Generating substantial passive income is a central goal of a wealth practitioner's mission, often $3000/month or more. This sum can offer a comfortable life for a vast majority of individuals, and is a great stepping stone to a life of considerably greater riches.

If you are looking at a purely cash oriented portfolio, using some wise and safe investment techniques, you can gain a return of about 8% on your portfolio. For an annual income of $36,000 ($3000 X 12), you will need a portfolio of $450,000. This money can be comfortably invested in closed end mutual funds that combine debt, equity and options strategies to generate the 8% average return without loss of capital, and deliver the passive monthly income you seek.

Building a portfolio of $450,000 cash will take time however, and by investing in stocks, bonds and mutual funds, you can get there in due course of time. Without getting discouraged, make sure that at least a portion of your desired passive income is being achieved through a cash portfolio. For example, plan to generate about $1000 per month through a cash portfolio of $150,000. It will take considerably less time to reach this goal, and with a directed effort, you can get there in 3-5 years depending on your income and savings rate. Alternatively, seek to generate a lesser amount through your cash portfolio, say $500/month, and work hard to save the needed $75,000.

To generate the remaining money, you need to develop businesses that throw off cash. One such example is creating a website that attracts a lot of traffic. The best way to achieve this is by choosing a topic of your interest and knowledge and that is relatively underserved and then packing the site with useful, keyword rich content that is updated regularly. Then, monetize the site through affiliateships and Google AdSense (or other advertisements). Working hard at this for a year or more can begin yielding an additional $500/month of passive income for you.

If you have specific expertise in a business, you could create a membership site that specifically helps business owners make money. Such membership sites can be built at a relatively low cost (under $4000), but can generate a lot of cash (strong membership sites generate upward of $40,000/month). However, developing a strong niche is critical for success in this area, along with the work needed to keep the site filled with extremely useful content that is updated regularly.

Another excellent way for building passive income is to develop a product. This could be an information product, giving information on a sought after topic that is underserved, or interviews with experts in a field, or a "how-to" information product. This could be provided in the form of DVD, CDs, tapes or digital downloads from your website. These are fairly easy to produce. If your product is good, then using Google AdWords, you could attract the necessary traffic and make the sales you seek. Success with products tends to be short-lived, so you must plan on producing multiple products over a period of time to keep the income stream alive. Once you establish your niche, your products will sell themselves increasingly easily - and some can make you rich enough that you won't need to sell any more products!

Thus, with a combination of a cash portfolio and multiple micro-businesses, you can develop a passive income stream of $3000 or more per month.