The vast majority of my friends are musicians. That won’t come as a surprise to regular readers, particularly those who are aware of my career as a jazz musician. What might come as a surprise, however, is that many of my friends cannot believe that I am currently making a steady stream of income from an album that I am still writing.

You can read about my micropatronage project, including my ongoing plan to release a self funded album once a year, at ashleymorgan.com. In May ashleymorgan.com generated an income of $1,150, bringing my total online income for that month to $9,385. And although that represents less than 10% of my online income I genuinely believe that the principle I’m applying to generate hard cash from an intangible and openly unfinished product is the simplest and most effective way of building sustainable and growing wealth with a blog.

The disconnection principle is the name I have given to the method of making money by separating income from your product or service.

Conventional wisdom dictates that you must sell or use your product or service to make money.

The disconnection principle encourages you to make money because of your product, not with your product.

Let’s go back to my album example.

If you read the introduction you will see that I took some time off from my jazz career for personal reasons. When I returned Upstart Blogger was in, if you’ll excuse the slight pun, full swing.

Since I wanted my jazz career to be self funding I had a choice. I could either attempt to record an album and then sell it or find another way.

Selling music, in its simplest form, is not an easy task. The reasons why the music industry resembles a dodo are many, varied, and not within the scope of this post. Let’s just say that trying to build a business around a concept that has been destroyed by big business, piracy, file sharing and everything in between was never going to be a good idea, even less a successful one.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I would have to find the income to record the album before I was able to sell it. I would need money to pay for the studio, the musicians, the mixing, the mastering, the duplication, and so on and so forth.

I didn’t want and wasn’t prepared to put my hard earned cash into restarting my jazz career when I knew that there was a way to make it absolutely self sustaining from day one.

You can see what I did. I started a blog, offered the album to anyone who supported me for free, told my story, shared my journey, and watched the traffic roll in.

The traffic built steadily and, as sure as night follows day, so did the advertising revenue.

All of the income has been, and continues to be, generated by disconnecting the product from the money.

Of course, given that I’m operating this project in a very narrow niche, and also in one of the most difficult industries for an independent individual to succeed, the level of income is not earth shattering.

But $1,150 for a just a few blog posts each month is still a good deal. It has, after all, helped me get where I want to go, allowing me to run my career as a jazz musician as a 100% self sustaining entity.

I’m pretty sure that every musician I know, and every struggling artist in any discipline, would be equally, if not more, happy with an extra $1,000 every month.

Disconnect your product from the money. Blog your story without fear. Build your traffic by being open with your creation. Monetize your blog with sensible advertising and watch the income take care of itself.