Are you doing a lot of “money making activities” but not seeing any results? Are you following “expert advice” that seems to work for everyone but you? If so, you’re probably frustrated to the point of giving up. You’ve screamed internally that “it’s impossible to make money on the Internet”, or “Network marketing doesn’t work anymore”.

I think I know what you’re doing wrong. Intimately.

The age old adage is that if it can’t be measured it can’t be improved. The same applies to creating passive income. If you’re not achieving the success you want it’s because you’re not following the tried and true formula for success. Many guru’s have taught this in some fashion, and books have been written that describe the success formula in many different ways. Anthony Robbins even terms this the “ultimate success formula”.

What is it? The formula for success for anything you want in life boils down to doing these five things

  1. Decide what you want to achieve
  2. Create a plan for achieving it
  3. Take action based on that plan
  4. Notice what’s working and do more of that
  5. Notice what’s not working and do less of that

It’s pretty simple really. I’m going to guess that if you’ve really worked hard to create passive income that you breezed through steps 1-3 without a problem. Just by doing that you’re already ahead of most of the rest of the world, but as you’ve probably noticed – that’s not good enough!

A few months ago I was trying everything to succeed. I was taking action, but I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted, so I changed what I was doing. Yet still no results – so I’d change what I was doing again. You guessed it, still to no avail! I felt like I was chasing my tail.

I was doing everything but applying my intelligence to step 4. Notice what’s working and do more of that. I thought I was measuring results – after all, sales are direct results that are easy to measure. And I was doing a great job measuring that: $0…$0…$0… you get the picture.

It was disheartening. I didn’t realize at the time that I wasn’t measuring the right things.

Lets take an example to illustrate. Say you want to setup a website to generate income by selling affiliate products. You setup your website, hook up Clickbank, begin promoting some great affiliate products and… nothing happens.

So you try a writing some articles, or advertising on Google. Nothing. So you try writing a few blogs posts. Still not a single sale.

You’re measuring the wrong thing! Sales is a great thing to measure once you’re making some, but until you make one you have absolutely no idea what is working. You have nothing to say you should switch tactics. For all you know you have a winning strategy that just needs some time to play out.

The trick is to find something more granular to measure, so you can detect progress sooner, and apply steps 4. and 5. intelligently. What are some of the things you could measure earlier on? How about traffic to your website. Or your position in search engines for a particular keyword. Or your page rank. Or the number of inlinks. There are dozens of things you can measure before the sale that can help you make a smart changes and avoid running in circles.

So how do you achieve a greater level of success today?

Define a crisp set of metrics to measure. Make sure that these metrics are valuable both in the short term, and as an indicator of your ultimate success. Use metrics as early as possible to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Most of all, keep learning and improving!