The first is linear income. Although you may or may not have heard of this term, chances are, this is the type of income you currently have. Linear income is money you make by trading your time. Think of any job you have ever had. If you got paid by the hour or even on salary, then it was linear income. This type of income is fixed since you only have so many hours in a day. Even if you are a doctor making $700,000 a year, you are still limited to the amount of patients you can see in a day. With linear income, the downside is that once you stop working, your income will stop as well. The upside is that you can count on producing an income for every hour that you put in.

The second type of income is residual income. Unlike linear income, this type of income isn’t fixed. This means that you aren’t limited to the amount of time that you have. The reason is because you are able to produce the income even if you don’t put in the time. This may seem impossible but think about your savings account. You put money in there and earn interest on it each and every month. Sure, the amount you earn may be insignificant but the fact is that you increased your net worth without putting in any extra time. To give you another example, think of song writers or authors. They produced a piece of work once and are able to reap the benefits over and over again for years and years to come.

With residual income, you can literally retire without even being a millionaire. All you need to do is find out how to produce enough of it to offset your monthly expenses. Someone with a $100k job will need to continuously work in order to produce that amount of income. If they stop working, their income stream will stop as well. And if that happens, they will be in trouble. Even if you had $1 million, it will only last you for so long. If your expenses are $5k for example and you made $5k in residual income each month, you can stop working and live the rest of your life in retirement even if you aren’t making as much as someone who is bringing in $100k a year.

This is the power of residual income. Now that you know what it is, it’s time to find out how to actually build it. There are lots of ways you can do this and one of the most powerful ways is to create an internet business. The reason why is because compared to a traditional business, the start up cost is usually less. On top of that, your “store” will be open 24/7 to people from all around the world instead of just in your local neighborhood like you would with a brick and mortar business. There is a learning curve with an internet business though. You will need to be able to create websites and more importantly, drive traffic to them. Fortunately, there are many great websites that will show you how to succeed with your internet business so take the time to learn from them.

Once you know what to do, you need to put in the work. If financial freedom is at all important to you, then make creating enough residual income to retire on your number one goal. Once you reach that point, life will become a lot more interesting.

Reading the various MMO-blogs

Almost all of us are quilty of this and it is actually quite normal – you want to have an idea of what other people are doing to make that online income a reality. Every now and then you find a nice blog which you start reading, and sometimes you get hooked. I personally don’t read too many blogs but I do spend way too much time sometimes on the few that I read. You might think that you can’t spend too much time on a blog once you have read the post but oh yes, you can…

Commenting on the MMO blogs

Sometimes you really want to be social and you have to make a comment about the post that you just  read. It might be the fact that you appreciate what the author wrote, have more experience about it, have some questions about it or just want to let him/her know that you were by that blog. You want to socialize because the majority of your time is spent building websites and trying to shut everything social out from your life. Once you start to respect another internet marketer, it is normal to try to be friends with him/her because your thoughts are similar. Well, once you have made your comment it is time to waste some more time…

Wait for your comment to be published

Blogs which automatically approve of comments that are not spammy by nature are the worst enemy of people who refresh the page every five minutes just to see if their comment got through Akismet, and is approved by the author. I have definitely done this at some point of my life, and it has to be one of the most time consuming things you can do. At some point you might even think that you are not going start writing that ezine just yet because your comment might be published soon, and after that comes the…

Wait for your comment to be answered

It is approved now.. What next? Is he/she going to answer it? She must have read it because it is published! WHY IS HE/SHE NOT ANSWERING IT?! Well sometimes people just write comments that can not be answered, and sometimes bloggers just can’t be bothered to. If you commented on Griz’s blog you most likely did some digital fellatio and are waiting for him to ‘approve of it’. You are waiting for the nod of the head from the guru which is a clear sign of the fact that he now is your friend and in future you can bother him with any possible thing that comes to your mind. Comments are great and if you ask something that has not been answered in the post then it is excellent. But you if you claim to be a long time reader and are asking something that has been written 10 times in the 5 last posts and asked 20 in the previous comments, then you are most likely not going to be answered every single time.

Also because of the fact that some blogs get an insane amount of comments, it could be possible that the author did not just see yours – but if you think this is the case don’t go back begging for him/her to answer your comment, it’s not cool. I don’t get an insane amount of comments in any of my blogs, and that is why I feel obligated to answer all of them, even if they are those ‘fly-by’ comments “hi! nice post”. Well if they get through Akismet I do.

Waste your time on the forums

Do you really think that you can make money online reading forums? I am definitely guilty as charged on spending too much time on one of the various forums there are. The truth about forums is this. If you are reading forums like Digital Point or Warrior Forums, you are most likely not learning anything that you can use. There are a lot of people just gaming the forums and marketing useless crap to newbies who are trying to earn a passive income, and they are doing it simply because these guys are ready to buy everything you feed to them. If you identify yourself from the previous paragraph, it is a good idea to get out from there and forget about your username – forums are not going to provide you with any sort of income unless you are selling stuff to the readers.

I spend most of my time on Ben’s make money online forum and I concider it being quite a high quality forum, even though there is a lot of the regular crap there. The fact is that if you are a part of a forum and you are not there to ask questions, you are most likely going to give newbie advice to people who are even newer to the business than you are. Congratulations you have found someone who knows less of internet marketing than you do! I do give advice there and I do spend way too much time there, and I can honestly say that sometimes I think that I am a more experienced marketer than the guy asking the question. Well the problem is that I don’t know how much he is making, or how long has he been doing it. I can give advice that are based on something that I have learnt by doing, or something that I have learn by reading, or something that I have learnt by just trying to figure out. There are usually as many advice as there are people giving them, and you are probably going to get a wide view of peoples opinions if you dare to ask a question that is interesting, There is no one method that works, and there are many success stories and you are going to have to do the work to see the money, not change your methods every week.

Doing pointless keyword research

The Keyword Academy method for keyword research is actually quite great – build a large list of keywords before you proceed to work on that list. When you are constantly trying to do some keyword research and come up with new ideas, you are most likely neglecting the ones that you had last week, month or year. Do you have a website which is built, has a few backlinks but is sitting in the third SERP because you have had too many other great ideas to be able to get that one site making you money? I noticed that I have at least three websites that I have sitting in positions 12-15 for their main keyword, and I have not even done too much work on them. These are sites with potential and I am getting zero visitors because of the fact that I am too busy not promoting them.

Staring at the screen

There are moments when we feel like we are burnt out and don’t have anything to write or do. Don’t just stare at your screen and hope that you are going to get an inspiration on what to do next, but instead take a break or try to get that inspiration from somewhere. If you are spending most of your time writing articles then you are most likely not taking breaks. That is great if you can work like a madman, but if you are one of those guys who can’t write a word once they are done with what they had to say it is time to chill out a sec. You are not going to be efficent if you are working for six hours straight, you need a few ten-fifteen minute breaks once in two hours to be able to keep on working efficently.

Perfecting your MMO blog

Don’t get me wrong here – if you have tons of search engine traffic and are making a lot of money it is a great idea to try to hone that adsense placement and that theme to be able to make the most out of it. If you take a look at the most popular blogs there are, you are going to see a simple blog which is clear. This is because the owners are people who are actually making money online, and don’t have the time to do nice graphics for their header, or make their site look nice. They are doing this as their business, and if you would have a business of your own, would you prefere to spend your time telling a friend how you are doing, or would you spend your time trying to improve your business. People get it all wrong, and think that the MMO blogs are the actual business – they are not.

Not working because it might not work

There are times when you are uncertain about yourself. You will think that you are not going to gain anything from writing this article, and that this one blog that you create is not going to make you money. You will never know if something is going to work if you don’t give it a try. The funny thing with making money online is that usually the thing that you least expect to make you any income is likely going to be the one most profiting thing you ever did. If you think that writing about making money online is going to make money online and that building a niche blog around left handed scissors is not, then you are probably wrong.

Not working because it is too late

I see this asked over and over again on different blogs and it is closely related to the previous way to waste time while trying to make money online. You are afraid that your efforst are not worth anything and you think that you already lost that chance with that one blog because you started out the wrong way. WRONG. You can always go back, change the content and interlinking, build the support sites and reap the benefits, unless, you did something stupid and got a ‘permanent’ deindex.

If you don’t think these are the 10 best ways to waste time while trying to make money online then feel free to comment and add your two cents!