"Passive income" sounds very promising, doesn't it? Do nothing, get paid.

It's essentially what we would all love to have: Some source of income that doesn't require our attention, presence or time. An important question we need to ask is, however:

How passive is passive income really?

From everything I have learnt and all the experience I have made with online marketing, I can say that "passive income" is actually a misleading term.

How can you generate passive income? Give it a quick search online and you'll mainly come across the following suggestions: Sell other people's products as an affiliate, create a product (e-book, book, software, iPhone app...), make money from advertising on your website/blog, create a membership site.

What do all of these suggestions have in common? That's right: They involve a lot of work. Surely, writing a book or creating a blog that gets enough visitors to make more than a couple of bucks a month in ad-revenue isn't anyone's idea of being passive.

So why are these methods recommended for generating passive income? Because the idea is that you can create it once and then keep earning from it for a long time without putting in additional work.

Now, that might sound reasonable, right? You create a product, let's say an e-book, and once it's published, people can keep buying it for years to come while you can sit back and count the money.

Again, I believe this is very misleading. Once you have completed your product, the work is far from done. You need to promote the product in order to generate sales. That can be as much or even more work than the product creation was in the first place.

And once the promotion is done, you'll either have to update and re-publish the book from time to time, or write a new one. Why? Because everything is changing and it's changing fast. Information products have quite short life-cycles nowadays. Even if the information in your book is timeless (is it really?), trends will shift and people will be looking for a different kind of product a few months or years from now.

The same is true, or should I say even "truer" for software (needs constant updating), membership sites and blogs (need new material to keep people interested) as well as affiliate marketing (largely trend-dependent).

I don't just want to describe a problem or shatter illusions, here. If no income is truly passive, then let's at least try to find some possible income sources that are "as passive as possible".

For example, if you have

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