By Jon Rhodes

For years when I worked in employment I instinctively knew that something was not right. I am not by any means a lazy person. I have regularly gone to the gym several times a week for years. I used to spend hours every day practicing the guitar, and I got good grades in my law degree. I even learned to juggle! However I could never quite feel motivated by employment.

I tried several small business ideas, such as being a musician, and being a clinical hypnotherapist. Now I still love music and hypnotherapy, but I no longer rely on them as a means of earning a living. Well scrap part of that – I do earn considerable money from providing hypnotherapy online, but more of that later.

The problem with being a clinical hypnotherapist and a musician is that they still follow the basic rules of employment – you only get paid when you work. (This of course is not the case if you’re successful enough to sell masses of records). That means that the instant you don’t work, you get nothing.

This concept, I realised after several years, is what made me feel subconsciously uneasy with employment. With employment you are not really building anything to secure your future. Sure you can work hard, for someone else’s profits, and receive pay rises and promotions. However these pay rises and promotions are far from guaranteed, and can be used as carrots for your obedience. I hear far too many stories of someone giving decades of their life in good service, only to be left on the scrap heap and leave with virtually nothing. These people have helped a business to thrive, and are left with nothing at the end of it all.

With passive income businesses such as Internet marketing, things are greatly different. You can build your empire of websites, becoming stronger and stronger over time. If you want time off for a month, it should not greatly effect your earnings.

I have deliberately built my online business network around the principals of passive income. With the online hypnotherapy ( which you can see at http://www.HypnoBusters.com), I resisted lots of advice to do ‘live’ sessions over Skype. Although I would probably have earned a lot more cash very quickly, this was not the point – at least not in my eyes.

I didn’t want to be tied down to endless appointments at all hours of the day. What I wanted to do was record a session once, and sell it many times. This had the advantages of only taking my time once, plus I could offer it far cheaper since it is such a time efficient method of therapy. Once I had made the session, my time was then free to do other things. I can make more sessions, start new projects, or even chill out for a while and think of new creative ideas.

With this basic model in mind, I feel I can only ever get stronger online. With never being tied time wise to anything, my time and energy are free to keep creating. Creating new products, new content, and new projects. If I was busy full time doing live hypnotherapy sessions, then I would probably be more or less treading water.

I feel so confident in the strength of my passive business model that I feel I could take a year off and still be earning the same as I am presently. It is even possible that it would continue to grow, although obviously not as quickly, through word of mouth and the redistribution of my articles on article directories. This gives me ultimate freedom of choice with my career and my life.

If I wish, I could take a year out to go traveling. I could even build some sort of offline business without having to compete my time with my websites. The possibilities are greatly enhanced with this type of business model. Very few people in life enjoy having both time and money. Having one or the other is not enough in my book. If you have loads of time but no money, it is difficult (but not impossible) to keep yourself fully occupied. With loads of money but no time, you simply don’t have the opportunity to enjoy your wealth.

Like I said before, I sometimes turn down opportunities that I feel are too time demanding. I want the freedom to keep creating new things as I know that in the long term this is the best strategy. I am not simply chasing the cash at any cost.

So if you think you would like to enjoy both time and money in the future, then Internet marketing is great for this. However not in all cases. If for example you heavily use PPC campaigns to sell products, then you probably can’t just leave it ticking away. The market could change and you could end up losing money.

That is why I prefer to create high traffic, high quality sites with loads of useful resources. You will create a loyal following, that attract more through word of mouth. You build a stable foundation that can serve you for many years to come. Once you have a decent amount of content, you can please yourself if and when you update it. In my experience people really don’t mind if there are no regular updates as long as there is a good amount of quality content already there.

So think about time efficient ways to make money. I believe the key to building wealth is down to speed. We can all earn 1 dollar, but can we do that a million times? We need to find methods to do this in a time efficient way.

I like to sometimes think about the analogy of building a well. You could build a business where you get a bucket and fetch water for people from the local river. You will make money, but there are only so many trips a day you can make. Your earnings are capped. Plus if you are ill, you don’t earn anything. Once you stop working, you stop earning.

If instead you build a well, you might not initially earn anything while you are building it. However once finished, you can earn easy money by charging people to use the facility. You can charge them a lower price than you did for collecting water in a bucket, but you can make far more profit as you can sell a lot more in a day. This creates a win win situation for both you and your customers.

Also you can pay someone to look after the well for you, whilst you build another in a different area. Each well can eventually be making you money with very little effort. You could eventually have an ’empire’ of hundreds of wells, all making you money. If you begin struggling overlooking the running of all these wells, you can also pay someone to do this as well.

Now go out there and build your well!

Jon Rhodes is a successful Internet marketer from the UK. He shares his amazing secrets of success on his blog Affiliate Help