From time to time, I plan to post links here to things I have written on sites that earn me a little bit of dough, a little bit at a time.

One such place is Helium. You write, they pay. Sound good?

Hold up and listen to me for a second.

Look at the title of this entry. Look at the 'passive income' part with great scrutiny.

All these sites that say -WRITE NOW, GET PAID- pay you cents at a time. Not good for those of you looking to pay off that BMW. People flock to these sites -and yes some of them do make inflated claims- and get frustrated that they only make pennies at a time. And I say, oh but honeychild- you oughta know at your age there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. I know they solve crimes on CSI in 30 minutes and SuperNanny quiets a home in one episode but that's TV; and we silly Americans need to pull our heads out of our asses and get over this instant gratification garbage we're all so obsessed with.

Passive income builds. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to build. These sites won't pay you until you reach a payout level of $5, $10, $25 or $100. That can take a while. BUT if you have a number of these sites to visit and you don't go overboard and spend 3 hours obsessively trying to write a single paragraph that's only going to earn you a few cents- it's totally worth it. Because with a few tricks and tweaks and networking, that passive income will build. NO YOU WILL NOT BE A MILLIONAIRE IN 6 MONTHS. Get past that right now. What's nice is once you get going, there is a little extra cash every month. Cash is nice. Cash is good. You get a paypal account and every once in a while, there's a little extra change in there. Which is nice for when you've got all your primary income mapped out for the month. You can take part of it, save, it invest it, etc- and that's how you do smart money. You make a little bit of passive income and you squirrel it away here and there.

So if you can write an email, you can create a passive income for yourself. (And you should be able to write an email if you're keeping a blog! )

It's easy to create passive income by taking a few minutes every day to write something useful to share with others. You won't get rich overnight. Anything worth doing takes time.