Note: I wrote this post in December of 2022. It was going to be a yearly review but I clearly got distracted.
Wow! Time flies when you are working hard (and not earning any money). Apparently, I only post once or twice a year to this blog. Does anyone read this thing anyways? Probably not but if you are reading this, hello and welcome!
This post is going to be a little different than the other posts I’ve made. I’m going to write a little something from the heart and whatever is on my mind so sorry in advance if I’m rambling. You can skip it if you want.
Last night, I was thinking about what got me interested in earning passive income. The year was 2008. I had spent thousands of dollars going to college to get a degree that was basically worthless. I was working a minimum wage job and I hated it. I didn’t want to live that way for the rest of my life. Late one night, I was searching the internet for work from home jobs when I came across the Smart Passive Income blog. This blog was amazing. It was started by a guy in California named Pat Flynn and he stumbled upon a way to make thousands of dollars a month selling an e-book study guide for a course he needed to pass for work. Reading his income reports were super inspiring. He blogged about mistakes he made, successes he had, tips and tricks to make more money, how he sells his eBook, etc. He posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I couldn’t wait to read his next post. His website motivated me to start my very first website, My Vintage Teddy Bears and eventually Dental Hygienist Programs. Both websites were a flop although the dental site was making a few thousand a month in its hayday.
I visited the Smart Passive Income blog last night and it made me so sad. It is no longer a blog. Pat no longer posts on it. I had to scroll half-way down the homepage to even see a reference to him. The last “Income Report” was in 2019. Those were my favorite posts to read. Random “experts” make the posts now and you have to pay to read most of them. In fact, most of the site is pay-to-read now. This once amazing website that was so full of information is gone. The site looks scammy now and doesn’t give the feeling of being home that the old site had. You can still read the old posts on Way Back Machine and I highly encourage you to do that as the a lot of the information in his posts are still relevant today. I’m sad that we will no longer get new posts though.
Unfortunately, another blog I used to read all the time, Niche Pursuits, is also heading in that direction. While the guy who started the site, Spencer Haws, still makes posts every once in a while, it isn’t very often and it’s usually a podcast. Almost all of the new posts are by “experts” in the field who I’ve never heard of. While it’s still better than Smart Passive Income in that you don’t have to pay to use the site, it still looks kind of scammy now. I still read it and Spencer is currently doing an AI competition that I’m interesting in. I just wish he was doing his own site as part of the competition as well and making blog posts about it.
I don’t post very often on here but I will promise you this: I will be the only person to make posts on this blog even if they are only once a year. I will never hire a writer to act as an “expert” to post articles. I will never SEO the crap out of my articles like Spencer Haws does and I’ll never make my website into a paid membership site like Pat Flynn has. I’m writing this blog for myself and for my readers. I do not want to make money off of this blog. I want to show you how I make money outside of this blog.