I like to think a lot about passive income. That’s the ultimate dream right? To just travel the world, focus on whatever you feel like, and pick up a check each month from your investments or business.

Robert Kiyosaki makes a great point about this in Cash Flow Quadrant (aff), as have many other authors, that just because you’re self-employed it doesn’t mean you are financially free. Many entrepreneurs end up buying themselves a job - sure they don’t have a boss, but they are still putting in 10-12 hours per day. (Typical examples include shop owners, or businesses where you are the primary talent, like consultants, etc).

But, I’m starting to realize that it’s not a clear answer most of the time whether income is passive or not. It typically exists along a spectrum, and I like to find out where it is on the spectrum by asking this question: If you were to disappear to Tahiti, how long would you continue to earn money?

Here are some examples along the spectrum…

• A blue collar job - only paid when you clock in, you don’t get paid for even 1 minute you aren’t there.
• A white collar job - you could sneak in late or take a long lunch (a few hours), but you also get time off for sick leave, and vacation…so a few weeks in some cases
• Mom & Pop shop owner - You’ve got to be there each day to open and to close, so typically no more than a day or two if you can get someone to cover for you.
• Mom & Pop shop owner with management (or kids) - once they get management, they make a lot less money, but could potentially disappear for a few weeks to a month. The problem is that if you leave for much longer than that, the business will start to deteriorate. Theft, dirt & grime, laziness of employees, etc start to creep in. Only what’s measured gets done.
• Self-employed business owner - this is like my tutoring business…it would continue to earn money for a month or so if I disappeared, but income would steadily decline as I wasn’t bringing in new clients, sending paychecks, etc.
• Owning real estate that you manage yourself - Could last six months probably without you doing anything, but it may not be prudent to do so. Tenants would call with repairs, could miss rent, etc. Some upkeep is required.
• Owning real estate with a management company - Could disappear for a year or so and the checks would continue to come in. You may need to be called once in a while for massive repairs, lawsuits, or insurance claims (fairly rare events).
• Passive investor - As a passive investor (think large appartment buildings, shopping centers, hedgefunds, REITS, stocks, LLC’s, LLP’s, etc) you could literally disappear for several years, having never seen the business, and you wouldn’t need to feel guilty. It’s someone else’s job to manage the project day to day.
• Handing all your money to a financial planner - again, several years.

This is part of the reason I’m transitioning more and more into real estate right now (it has other factors like rate of return and tax benefits that I think make it better than stocks or typical financial planner type investments too).

Some of the mentors I’m working with own apartment complexes that they literally haven’t been to in years. They don’t have a key to the place. They wouldn’t even know how to get on the property if they had to. Their phone number isn’t listed on any registry of people to call. And that’s exactly how they want it!

How long could you disappear from you current (or ideal) job, and continue to earn money?

This is the conclusion of my 30 day marketing challenge where I’ll share with you some of the results; both what worked and what didn’t.

All the graphs below show a two months range: the month before the marketing challenge started, and the month of the marketing challenge.

Here are the page views for the last two months. As you can see, thing picked up substantially (and fluctuated) after the marketing challenge was started, with the biggest day being early on with 2,191 views in a day. This was due to lots of people linking to my LifeHack.org article on power napping.

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This is day 30 of my 30 day marketing challenge, to demonstrate that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

By the way, please continue to Digg this article on how to generate good business ideas. It’s starting to get some attention!

My three tasks for the day are…

1. I added the site to Illumirate

2. I added the site to Mavicanet

3. I added the site to http://www.athomedirectory.com/

These are all just other website directories that are less well known than Yahoo or DMOZ. To be honest, it is day 30 and I have been having a hard time finding new marketing ideas!

In retrospect, I think 30 days is enough time to spend getting a bunch of SEO and link building done to the point where I can now focus on just posting good content to this website.

The foundation has been built. Tomorrow I will make a post concluding this experiment and showing some of the results.

This is day 29 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new traffic to this website. It’s been a long journey and it’s almost done demonstrating that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start!

Here are my three tasks for the day…

1. Contributed to “Entrepreneurship Resource” Directories

I started off today by doing a google search for “entrepreneurship resources”. One of the best results I found was this page on Ryan Allis’ Zero Million site. So I submitted a few articles that I’ve written.

By the way Ryan is a master of building website traffic as you can see by his outstanding rankings in Google. He wrote a free eBook on the subject, and while I think his strategy worked for him (basically email website owners and asking for links, on a mass scale), it’s probably not as effective today. Website owners have seen too many link request emails like and consider it spam at this point.

Try typing “[your industry] resources” into Google and see where people are looking for good content.

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This is day 28 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new visitors to this website. I also want to demonstrate that starting a blog can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

My three tasks for the day are…

1. Updated Information On Amazon.com

My book on how to start a home based business finally appeared on Amazon.com today.

The images didn’t show up however, and the formatting of the text could use some work, so I spent some time correcting it. The text hasn’t updated yet, but the new images are there.

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This is day 27 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new readers to this blog, and demonstrate that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

I skipped two days in the challenge because I decided to go a seminar on real estate investing for the weekend. It was all day both days and I was just too tired to do anything else by the time I got home. The seminar was awesome and I’ll be posting some more about it in the future. To be honest, I’ve been having trouble thinking about anything except what I learned over the past few days, and have already started taking action.

Another interesting note: I am now #12 on Google for the keyword “home based business”. Just last week I was #14 (and it fluctuated after that, going as high as #16). First page (top ten) here I come!

Here are my three tasks for the day…

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This is day 26 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new readers to this website and demonstrate that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive to start.

My three tasks for the day were…

1. Added This Website To More RSS Directories

I finished submitting to the pages on this list. There were a lot and it took a long time.

2. I Attended A Business Networking Event For Rice University Alumni

This was a great event to meet people of all ages from my university, Rice. Some had graduated this year, and some had graduated 40 years ago. This was a good chance to use my business cards.

• I followed up with a number of people by email, and included my link in the email.
• I made a contact with one guy who is in the business of helping others start companies. There is a potential for partnering here in a number of contexts.

Take advantage of your universities networking groups!

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It’s day 25 of my 30 day marketing challenge to demonstrate that anyone can start a blog, and it can be a profitable and inexpensive home based business to start.

Today I went to a free marketing class at the University of Houston taught by Dick Myers and Jay Mock. I couldn’t believe how much useful information I got. I’ve been reading a ton about internet marketing, especially lately, so I thought I knew it all. But these guys had some great ideas that I haven’t seen talked about elsewhere.

Jay runs an outdoor lighting and light fixture store that gets a staggering amount of traffic. Dick Myers also has an excellent Internet Marketing Blog that you should check out.

All three ideas for today came from the presentation. I’ll probably go back each week.

1. Translation

Using Google’s Translation service I was able to get my entire website translated into 8 languages! Check out the collection of flags in the sidebar on the right. Here’s how…

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This is day 24 of my 30 day challenge to bring new visitors to this website and demonstrate that blogging can be a inexpensive and profitable business to start.

My three marketing tasks for the day were…

1. Keyword Research

I was checking up on my search engine rankings today and I noticed for the keyword “home based business” I am now #14 in Google. Just two days ago I was #15. I’m moving up! Getting on the first page (top ten) will mean a big traffic increase.

Two important things I discovered were that:

• People don’t search for what you think they search for
• It’s best to target less competitive keywords when first starting out

Just to give you an example, when I was brainstorming what keywords to target for this site, I came up with some like “entrepreneurship” or “start a business”. Well it turns out that apparently very few people search for these terms.

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This is day 23 of my 30 day marketing challenge to demonstrate that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

Today I started reading through Matt Huggins awesome list of 55 essential articles every blogger should read, especially the section on Increasing Traffic & Retaining Readers.

One thing I realized while reading CopyBlogger.com is that they have a great sense of design. Contrast this page for example to some of my previous posts. It’s just so clear and readable, and beautiful. I’m no designer, but one thing I realized is that I need to make subheadings for my 3 points bigger and bolder. So I’ll try that on my post today.

My three marketing tasks for the day were…

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