The short answer is yes, absolutely! The longer answer is much more interesting. I won't lie, I haven't been making a go at making money online since Al Gore invented the internet and I'm not some million dollar guru. What I have done is spend an inordinate amount of time researching and finding out about the various methods that people use to build a passive income online. I've started in the last few months, mainly due to the economy, to take this make money online business much more seriously. The internet is the wave of the future, and recession proofing your income really can only be done through diversification. If you have all of your eggs in one basket and get laid off tomorrow, where does your next meal come from? Far too many of us are living from paycheck to paycheck without ever really getting any actual savings going or quite making it completely out of debt. My conclusion: its definitely doable to build your own passive income opportunity online, it will take a lot of work from you up front, but there are ways to start out that have very low costs or no costs associated with them.

If you have ever searched for "make money online" and read the numerous sales pages out there, I can assure you that you have come across many different scams and perhaps a few legitimate offers. In the beginning it is really difficult to tell what is legitimate and far too many MLMs exist online. I'm not a fan of MLM personally and I don't know anyone who has made money with them. Some are legit, some are glorified pyramid schemes that eventually get shut down by the FCC and other agencies because they are scams. If that happens to you, you are left holding nothing after investing potentially thousands into building up a passive income.

The other problem I see with many make money online programs is that they don't really talk about the work involved with building a stable passive income. They make it sound like you just sent them your $197, $97, $77 today, push a button, and somehow *poof* tomorrow you are raking in thousands a day. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Building a true income online involves time (or money if you outsource content writing) and effort on your part to reap the benefits. Often you can learn all you need to get started by reading books at your local library on copywriting and internet marketing.

Building a Passive Income Opportunity

There are two general routes to take that don't involve MLM schemes or having your own physical or service product to market online. These methods are through either affiliate marketing or through earning passive income with Google's Adsense program.

Affiliate marketing involves basically acting as a middle man between people who are searching for a product or service and the business that is offering the product or service. This involves setting up web pages that target what people are actually searching for, affiliating with a company that offers that product or service, and sending traffic to the company through affiliate links on your website. Companies such as Amazon are happy to pay you a commission for sales through your links that they may not have otherwise received. The products and services sold through affiliate links also do not cost the consumer any more than they would have if they had gone directly to the website in question. This sets up a win-win-win situation. The customer finds what they want, the company makes a sale, and you get a commission for getting the consumer to the product doorstep.

Making money with Adsense is very similar except in this case you aren't setting up web pages that are trying to nudge a consumer to a particular product. With Adsense you simply own a website, or work with a website such as Hubpages that pays writers a portion of the Adsense clicks, agree to Google's terms and conditions, and place ads on your site. Creating a successful passive income opportunity with Adsense involves understanding search traffic and keyword research. If you don't, you may develop a wonderful blog that people love to visit and read, but the ads placed aren't worth very much to you or you don't get very many clicks resulting in no real passive income.

The key to both affiliate marketing and Adsense is diversity. If you only have one page for one affiliate offer or one blog or website for adsense you may never make more than a pittance. To truly have a passive income opportunity, you will want many different sites targeting different paying keywords to build multiple income streams. This is what will make your online passive income truly recession proof.

Obviously this article barely scratches the surface of what are two very broad strategies to building a passive income online. You will need to do much more research and work out different techniques that work for you. Often it is easier in the beginning to follow a plan that has been successful for others and this will involve a small investment for you. You can also search out free blogs that offer truthful advise on starting an online business, just be wary of some of the scams out there.