Those sites purporting to tell other people have to make money, that's how they make money.

If generating substantial passive income was trivial everyone would do it.

Generally, it boils down to you need money to generate a fraction of that money in passive income. And there's a number of ways to go about that, but I feel like your issue is you have no money to begin with.

Generally rags to riches stories involve some sort of dubious if not outright illegal activities. Kevin Smith, for instance, lied on CC applications and used the borrowed money to make his first movie. It worked out, but if it hadn't his career might have been behind bars for CC fraud.

The Kennedy's, bootleggers. US politicians, insider trading and corruption.

You have to raise your start up capital somehow.