Running an ecommerce website and selling digital services or products through it as a source of income is often seen as a form of ultimate freedom, and moreover — a great way of generating passive income.
In fact, the whole idea of it is big business; there are many individuals and companies out there who promote running a website as a means to creating a source of passive income. Of course, they do this because they themselves make money with the products and services they want to sell to you, which according to them enable you to “quickly and easily” create your own highly successful passive income website.
Hence, the myth of passive income in relation to owning an ecommerce website is quite persistently being forced through the throat, often advertised as “easy money,” “a six figure income in six months,” and “making money while you sleep.” I will further discuss this (and the untruth behind it) in this article, but let’s first look at what exactly “passive income” is.
Now, the official definition is that passive income is a type of “unearned income that is acquired with little to no labor to earn or maintain.” Generally, this applies to income generated through ownership of land or property, inheritance, investments, or pensions and such, which basically comes down to receiving an income through rentals, profit, dividend, or interest.
So, the people who receive passive income don’t really work for it by the sweat of their brows, but mind that others often do that for them, for instance, to maintain their properties or manage their inheritance and investments, and so on. You can also see now that running a website has very little to do with the actual definition of passive income.
But what is thought is that once you’ve created an ecommerce website (which is often presented as “something very simple to achieve”) you can afterwards lean back (and “sleep” as it were), and the money will just stream in while you’re products and services are “automatically” sold through your website without you needing to give it a second thought (or effort).
Now, it’s certainly true that active income can become passive income, that is, earned income can become unearned income, but this is usually only the case after decades of hard work on building your company or other commercial endeavor, or having saved money and invested that in stocks or in building a pension, to give some examples.
It’s likewise true that we from TraditionalBodywork.com “make money while we sleep,” which means that while we sleep we sometimes indeed sell eBooks and Video Workshops through our website. Yet, this has obviously more to do with the different time zones our customers reside in and not so much with us being asleep.
Another statement is perhaps even more true and that’s that “we don’t make money while we work.” Doing research and publishing articles, eBooks and Video Workshops is something that only afterwards (and often long afterwards) maybe brings something. That is, many things we do don’t generate any revenue at all. It’s always a guess, a gamble, luck, or having jumped on the bandwagon while it lasted.
In addition, you need to update your products (such as necessary revisions of books and articles), supply customer service, and perhaps most of all maintain your site as for website security, user interface, search engine optimization, your online shop, and software updates. What’s more, trends and interests change over time and you need to be on top of new developments and possible competitors.
Therefore, I would say that maintaining a website and creating digital services and products is actually quite hard and uncertain work, very much active, and sleeping for us is not something to “make money” with but rather a means to rest and recover after having worked our b*tts off during the day.
