Every entrepreneur dreams of printing money in their sleep. A completely passive income stream that requires no manual intervention and lasts forever. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Well, I can tell you from firsthand experience that true passive income does not exist.

Anybody who claims to know a way to make passive income is nothing more than a snake oil salesman. They are unilaterally trying to sell you on an idea. If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, get that idea out of your head right now. Throw it out the window. It’s a complete and total fantasy and a farce.

The truth is, becoming a successful entrepreneur requires a combination of skill, grit, determination, with a touch of luck––having the right idea at the right time.

How I Created Passive Income

Did I just contradict myself? No. I’m going to tell you a story about my own business, Extra Chill, which at its peak earned me a $16,000 paycheck in one month. For that one month, the income was truly passive, and life-changing. But what created that huge payday was far from passive. It was the result of years of dedication and learning that created the opportunity for me.

Extra Chill is a music blog that I started in my dorm room during my freshman year of college, way back in 2011. I discovered the wonders of writing one night and stayed up all night tapping away at my keyboard until I had created a blog.

The year that I made the $16,000 paycheck in one month was 2023. That alone should illustrate how much passive income is a myth, but in case you aren’t convinced yet, I’ll lay it out for you.

As a college freshman, I truly had no idea what I was doing. I knew nothing about SEO, nothing about digital marketing, and nothing about code. I was just a kid with a passion and a dream. But, I kept at it, with countless long nights of experimentation, lots of shoddy content and half-baked code that hardly worked.

What Changed Everything?

Over time, the concept began to take hold. In 2016, I read Neil Young’s autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, where he talked in detail about his renowned guitar, Old Black. This story fascinated me, and I searched the internet for more information, only to find that it didn’t exist online.

So, I wrote an article about the guitar on Extra Chill, out of pure interest, knowing that I was the first person to put this on the internet. That article started to get traffic, and in 2019 even received a backlink from Pitchfork.

The wheels started turning in my head, because all of a sudden I had traffic and a backlink from one of the most respected music blogs in the world. I started to make a couple bucks a month off Google Adsense.

However, it was still a few years before I had the major breakthrough that allowed me to quit my full-time job. Somehow, it didn’t occur to me at the time to scale this music history idea to the moon. But, the seeds had been planted, and in a few years, I would achieve the passive income I dreamed about.

My Lightbulb Moment

During the pandemic, I was laid off from my job in the tourism industry and had several months worth of free time to tinker with my blog. It was during that time that I got into the Grateful Dead, to an obsessive extent. I also wrote a few Top 10 articles about other bands, which started to get traffic.

I started to go down rabbit holes on the internet in search of Grateful Dead knowledge, and wrote some articles about their logos. These articles were just as unique as the Old Black article, but the market for them was absolutely massive, and Extra Chill’s traffic went up and to the right.

This was a holy shit moment for me. I started to understand what needed to be done. I purchased an Ahrefs subscription and learned more about the exact keywords that people were searching for, and began pumping out countless music history and song analysis articles, especially about the Dead.

Traffic skyrocketed, I was approved by Mediavine, and in 2022 I quit my full time job to run Extra Chill instead. At this point I was making about $150 per day off ads, and I thought I had found my secret sauce. I thought I was on my way to becoming rich. I bunkered down in my free time and wrote hundreds of articles.

Soon, I hit the jackpot yet again with Google Discover. I found a formula that would get me 20,000 clicks in a day for Grateful Dead content, and I started seeing $1000 ad revenue days. I could write an article, know it would blow up on Discover, and go do whatever the heck I felt like doing for the rest of the month.

It All Came Crashing Down

Then, in September of 2023, Google changed their algorithm. My formula stopped working. My posts stopped showing up in Discover, and I began a downward spiral towards the site’s current levels of 200 clicks per day, and less than $500 per month in revenue.

This was completely devastating for me. I spent over a year in denial, obsessively checking my rankings, tweaking content, adjusting code, and building new website features in hopes of recovering. Nothing worked, and traffic continued to descend into the abyss.

I desperately wanted to re-experience the high of that $16,000 check hitting my bank account. It felt like the culmination of all my hard work. I had finally touched the thing I had been reaching for since I was 18 years old.

The truth is, there was never any passive income to be had. All of the money came from years of experience, learning, and finally, executing at scale. And even after all that, it only lasted six months.

This is all to explain that passive income is a myth. Even if you do find a way to earn it for a time, the nature of the beast is that it doesn’t last forever. All good things come to an end.

Passive Income Doesn’t Exist

So, if you’re out here hoping to find a passive income stream that will make you rich, and allow you to sip cocktails on the beach until the end of time, just know, at some point, you will have to pivot. There will be years of hard work, you will fall flat on your face, and when you finally succeed, you know it’s time to learn some new skills.

You can’t just ride the gravy train into the sunset. The gravy train has a limit and you are not the one who gets to decide what that limit is, especially on the internet.

The solution is to become a well-rounded beast, not a one-trick pony, and to offer value that can’t be replaced or automated away. I don’t have the answers. I just have my story, my journey, and the scars to prove it.

The Silver Lining

Throughout the downfall of Extra Chill, I felt an existential dread. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. The skills I had spent years teaching myself seemed to become useless overnight. However, during that time, I also taught myself some insanely valuable new skills, and ones that have much more longevity.

The difference is, I now know that none of them will ever bring me passive income. Even if they do, for a short amount of time, I must always be prepared to lose everything and start over.

I had heard Google wanted to see a Community. So, I built a bbPress forum, learning the depths of WordPress and exactly what makes it tick. I developed an understanding of Javascript and PHP code, and through trial and error learned how to code WordPress themes & custom plugins from scratch.

I launched several new websites, including Sarai Chinwag, an experiment with AI. I learned about scaling content through automation, and alternative traffic streams like Pinterest. I built a plugin that allows me to post automatically to social media platforms using their APIs. I automated event imports with the Ticketmaster API.

This experience turned me from a writer who knew how to game keywords, into a multi-faceted creative powerhouse with the skills to build almost anything that my imagination can dream up. And these skills are way more valuable, and resilient, than following a formula like I did before with SEO.

So while I may never reach my passive income goals, I prepared myself to thrive in the rapidly changing digital landscape. I am no longer clinging to the delusion of passive income, but rather have become a digital warrior who can tackle any challenge that comes my way, and that is worth more than all the passive income I’ll never see again.