The concept of passive income has been around for ages and has become more popular with the opportunities the internet and ecommerce has started to offer leaving many wondering what is passive income exactly. The most basic definition is where you are earning income without active effort. Now this seems to be a dream, but it is also not exactly true in that any income you earn from passive income has required effort, but it is just not active or in response to the income you bring in. Let me explain.
Blogging is considered a very popular way to earn passive income. Why? Because while you are sleeping at night anyone on the internet who searches could find your blog. As they land on your site, you are seeing the traffic and if that traffic eventually clicks on your affiliate marketing link or advertising link, you earn revenue from that traffic. You did not do anything specifically to earn that income at the time since you were asleep. This is the very definition of passive income.
The thing that many do not understand is that to get that traffic to your website while you were sleeping you did in fact have to put in a lot of work to get there. So, while blogging seems easy to earn passive income, you do have to put in a lot of work to earn it. Let’s talk through what it really takes to earn passive income from blogging.
What is passive income? Let’s explore how passive blogging really is.
- First you need to purchase your domain and select your hosting provider. From there you need to setup your blogging platform such as wordpress and establish your site.
- Once you setup your site and space online, you need to figure out your theme and style, brand and presentation layer of your blog.
- Now in order to be found online you need a lot of content. Not just any content, you need well written, long content that adds value to readers. This would require you to spend a lot of time to write dozens and dozens of posts on your topic and get them published to give yourself a good base of content. From here, you would want to post 1 to 2 times a week to keep your blog active and growing in content.
- Now that you have a site, a brand and starting content you need to get found online. This requires a good understanding of Search engine optimization work. SEO work spans both your content and technical setup of your website. You need to learn what it takes to rank on Google and update your content and website is performing the best way possible to be found.
- In addition to a strong SEO strategy you can attract more traffic to your website by also having a social strategy. This means setting up Facebook, Twitter and other popular social channels for your blog where you can share your content out to drive more awareness and traffic to your site.
- Now comes the hard part of this whole process. Now that you have done this work upfront, you need to be patient and do this day in and day out for about a year to really see any traffic come to your site. It does not happen overnight and to be found online takes a while given the amount of traffic there is already. So you need be consistent in your approach and work on it every day to grow your content, your SEO and ranking to get found.
- Once you start to get ranked and see traffic hitting your site on a normal basis, you should then look to monetize your website. You can monetize in a number of ways like affiliate marketing or advertising banners or links such as Google AdSense. These require approvals but once approved you can add those to your site to start creating the opportunity to convert traffic to income.
- Lastly, while the work is front loaded, you still need to keep your blog growing. This means adding more content, working on your search visibility, and social strategy to keep driving awareness and ensuring you continue to be found.
So, let’s go back to the original question – what is passive income? As you can see, passive income is defined as income acquired automatically without direct or active effort to earn it. With the list above, you can see there is a lot of work that goes into blogging to earn your passive income. Additionally, you are never done where you fully sit back and just collect the income. To be successful in blogging you do need to be active in your investment. The more you put into it, as the saying goes, the more you will get out of it.
Often people try to make passive income seem easy and how someone went from nothing to millions overnight. This is just not true. Anyone who is earning real income via passive income put a lot of work into it over a long period of time and still actively work on it to do well. I do not want to scare anyone away but just want to be clear that passive income is still a lot of work and to earn it you should be prepared to work hard and then you can earn money while you sleep.