You can earn a passive income from blogging in a number of ways. However you do it though you’ll need a lot of visitors to your blog. That can take time and some serious effort. So before you set about building a blog, it’s wise to consider your blog topic.
Choosing a topic only for the money may have the opposite effect. If you can’t sustain the necessary effort required to make a blog profitable, all your work will be for nothing! Many blogs are abandoned because their owners lost interest and didn’t fully realise the huge effort required to build a blog that makes money.
Passive Income From Blogging: Competition
There are currently more than 600 million blogs on the internet out of the 1.9 billion websites (and climbing). To make a passive income from blogging, you will be going up against thousands of others in all kinds of niches/topics. If you can’t imagine blogging for several months or years before you start making money from it, it might not be the right path for you. There’s other ways to make money online of course and much faster ways too. (See PPC vs organic marketing).
But blogging is cheap and it can be effective if you are prepared to roll up your sleeves and do the work; even if it takes longer than you might expect. A blog can compound on itself over time, bringing in free traffic, leads and sales and making money passive ultimately. With paid advertising, when you stop paying for it, the traffic stops too!
Monetising A Blog: Main Strategies
If you don’t have your own business or product to sell, you can monetise a blog with a couple of main strategies: affiliate marketing and advertising space. Affiliate marketing is a popular and simple online business model in which you can promote and sell other people’s products online. You don’t have to personally deal with customers, order or deliver products. You simply refer products via your unique affiliate link which is tracked back to you. This makes it a perfect business model to be used by bloggers.
The alternative to affiliate marketing is through placing ads on your content. Google Adsense is one of the main platforms you can use for this. Just sign up and place some code on your blog. The code will create adverts which are suitable and appropriate to your content. When visitors click on your ads, you earn a percentage of the advertising revenue.
You can also create your own products to sell of course. The simplest product to create is an ebook. Ebooks can also be used as lead magnets to encourage website visitors to sign up to an email list. Email lists can then be used to sell affiliate products.
Passive Income From Blogging: Choosing A Niche
Since there’s so much competition on Google, you should expect to spend several months or even several years to build up a good amount of traffic from a blog. Of course it will depend on many factors:
- Your niche/topic and the relative competition
- How often you post content
- The length and quality of your blog posts
- How well you promote your content
So if you assume that you’ll be creating content for at least several months, it’s well worth considering your blog topic before you start. What do you know about and what’s your passion? Can it be monetised? Ideally choose a topic or area which you have some knowledge or interest in.
When you know about a topic, it’s much easier to create a lot of content on it because it’s a pleasure to write about it. Conversely, choosing a topic you have no interest in just because you think it will make money can be a bad idea. It’s much more difficult sustaining a blogging habit in an area in which you’re unfamiliar. You need to research your content beforehand and it’s less enjoyable to write about. Therefore you’re much more likely to grow tired and quit, probably long before anything happens.
Passive Income From Blogging: Email Marketing
Whichever route you take to monetise your blog, it pays dividends to use an email list. On a blog, many of your visitors will click away after less than a couple of minutes, never to return. Most blog traffic doesn’t return and a huge proportion of visitors will leave in only a few seconds. People’s attention spans are pretty short these days, particularly now they are being bombarded with endless media from all angles.
An email list can help solve this problem because it allows you to capture the email address of your visitors. You can then continue to inform them of your latest blog posts and of course promote affiliate products too. Often people will purchase from an email list long after they have subscribed to it – even years later. This just wouldn’t be possible if you didn’t capture your blog visitors email address.
This is done by offering some kind of legitimate “bribe” such as a free video series or ebook.
Passive Income From Blogging: The Work
If the end goal of blogging is a passive income, you’ll need to attract the attention of the SERPS – the Search Engine Results Pages on Google (and other search engines). Once your content starts getting listed on Google, you should see an uptick in your traffic stats. However, this can take months and initially it can be difficult having faith that this will actually happen. Newer websites don’t get indexed by Google often until they’ve been around for months.
So if you’re throwing up a few articles in expectation of a passive income, sorry to break it to you but this will be very unlikely. More likely is that you will struggle to get any free traffic for a few weeks or months.
To give yourself the best chance you’ll need to create some awesome content which attract the right kind of visitors for your affiliate products. Since so many are doing this, your chances of getting rankings for any of the main keywords in your niche are pretty low.
So you can target long tail keywords which have less SEO competition. This can give you a better chance of ranking, although you’re never guaranteed to rank for any keywords, even if you create an awesome piece of content. So you should also promote your content as much as possible to help grow your readership.
See also how to increase website traffic organically.
The short version to getting traffic to your blog is:
- Create high quality content
- Promote it
- Rinse and repeat (for as long as it takes)!
Passive Income From Blogging: Other Considerations
To earn a passive income from blogging you’ll first need traffic and a lot of it. In a competitive niche this is going to be much more difficult to obtain than in a less competitive one. However, more competitive niches are typically more easily monetised too. Ideally find a niche which suits your interests so you can continue creating content for a good, long time. If you’re monetising with advertising, the less competitive topics are generally going to pay less to advertise in. So again, less competition means it’s easier to get traffic, but it can be more difficult to monetise.
With affiliate marketing, you need to attract the right kind of traffic too. Not all traffic is buyer traffic so it’s useful to understand your customer avatar and create content they are looking for.
With affiliate products you can increase your opportunity for passive income by promoting products and services which offer a recurring income. Recurring income affiliate programs typically offer more value in the form of software, memberships and programs which give the customer ongoing value. They’re great for affiliates because you can earn a passive income from each and every sale. One off sales aren’t so great because you need to make them continually in order to make it profitable.
Summary
Yes passive income is possible with a blog. But it’s not easy! Expect to work hard at blogging for some time before you can make a good income from it. Ideally choose a topic you love writing about so it doesn’t become a chore. If you enjoy writing and sharing your knowledge, it’s so much easier to sustain your blogging habit for the long term and this will mean you’re much more likely to succeed in making a passive income from it.
Monetising a blog can be done with your own products/business, or you can use advertising or affiliate marketing. For more information on affiliate marketing or starting an online business of your own, access a free video series here.