One of my near-term goals’ is to create $3,000 in passive income. (Since writing this post, I’ve broken that record. Check out this post to see how I made over $3,000 in a month) So far I’m about half way there, with income from various sources like blog advertisement revenue, Canadian Income funds and stock dividends,  and direct oil and gas drilling programs. Serial-blogger, Derek Beau, has already reached this target and his goal is to now make $10,000/month! Unlike me, he’s chosen to generate this income solely from blog ad revenue.

Over the past 2 years, he’s created 23 blogs on various topics ranging from golf balls to pregancy (apparently personal experience or expertise isn’t a deterrent!). He outsources the content creation using sites like Elance, and pays between $3-$5 per post. After waiting for a few months, during which time he lets the traffic build up, he begins to monetize it using various companies like Google, Text Link Ads, Kontera and direct advertizers . He’s making $3,000 every month and his eventual goal is to have 100 blogs pulling in $10k every month.

This isn’t by any means a unique or novel concept. However, I haven’t met anyone who actually have put in the effort to create so many sites and successfully monetize them.

Anand of TheAnand, has taken this automation one step further by suggesting that you can even automate blog posts by having google alerts send emails directly your blog auto-post email address! He even has a disease site on Avian Flu thats a really good example of a topic specific information site. I’m not sure what his traffic or conversion numbers are, but its still quite well implemented. [Updated note August 2009: I tried my hand at autoblogging and nearly got my adsense account shut down. It didn’t work for me. I’ve been able to create $3000/month in online income using other methods so make sure you go through all my posts!]

While creating 20+ blogs takes an awful lot of time and may not be possible for everyone, there are still ways to make passive income online.

This post describes two ways for you to earn passive income from your domains with a minimal amount of effort. If however, you’re interested in running a website that actually makes money passively by selling stuff, be sure you check out this link where you can buy existing online businesses.