condition your subconscious mind in various ways to improve your results.

What’s the Catch? Why Is It Free?

The Mindfest is free because it’s a try-before-you-buy program.

Learning Strategies, the producer of the Mindfest, hopes you’ll find the Mindfest material so helpful that even after you listen to the whole thing for free, you’ll want to purchase a copy for yourself to listen to it more than once. I used this same model when I sold shareware games.

If you like the Mindfest and want to buy a copy of the recordings to keep (via download or on CD), go for it. If not, then it doesn’t cost you anything.

Of course they’re also sweetening the deal by including some extra bonuses if you do decide to purchase the recordings. I suspect that a lot of people who listen to it will end up buying it, so they can reinforce these ideas every few months, and Learning Strategies is including some of their most popular Paraliminals in the package to make it a pretty sweet deal.

Tune In

If you haven’t started listening to the Mindfest yet, you can sign up and get caught up at the Ultimate You Mindfest page.

I’m off to listen to Day 3…

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In December of 2010, Steve Pavlina released all copyrights to his materials.

As we go through this passive income series, you may start getting ideas for how you can create new streams of passive income. How do you know which ideas are worth pursuing?

Keep It Simple

It’s easy to bite off more than you can chew with your first passive income idea. If you already have a track record of successfully completing large projects, then don’t let me stop you. But if you have a tendency to get discouraged and give up too soon, I suggest scaling down your ambitions. Start small by tackling a simple project that you’re confident you can actually complete.

It’s better to complete a 30-page ebook and sell it for $7 and generate a few sales per month than it is to tackle a 200-page writing project and never get it done. The former provides some genuine value to people; the latter will merely frustrate you.

Treat your early projects as training for your success muscles. The greatest predictor of future success is actually past success, so think about creating some simple successes by taking on modest projects and getting them done and released. Once you’ve done a few of those, then consider scaling up and tackling bigger projects. Even with seemingly simple projects, you’re going to learn a lot. You’ll get faster, and then it will be easier to scale up and tackle larger projects.

It’s so easy to underestimate how long things will take by overlooking details. With some of my early game projects, I’d estimate that I could crank out a particular arcade-style game in 2-3 weeks, but in reality it would take me 6 months. There are so many hidden steps that are easy to gloss over with an off-the-cuff estimate, such as creating the installation program, creating the music and sound effects, writing the documentation, setting up the online ordering system, etc.

If you’ve never created a passive income stream before, your first project may involve lots of one-time steps like setting up an online shopping cart. But once you’ve done that initial setup work, you can create similar streams with greater ease simply by plugging them into the same system.

Try not to get overly excited about making a killing with your first passive income project. Put your attention on learning the ropes and generate a nice little stream. Then you can scale up by creating more streams. If you can generate even $50 a month with your first stream, I’d say you’re off to a good start. It’s generally harder to go from $0 to $50 a month than it is to go from $50 to $500 per month.

Inspiration vs. Market Research

There are two main schools of thought on how to pick income-producing creative projects. One is to go with your gut and do whatever inspires you. If you get an idea for a new project, run with it right away. The other idea is to research what people actually want to buy and then create something for that target market. This is the classic “find a need and fill it approach.”

I tend to get the best results by combining both approaches. First, I saturate myself in trying to understand what people want. I can do this via online research, surveys, or just talking to people. Over the years I’ve met hundreds of my blog readers face to face, especially at workshops, so that helps me better understand their needs and what I can provide that will be helpful to them.

If you have your own website or existing audience that you can use for market research, that’s a great place to start, but you can just as easily gather information from other websites.

When I was creating computer games, I started out by making simple arcade games because those were relatively easy to design and create. My games didn’t sell well though. So I did some market research, looking for where there was strong demand for new games from customers, especially in genres that I was interested in. I spent hours on game download sites (where game developers would post their free demos), observing which categories got the most downloads. I downloaded dozens of demos to get a sense of what else was out there, how popular various games were, and what I might be able to contribute that would be unique enough but also familiar enough to sell well.

That’s when I settled on making a cerebral puzzle game. The low end market for puzzle games was very crowded, especially with match-3 types of games, but I could see that the smarter end of the puzzle game market was underserved at the time, yet there was still some decent demand. People were downloading a lot of so-so games in that category. So this research helped me realize that if I made a decent game in that category, it would probably sell well.

I think this type of mental saturation was a good place to begin because it helped me narrow my focus, so generating ideas wasn’t an overwhelming task. I could then think about creating something in one of the sub-genres where I perceived good opportunities.

After that I began brainstorming some potential design ideas. I find that taking in a lot of input really helps when it comes to generating ideas. When I do this, I notice gaps in other people’s creations that help me see where I could take things in a different direction, thereby contributing something unique.

Once I had an idea that inspired me, it still took a lot of work to implement it. To create that game took about 4 months of solid design effort just to create a 5-page design document. Everything else — programming, artwork, music, sound effects, level design, testing, and release — took another 2 months. In its first month on the market, this new game sold more than my previous 4 games combined, and several months later it was earning 10 times what the other games were earning. That’s the power of market research. If you sell something people actually want to buy, you can do a lot better financially.

How to Do Market Research

I’m not really too particular about how I conduct market research. There are so many variables that you can get bogged down in analysis paralysis if you overdo it. I take a pretty light-weight approach to it.

Mainly I look for two things:

1. What are people already buying?
2. Where are there gaps with relatively high demand and low supply that I could potentially serve?

Sometimes it’s hard to answer #1 directly because you probably don’t have access to other people’s sales figures. But you can often use other public data to make some educated guesses. I didn’t know other game developers’ sales figures, but I could go to download sites and see how many downloads each demo had and how many games there were in each category. I could then calculate average downloads for each game in a a particular category. If I saw that one category had triple the per game downloads of another category, well… it wasn’t hard to surmise that one genre might make me triple the sales of another genre.

I could also look up traffic rankings for a developers’ website to see how popular it was (such as with Alexa.com). And I knew many developers personally, so I had a general sense of who was making money and who wasn’t. All of this information combined to give me a decent idea of where there was good money to be earned and where there wasn’t.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, I could see that developers of casual games were typically doing pretty well. Friends were making six figures a year selling card games and puzzle games. Today those markets are even bigger, especially with the expansion of tablet and cell phone games.

It can be a tricky balancing act between making something that inspires you and making something that people want to buy. There’s surely some luck and randomness involved too. But I’ve seen situations where results are 10, 20, or 50 times better when creators finally agree to give customers what they want instead of trying to convince customers to want what’s been created.

Do I think you should sacrifice your artistic integrity to satisfy the public? No, I don’t think it’s necessary to do that. I think most people who feel they must choose one or the other are creating a false dichotomy due to limiting beliefs and blocks to making good money. I didn’t feel I had to sacrifice my art to please others. In fact, I felt that paying more attention to what other people wanted made me a better artist. I liked having more customers to appreciate my creations.

If you think you have to choose one or the other, I encourage you to question whether that’s really true. Can you take the pulse of what other people want to buy and then focus on pursuing inspired ideas that will land somewhere in the general vicinity? I think that’s doable.

Much of the time when artists claim to be undiscovered geniuses and lament that they can’t make money doing what they love, I think the likely truth is that their art just isn’t very good yet.

I think some of the best art is developed with a strong social component, meaning that there’s ongoing feedback between the artist and the patrons.

Making Reasonable Trade-offs

Another advantage to knowing what people want is that you know when you’re going against those desires to some extent, and you can make this choice consciously without any self-delusion.

Based on surveys I had done, I expected that the Conscious Success Workshop would sell a lot better than the Conscious Relationships Workshop earlier this year. And that is of course what happened. CSW got twice as many registrations as CRW.

I could predict in advance that I’d earn more money doing something other than a relationships workshop. I accepted that, and I still felt inspired to do such a workshop, even knowing that the decision would mean earning less money. I felt that a smaller group would be better for this topic since it would be more intimate.

So in this case, the research gave me an idea of what to expect. I could make an informed choice, and there wouldn’t be any disappointment with the lower sales.

It’s nice to get an idea of what the trade-offs are when you put other concerns ahead of making money. Then you can ask yourself if the freedom to create what you desire is worth the financial impact. There’s no right or wrong way to make these decisions. It’s a matter of personal preference. You can make different choices over time and see how each type of project plays out.

Taking Risks

With new and untested ideas, there’s always some risk involved, but everyone has a different level of risk tolerance.

If you’re less risk tolerant, then I would put more effort into market research, so you do a better job of aiming where the demand is. That way you don’t waste your time creating something that no one wants to buy.

If you’re more risk tolerant, you can take the chance of doing something new where it’s hard to conduct market research. Success is far from guaranteed, but you might just stumble upon some previously unknown demand.

This is a matter of personal choice, and your preferences may change depending on what else is going on in your life. It’s like any form of investing. Do you want to play it safe and deal with relatively predictable outcomes, or do you want to take a chance and explore uncharted territory?

Both Site Build-It and the Getting Rich With Ebooks program I mentioned earlier explain how to conduct online research using various tools in their specific domains. So SBI provides tools to help you see where there’s good potential to create a money-making website, and GRWE helps you research potential topics for ebooks where you can expect good sales.

That said, if you’re more of a risk taker, you can bypass these tools and go with whatever inspires you. You might hit upon something new that works, but you could just as easily end up with a total dud. Who would ever want to do that?  I sometimes like doing that. It can be exciting to try something new and see what happens, assuming you can handle it if it doesn’t work out so well. This is especially doable for small projects where the downside isn’t so terrible if it doesn’t perform.

Since I have enough streams of passive income to support me, I can afford to take more chances with new income streams. But if I was just starting out, I might be more conservative and make sure I’m tackling projects where I can predict strong demand.

A lot of this research can be done with free tools and public information. For example, you can see how well any book is selling relative to any other book by checking the sales rankings on Amazon.com. For all kinds of products now, you can get a decent idea of how well any particular product is selling just by looking at public data. This is not difficult if you have decent Internet skills.

Inspiration First

Sometimes I get inspired ideas before I’ve done any market research. In those cases I can still do some research after the fact to validate or invalidate the idea. Maybe I’m excited about it in the moment, but the question is: Will it sell?

For instance, a few years ago I got the idea to offer personal coaching, but I didn’t know exactly what to offer or what to charge for it. It felt like an inspired idea that I should pursue, but I had a lot of uncertainty about it. So I decided to do a test by offering a 1-hour consultation on eBay and inviting people to bid on it.

The auction reached $1000 before eBay pulled the plug and killed it. Apparently eBay doesn’t let you offer intangible items for sale. Generally they do a poor job of enforcing this policy since there were plenty of other intangible items listed, but my auction was probably a bit too high profile to duck under their radar.

Fortunately the auction lasted long enough to convince me that there would likely be some decent demand for coaching, so I began offering that service. I don’t promote it much because I know it’s beyond the price range of most people, but it’s there for those who want it.

So this was an example of how the inspiration came first, and then I did a little research and testing to validate it a bit more before committing to it.

As another example of this, I’m in the process of booking a new 3-day workshop in Las Vegas. This one will be unlike anything I’ve done before. It will have no set topic, no pre-planned content, no pre-arranged exercises, and no written materials or handouts. This will be an experiment in co-creating a transformational experience with the audience. Our challenge will be to go with the flow of inspiration the whole way through — and still to make it an engaging, growth-stimulating experience for those who attend.

So this will be a workshop where we’ll have a lot more flexibility. I’ll be facilitating it, but I won’t wield such tight control over how it turns out as I have at previous workshops. It’s going to be a balancing act to keep us in the sweet spot of creating inspired growth experiences without descending into chaos.

At the January CSW workshop, someone asked me to share a goal or project that I felt would challenge me, and I shared the basic idea for this workshop. Then I quickly dismissed it as impractical. But who’d actually want to go to a workshop like that? I said. It seemed like it would be an interesting experience for me as a speaker, but I couldn’t imagine too many people wanting to sign up for it, especially since I couldn’t realistically tell them what to expect.

But someone replied, “I’d actually go to that.” Then someone else said “Yeah, that sounds like fun.” A quick survey revealed that about 2/3 of the people in the room were interested in attending such a workshop. I was shocked that so many people resonated with the idea. It always sounded like a crazy idea to me. That got me thinking about it more seriously. Could I actually do this?

For additional validation, I talked to some speaker friends about this idea, and a couple of them told me, “Yeah, I did a workshop like that before.” I asked them how it went, and each of them said something like, “Best workshop I ever did. People loved it!” They told me that the spontaneity of it made it work very well. They also pointed out that the people who are willing to attend such a workshop are the kinds of people who will ensure its success; it attracts people who can help co-create a cool experience for everyone.

After a few more conversations about the idea, I finally decided to go for it. It’s a risk because I really don’t know how to sell a workshop with no set topic, where we’ll be going with the flow of whatever inspires us in the moment. Part of me still thinks it’s a crazy idea, but this is another case where I feel the coolness factor of doing something new outweighs the certainty of having semi-predictable sales. For all I know, the idea might turn out to be a homerun. The only way to know is to try.

This is actually another way to conduct market research. Dive in and test your idea in the real world. Then you’ll know. The benefit to this approach is that you might just stumble upon something that works really well. Then you can build around it.

The Courage Advantage

If you’re more courageous than most people, your courage can give you a serious advantage because it cuts down on competition. One reason public speaking pays so well is that so many people are afraid of it, so it’s not as competitive as other fields. So if you’re willing to go where others are afraid to go, most of your would-be competitors will surrender those markets to you.

So to summarize the ideas in this article, idea selection has a lot to do with risk tolerance. The less risk tolerant you are, the more you’ll want to rely on market research and assessing demand to guide your decisions. As your risk tolerance increases, you can afford to take on projects that rely more heavily on going with the flow of inspiration, but even in those cases, you may still choose to validate them with a little market research to give you enough confidence to get moving.

If you’re going to go through the trouble of creating something of value to share with people, I think it’s reasonable to do at least a modest amount of market research to get a general sense of what you can expect income-wise, even if income generation is just one concern among many.

What if you can’t come up with any ideas at all? Try ordering a quad shot latte — that should get a few ideas flowing.

A good article to read to help counter-balance the points in this article would be What Are the Odds of Becoming a Black Belt? This will help you avoid some of the pitfalls of market research, such as getting bogged down in thinking about your odds of success instead of actually placing bets on the choicest opportunities.

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In addition to earning passive income from physical real estate, you can also generate income from virtual real estate.

Virtual real estate is online property, including domain names, websites, and online services. A virtual pub in an online game world is an example of virtual real estate.

If you’ve ever registered a domain name or created a website, then you’ve already owned some virtual real estate.

Ownership is somewhat of a gray area, both with physical and virtual real estate. I use the term loosely here. Ownership depends on how much control you have over the property, so we have a spectrum of possibilities. For instance, if you want to discover who really owns your home, stop paying your property taxes for a while and see what happens.

With virtual real estate, ownership can become especially muddled, but for the purposes of our passive income series, what we’re really concerned with is how much power you have to monetize your property.

Suppose you have a Facebook page. We could say that Facebook owns it more than you do, and you don’t have much control over the layout and functionality. However, you still have some ability to monetize, so you could treat it like your own virtual real estate to some extent. For example, you could recommend a product with your affiliate link, and if any of your friends buys, you earn a little money. Or you could use your Facebook page to drive traffic to your other virtual properties and then monetize that traffic.

Monetizing Virtual Real Estate

There are many ways to monetize virtual real estate, both actively and passively.

One way to make money with virtual real estate is by investing in domain names. If you can buy a domain name at one price and later sell it for more, you’ll profit from the appreciation in value, and appreciation can loosely be considered a form of passive income.

I still own the domain name dexterity.com, which I’ve had since the mid-90s. Single-word .com domain names can be valuable these days because they’re pretty much all taken (unless you invent a new word). So if I wanted to, I might be able to sell that domain for a profit.

You can also buy and sell websites, which is another way to trade in virtual real estate. Buy low, sell high, and you make a profit on the exchange. This isn’t necessarily passive income, but it’s a way to monetize such properties nevertheless.

Other than the value of the domain name, the value of virtual real estate depends largely on what kind of traffic it gets. More traffic is good. Higher quality traffic (meaning people who are willing to spend money) is also good.

One interesting form of virtual real estate is buying virtual property in a virtual game world. I’m not into that sort of thing, but I’ve heard of people making some money by buying and selling game world properties such as characters, game buildings, weapons, etc. Often they earn less than minimum wage though.

Developing Virtual Property

Anyone can buy virtual property since all you have to do is register a domain name, which can be done in minutes. This is a lot simpler than buying physical real estate.

I personally love virtual real estate since it’s easy to get started, you don’t need to tie up much cash, you don’t have to deal with banks and title companies and mountains of fear-based paperwork, it’s easy to maintain, and there are so many ways to monetize it with new ways being dreamed up every year.

I started this website for a total out of pocket cost of $9. My only expense was registering the domain name. I piggybacked the site on a web server I was using for another site, so I didn’t have to pay anything extra for web hosting. After that, everything I spent to improve the website, such as software purchases and hosting upgrades, all came out of the site’s revenue. Try buying physical real estate with only a $9 investment. You can spend more than that on gasoline just driving around to look at properties.

My favorite way to build traffic to a website is with lots of quality free content. This attracts visitors, links, and search rankings that can help maintain and increase the value of the property over time. When my site had no traffic, I posted this free content off site, so people could actually find it. This external content then helped drive traffic to my own site.

Traffic is key. Once you have traffic, you can monetize it in so many different ways. You can sell advertising, use affiliate programs, do joint-venture deals, solicit donations, sell subscriptions to a membership site, and more. Largely this comes down to testing and experimenting. Every site is unique, so what works for one may not work for another.

Jumping on Trends

When it comes to building up virtual real estate, many people really don’t know what they’re doing, just as I wouldn’t know what I was doing if I tried to invest in physical real estate. These people do the equivalent of trying to build a shopping mall in the middle of nowhere and then abandoning it half-finished. Then they complain that you can’t make money from shopping malls.

Perhaps the biggest problem I’ve seen is that people try to build virtual real estate by copying what others have already done to death. You don’t even want to know how many people have started personal development blogs after seeing mine. That strategy isn’t going to work very well these days.

When I first launched this site in 2004, I didn’t know of any other personal development bloggers. It was a relatively new idea. There were personal development experts, but they mainly focused on writing books and speaking. Most of their websites were just bare-bones online business cards, no more than 10 pages total. Many of them didn’t even know what a blog was. I sensed a big opportunity there, so I jumped on it.

Seeing this opportunity in 2004 was like finding cheap, vacant land right at the edge of a rapidly growing metropolitan area. You know that as the city grows, that land is going to become increasingly valuable, so it’s a wise investment.

When I started in 2004, for me and other bloggers like me, it was almost like we could do no wrong. There was far more demand for blogs than bloggers could satisfy. Many other bloggers who started around that time saw their traffic grow like gangbusters. Those golden days are over.

If I was starting out today, I would NOT start a personal development blog. This field is way too crowded in the blogosphere now. It would be a major uphill climb against entrenched competition to stand out, build a following, and get to the top of the search engines. I’m not saying it’s impossible to succeed with a new blog now — it can still be done — but it’s not nearly as accessible as it once was. There are much easier targets.

If I was starting out today and wanted to work in essentially the same field, I’d go where there’s still a lot of empty real estate, and I could get in cheap and build a following. I might get into ebooks since that market is exploding due to all the iPad sales, and it’s nowhere near the saturation point yet.

Other good choices would be apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android Tablets and phones. Another option would be to develop apps for Chrome, which recently became the #1 browser. And since the new Macbook Pro came out this week, you might develop a new app to take advantage of the Retina display as well as some of the new features of OS X Mountain Lion, which launches next month. Some of these markets may seem crowded already, but I think we’re just getting started.

Back in 2004 I was worried that I might be getting into blogging late because there were already 8 million blogs when I started, although most were akin to personal journals. Now there are probably 400-500 million blogs. I think we’ll see the same explosion in ebooks and various app markets over the next few years. You think 650,000 iPhone/iPad apps is a lot? Wait a few years. This is still early.

As Wayne Gretzky would say, skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been. Blogs are yesterday’s news. If you haven’t already ridden that wave to the top by now, you’ve missed the boat. Focus on the newer, more recent opportunities that are just emerging but that aren’t so saturated with competition yet.

When it comes to online real estate, if you snooze, you lose. When you see an opportunity, act on it.

Overcoming Excuses

One of the reasons people hesitate to take action is that they drown themselves in excuses. People who succeed could use all the same excuses though. It’s not the existence of potential excuses that’s the problem. It’s the willingness to succumb to them.

As I noted in a previous article, “I don’t know how” is perhaps the biggest and lamest excuse of all.

If you don’t know how, do it anyway. Once you do it, then you’ll know how. Of course you’re never going to know how the first time. Nobody does.

People often think they’re supposed to succeed with a process like this:

1. Set a goal.
2. Figure out how to accomplish it in a step by step manner.
3. Follow the steps to complete the goal.

When they can’t complete step 2, they get stuck and procrastinate. They also whine a lot, which I hate.

A more realistic approach looks something like this:

1. Set a goal.
2. Figure out one small action that might move you closer to that goal. Worst case, just guess.
3. Take that action from step 2.
4. If you haven’t accomplished the goal yet, repeat from step 2.

Last year I didn’t know how to create a song. I didn’t know what the steps were. I couldn’t use the first method. But I was able to complete a song using the second method. I could guess at the first step, which was to run GarageBand on my Mac for the first time. Once the program was running and I looked at the interface, I had some ideas for what the next action step might be, such as “Create New Project.” Within that same session, I created my first song. It was awful and only 12 seconds long, but it got me started. And within a week or so, I was able to create something that was about 3 minutes long and at least tolerable.

It’s the same thing with building virtual real estate. No one knows how to do it at first, but they do it anyway. You just guess at a step and do it. Then you guess at another step and do it. Keep adapting and acting till you get somewhere interesting.

If you think you need to know all the action steps before you start, you’re just being goofy and paranoid. Even if someone else gives you the action steps that worked for them, they probably won’t work quite the same for you. The inputs will be different. You can try following a recipe, but it will come out a little differently each time.

Don’t psyche yourself out before you begin. With any sort of passive income stream, you’ll learn as you go. To a newbie that may seem like a scary thought. But once you get used to it, you’ll see that the uncertainty is what makes it fun.

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Real estate investing is one of the most common ways that people become wealthy.

You can buy real estate such as houses, apartment buildings, office space, retail space, etc. and rent it out. You can also make money from the appreciation, assuming that real estate prices rise while you own the property.

When renting a property, it’s nice if you can create a positive cashflow, meaning that your monthly rents provide enough to cover your mortgages, upkeep, property taxes, and other expenses and still leave you with some profit. Note that as you pay down the mortgages (which is essentially being done by your tenants), you will gradually own more equity in the property. You can then borrow against this equity to fund more investments, or you can sell it and cash out.

Real estate investment has some tax advantages too. One role of government is to help ensure access to housing for its citizens, and so tax laws encourage real estate development and investing.

While real estate investing can be done in ways that require a lot of cash, with some creativity you can do deals that don’t require tying up a lot of money — and still generate passive income for yourself. In this capacity you can also act as a real estate dealmaker, putting deals together that other people will execute. For instance, you could assemble a proposal for a new shopping center, help get key tenants interested, and then sell the deal to a real estate developer in exchange for a cut of the revenue. This is way beyond my current expertise, but I’ve heard of people making good money doing these kinds of deals.

Many businesses and organizations hold a great deal of wealth in the form of real estate. For example, McDonald’s not only makes money from selling dead cows; they also own many valuable street corners around the world. The Catholic Church is also a major land owner.

As your investments increase in value and your equity increases, you can borrow against your equity to buy more property, thereby increasing your holdings over time. Of course there’s a risk of overextending yourself. Many real estate investors have gone bust when their over-leveraged investments sank in value, and they ended up owing more than their properties were worth while also dealing with tenants who could no longer pay the rent.

I can’t share much about real estate investing since I’ve never been into it. I’ve read several books on the subject out of curiosity, but providing housing and office/retail space to tenants just doesn’t excite me. I think this would be a decent way to generate passive income for someone who is patient, can be disciplined enough to stick to a long-term plan, and who knows a lot about property and is good at assessing what a property is worth.

If this type of investment interests you, please don’t let my personal preferences dissuade you from investigating it fully. Libraries have plenty of books on how to invest profitably in real estate, and I’m sure there are plenty of websites and forums where you can find good advice from experienced investors.

Even though it’s not my cup of tea, I wanted to mention real estate investing as part of the passive income series since it’s a common path that people use to generate passive income and long-term wealth.

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I wanted to share this photo I took because it depicts a nice example of providing passive value.

Coming up with the idea and adding this wall art required a one-time investment of time and energy. But once it’s shared, it can continue to provide value in the form of laughter and amusing conversations for visitors year after year.

Could this be monetized? Indirectly, sure. It could potentially cause more guys to talk about it… or to encourage their friends to use this restroom because of the silly surprise inside. Outside this restroom are several restaurants, and it’s just down the hall from a big casino, which offers plenty of opportunities to spend money.

If you’re curious to know, this restroom is located inside the Las Vegas Hotel (formerly known as the Las Vegas Hilton), next to their conference center. This would be one of the main restrooms used by convention-goers.

A common mistake people make in trying to creating passive income streams is that they focus on monetizing before they have anything to monetize. This is like fishing in a dry riverbed. It’s wasted energy. And people do this ALL THE TIME!

I dare say that most of the passive income failure stories I hear involve people trying to monetize a non-existent value stream. They try to go straight for the money, and their results are predictably weak. They’re doing the business equivalent of begging, and so they generally earn no more than beggars do.

You can’t produce a stream of passive income until you’ve have a stream of passive value, just as you can’t catch fish until you’ve found some water where fish are swimming.

Focus on creating the value stream first. Then when you know you have a healthy stream going, you can work on monetizing it.

If you focus on monetization first and foremost, that’s equivalent to saying, “Where are all the frakkin fish? Maybe some are hiding behind these cacti… or perhaps under that boulder. There must be some fish around here somewhere. Dammit, I paid good money for this fishing rod. Now, fish, listen up! I hereby command thee… come out from your hiding places, and skewer yourselves upon my hook!”

Stupid as this sounds, this is pretty much what people do when they get all gung ho about passive income with nary a concern for passive value.

Once you’ve integrated the mindset of creating passive value, and it feels like second nature to you, then you can think about monetizing earlier because you’ll know where to look for monetization opportunities. But until that becomes a habit, I encourage you to think deliberately about creating passive value streams first, before you give any thought to monetizing them. Get good at finding water first. Then work on your fishing skills.

My challenge to you now is to do something simple that can provide some passive value for others. Remember that even a photograph can do that. Where can you share this little piece of value such that a year from now, people might still be receiving the value you provided? Don’t worry about monetizing it. Just put something out there for free. Make it so.

How do you know if you’re really providing value? Feedback. Your attempt is only a guess. Other people are the ultimate judges of whether or not you provided value to them.

When I saw the men’s restroom mentioned above, I laughed and smiled. I snapped a photo. I shared it. For me this provided some value. If it does that for a lot of other people too, then whoever created this did a good job of creating a passive value stream.

If you do something that you believe will make people laugh, and no one laughs, then you didn’t provide value. You didn’t create the stream. That’s okay. It happens. In your attempts to provide value, you’ll often miss.

There is a skill element to value creation. It takes time to discern what people receive and appreciate as value, and it takes time to adjust your aim. I’m sure I’ve written many articles that few people cared about. But this helped me get better at understanding what people desire and how that matches up with what I can provide.

The more you condition this habit of looking for ways to create and provide passive value to others, the easier it will be for you to enjoy streams of passive income.

I wonder what the women’s restroom looks like…

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In December of 2010, Steve Pavlina released all copyrights to his materials.