For awhile, I was hellbent on generating passive income through online affiliate marketing, websites, ads, online businesses, etc. It seemed easy to create a few satellite websites, apply for a few ad blocks, and voila! I would be building up by passive income stream ten bucks at a time. I mean, based on numerous examples, perseverance does pay off – income-wise, if you stick with it, it WILL replace your day job.

However, I soon realized the hyper-monotonous nature of such an approach. You ponder for days to pick a niche, create a site, add new content weekly … pretty soon you lose interest AND the income. Instead, I focused on picking up new skills and improving old ones: (OLD) php, .NET, T-SQL, and (NEW) AJAX, OLAP.

When I moved across country in August and posted a crappy thrown-together resume on Dice.com with keywords Excel, SQL, and data mining, I did not have high hopes. However, when a big-office recruiter called four hours later with a nice offer, all of a sudden I put things into perspective.

A good DA (data analyst) in this town (Austin, TX) can make $50-70k, depending on the size of the firm, experience, and, most importantly, negotiation skills. If you make $60k, that’s about $48k takehome, which is $4k a month and $1,000 a week. To generate that kind of income by blogging or affiliate marketing, you must be working a lot of blogging / AM hours. The most I could ever swing was $250-300 per month even though I was busting my ass for months.

The bottom line for me – invest in myself. Whether it’s books, classes, or correspondence courses, I noticed that a combination of technical skills and leadership skills can yield amazing results.