Make Passive Income From Your Blog

Passive Income from Blogging

Passive income is income that keeps coming in with no further effort required. Making passive income from a blog is very desirable. I remember a specific moment when I realized that I had achieved passive income from my blogs. I was sitting in a coffee shop one evening, drinking a cup of decaf, and smiling. I was smiling because I knew at that moment I was making money without doing any work. In fact, I now make passive income 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from my blogs. This is a feeling worth experiencing.

Make passive income from blogging
Image Source: Dr. Penny Pincher

Passive income is quite different than the income that most people ordinarily think of. Most people are used to an income model where you work and are compensated for your time. This model applies whether you are paid hourly or paid a salary- you are being paid for your time working. Ultimately, you can make only a limited amount of income because your time is limited. You are selling your time, and you have only so much time to sell. Passive income is different. You produce something of value that you own- in this case a blog. You can stop working on the blog at any time, but it keeps generating income without any further effort required- this is the "passive" part of passive income. Unlike time, you are not limited in terms of how much value you can produce.

The passive income concept is similar to income that an author gets from writing a book. After the book is published, the author does not need to work any more, but the royalties keep coming in as the book is sold. If an author publishes additional books, the royalties from the 1st book keep coming in.

Multiple streams of income is another important concept for earning passive income. You typically only have one or two jobs that you work. However in passive income, you can have many streams of income simultaneously. You want to establish a stream of passive income, and then move on and establish more streams of passive income. Let your earlier projects continue earning income as you build more value and more passive income.

How to get Traffic to your Blog to Support Passive Income

The key to making passive income from your blog is getting a lot of traffic to your blog. The key to getting traffic to your blog is writing high quality content that people are searching for. If you want to make passive income from your blog, you will need to write about topics that remain popular all the time- these are known as "evergreen" topics. For example, if you write about a presidential election or other current event, interest in this topic will soon pass and you will get very limited traffic. If you choose topics of enduring interest, you can publish blog posts that people will visit for years and years. Coffee is one of my favorite examples of a topic that will be popular for a long time.

Search engine traffic is the key to making passive income on your blog. It is possible to generate traffic to your blog from social networking activity- however this takes continuous work on your part. Search engine traffic provides traffic even if you stop promoting your site. This allows you to apply effort to creating more content rather than promoting your old content, allowing you to develop more passive income streams.

How to Make Passive Income from your Blog

Once you are getting a lot of traffic to your blog, you can use advertising to generate revenue from every visitor to your site. AdSense and Chitika are my favorite advertising sources for my blogs. This advertising on a blog supports a passive income model very well. AdSense and Chitika automatically assign the advertising space on your blog to the highest paying advertisers- no work on your part is required. The ads may change over time, but you don't need to change your blog or do any work to recruit advertisers- the ads are updated automatically and the money appears in your account every month.

Another source of passive income from blogs is affiliate marketing. You can place links in your blog posts to relevant products for sale from sites such as amazon and eBay. If someone follows a link to an affiliate site and purchases a product, you get an advertising fee from each sale. In order to make money from affiliate marketing from your blog, you will need to get approved for each affiliate marketing program you want to participate in. Once you place the links, the only work required is to occasionally check to make sure the products you linked are still available. You can place affiliate links that show search results that are guaranteed to have products that are current. However, I often like to link to specific products. I think this is worth the effort so I can show the specific products I prefer in my blog posts.

Passive Income from Blogging Starts with Great Content

The foundation of making passive income from blogging is great content. You need blog posts on topics that will remain popular in web searches over time. You need blog posts that will rank high in search engine results- your goal should be to have as many of your blog posts rank on the 1st page of search engine results pages as possible. This can be accomplished using keyword research to understand what people are searching for- you can write blog posts on the best topics and use the best keywords.

As you develop your blog, try to identify evergreen topics for some of your posts. Use keyword research for at least some of your blog posts to start developing a lasting stream of traffic from search engines that will set you up to make passive income from your blog. You can drink decaf and smile thinking about making money just sitting there while you are not working!

Pro Blogging Journal

Tuesday, July 30, 2013