I don't see how mkrecny can consider pay per click affiliate marketing "passive income", it can extremely lucrative as Will Holloway has displayed but it is by no means passive.
Here's how you "passively" earn money with PPC affiliate marketing:
1. Get conencted with advertisers and sorting through offers to promote
2. Set up landing pages
3. (Probably) create your own ad images and/or write your ad and landing page copy
4. Identifying your target market, whether it's keyword based in Google or demographic based in FB
5. Run traffic and then split testing just about everything to increase your conversion rate.
6. Monitor stats to make sure the advertiser isn't capping or shaving you (if you don't monitor this on a very active basis you run the risk of sending traffic down a black hole and all the ad spend the goes along with it)
7. Scope out new markets/offers/traffic sources for when the existing dries up.
8. Repeat some or all of steps 1 through 7 ad nauseum.
It is indeed a grind. How you make it passive is by finding campaigns that require little maintenance once set up.
The passive nature is that you can maintain some campaigns with 30 minutes or so per week, each. This allows you to take a break from the churn (making new campaigns) anytime you like, so long as you understand your falloff.
At one point I had 40+ campaigns running and generating a lot of cash flow. I knew that on average, 1-2 campaigns per week would fall-off (stop being profitable or worth working on due to competition). This let me take a nice vacation with my wife without worrying that much about making new campaigns, because I knew what would probably stop working in the interim and I could catch up.
It is a lot more difficult now because of the number of people competing, so the rate of falloff is much higher in general.
Some campaings can run for years without being monitered. You basically just watch the income stream, if it starts going down you know something is up (someone might have found the same niché/keyword etc.).. It _can_ definitiely be pretty passive.
Here's how you "passively" earn money with PPC affiliate marketing:
1. Get conencted with advertisers and sorting through offers to promote
2. Set up landing pages
3. (Probably) create your own ad images and/or write your ad and landing page copy
4. Identifying your target market, whether it's keyword based in Google or demographic based in FB
5. Run traffic and then split testing just about everything to increase your conversion rate.
6. Monitor stats to make sure the advertiser isn't capping or shaving you (if you don't monitor this on a very active basis you run the risk of sending traffic down a black hole and all the ad spend the goes along with it)
7. Scope out new markets/offers/traffic sources for when the existing dries up.
8. Repeat some or all of steps 1 through 7 ad nauseum.
PPC affiliate marketing is a grind.