I admit that I get a little irritated when I hear people complaining that making money over the internet is difficult.

Every time I hear that I just think: I can go bid for jobs at Odesk.com, Elance.com and a series of other freelancing websites and have a paid project in a couple of hours, which will be sure payment.

Now, it can be difficult to make thousands of dollars over the internet without doing much work – which is what most people seem to make their only objective.

I stayed alive in this industry through ups and downs because I never considered myself ‘too good’ to take on a paid project as outsourced labor once in a while.

When money got short I’d take on a job writing articles or doing basic websites. There’s all kinds of other freelance work I could have taken on as well, and nowadays with fiverr.com you can make a few bucks doing all kinds of crazy stuff.

Can you actually do well at fiverr.com?

Don’t you see people that have done a gig a couple thousand times?

Let’s see, you get paid $4 for each gig – if there are no addons which you can make as expensive as you want practically.

So, if that person has done a gig 1000 times and received $4 for each one.

They’ve made $4000 online, doing little jobs on fiverr.com.

That’s why I guess I get irritated when people tell me that it’s ‘impossible’ to make money online or ‘they’ve tried everything for X years and have never made more than $200 or so’

If your strategy isn’t working to build passive income, take on a project to get ‘active’ income from the work you do until you can find (or buy) a better solution. At least you’re assured a return for your investment in time.

I think to myself so many times: If this person really has spent hundreds of hours ‘working’ this business and hasn’t made any money, I wonder how much they would have made if they’d applied those hours as a freelancer?

The answer is: Quite a bit.

In my opinion, the best way to get going in this business seriously, full time, is to take on enough freelance jobs that you’re rewarded for your time, then invest that money into your own projects which will bring you passive income.

If you still have a job and can keep your bills paid with your salary, use your free time to do freelance work, save every penny you make with it, then go to Flippa.com and buy a website with an existing passive income. That way you don’t have to do the hard creative work of the entrepreneur, you just show up as an investor and buy them out.

You can usually buy a website for about a year’s worth of income. So let’s say you want a site that makes $100 per month like clockwork – be prepared to spend $1200 for it (even though you can usually get it for half that)

If you want a website that makes $500 per month, have at least $6000 on hard to buy that income.

Would an extra $500 per month that you didn’t have to work for make a difference in your life?

And what if you could make some minor adjustments to the site to improve its return? Either through more traffic or sales, etc?

A money tree that pumps out $500 per month with little to no effort on your part is definitely worth $5000-$6000

Especially considering that so many people spend that kind of money on stuff that gives NO return for investment (like a used car).

And what if the deal was really good but you didn’t have quite enough for it?

For example, say, I close the deal for $5000 for that $500 per month website but I’ve only got $3000 on hand?

Well, if I have a (moderately low interest) credit card with limit available to cover it, I can use it to get the website, then use the income from the website to pay off the credit debt over the next few months – so technically it still cost you nothing since no out-of-pocket expense was needed to cover the difference. It’ll take you longer to get your ROI – but the crazy thing is that it’s still way faster than investing in real estate or the stock market.

Stock market investors consider a 10% annual return to be good.

With your website you can get a 100% annual return, or even 200% or 500%. It’s crazy isn’t it? So it’s totally worth a little risk with credit if you’ve really got a good deal. (Just be responsible – don’t put off paying that off. You want it back in case you find another one!)

So even if you fail at: affiliate marketing, list building, SEO, web traffic, Google Adsense, whatever etc. – It’s still not fair to say it’s hard to make money online. It may be hard to make money online THE WAY YOU’RE TRYING TO but if that’s the case, give it up and do something that actually makes some cash!