Affiliate Marketing and the Incalculable Glory of Passive Income

The secret to getting rich is not to be found in hard work, but rather its complete opposite: passive income, otherwise known as "wake up money." As in, you make money while you sleep, without doing any work whatsoever.

As money guru Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, repeatedly points out (and repeatedly gets rich from pointing out), true wealth is achieved when your passive income exceeds your expenses.

We couldn't agree more.

Mapping Out a Path to Passive Income Prosperity

Of course, the vast majority of people will never see the promised land. Your reading of Ace Affiliates indicates that you are the kind of person who can attain that lofty goal.

If you put in the work.

Putting in work in order to not need to work may seem contradictory, but anyone who's made the jump knows that it's not. Work--hard work, smart work, or both--is what initially creates the opportunity for passive income. Work is what sets the snowball rolling down the hill.

Work aimed at creating passive income is a special kind of work, though. The day when you don't have to work, but still get paid, must be clearly visible in the middle distance.

A Fork in the Road to True Wealth

One brilliant way of pursuing passive income is through real estate investment. You acquire rental property at the right prices, farm out the "tenants, trash, and toilets" work to a property management company, and then you sit back and collect the overage checks.

Another brilliant way of making wake up money is through affiliate marketing.

Which path should you pursue in your quest for passive income? Real estate investment or affiliate marketing? In later articles, we can get more deeply into these matters, but for now let's briefly investigate this question according to one very simple, very pertinent criterion:

Amount of Work Needed to Generate Significant Passive Income: Real Estate vs. Affiliate Marketing

Real estate is all about making deals, so if you are a natural deal-maker, real estate will not seem like much work at all. Simply head out into the streets and start knocking on doors and talking to people. If you have a nose for deals, you will find them.

However, it will certainly take you many years to complete a number of real estate transactions that result in consistent passive income (as opposed to "flipping" properties). It's rare to see a real estate investor build a passive income empire in less than ten years.

Like real estate, success in the field of affiliate marketing takes a lot of work. You must be prepared to get into the technical details and you must be patient as your website traffic grows.

But unlike real estate, affiliate marketing, done right, does not take years of work to generate significant passive income. If done right (and that's a big if), affiliate marketing should begin generating significant, consistent passive income within one year of work.

By this limited but relevant measurement--work needed to get things going strong--affiliate marketing appears to be the new king of the passive income mountain.

But hey, we could be biased.