Blogging is an active career. You need to keep up with your posts, edit for SEO, design and re-design your blog, generate traffic. All this activity, yet the golden goose is a question that sometimes eludes us: How can we earn passive income blogging?
Ideally, we do the most work in the beginning and once your blog is thriving, it has a few income streams that do not require active monitoring. Old blog posts will still generate traffic, affiliate links you put up months ago still have the potential to get clickthroughs, but you still want to maximize your blog’s potential. Here are a few ways that you can generate passive income blogging:
Paid Memberships
Do you have some premium content on your blog that you can’t find elsewhere on the web? Then you might want to consider making a portion of your site a paid membership. Having a paid membership section is an excellent way to generate passive income blogging.
Problogger is an excellent example of a blog which has a paid membership portion. Member’s can subscribe on a monthly or yearly subscription and pay you for your premium content. Generally, once this is set up, the subscription renewals become a residual income. When the time comes for a subscription to renew, you will earn that extra cash. While you do have to keep up with the premium content, that content should be readily available to you, as you can draw on your particularized knowledge of your specific niche.
There are a few examples of others who make passive income blogging. As luck would have it, Chris Guthrie just posted a great tutorial about how to set up a paid membership site (ultimate guide) on his blog Make Money on The Internet. It’s a definite must read if you are considering going this route.
Affiliate programs that generate residual income.
Perhaps you don’t feel comfortable setting up a membership program on your own site. Or your niche is competitive enough that you feel that people can get the information that they want without subscribing to a premium content section on your site. You can still generate passive income blogging by seeking out affiliate programs that generate residual income. While many affiliate programs are one time purchase, there are a number of them that have a monthly subscription fee that will pay commission each time a referred member renews their subscription or makes a new purchase. The Pingler or the Free E-book affiliate programs would be a examples of programs where you continue to receive commission for subsequent purchases or subscription renewals.
Tiered affiliate programs.
Slightly different from programs that generate residual income, these are programs that allow you to get a portion of affiliate commission from your referred affiliates. While the programs may all be one time purchases, if you have a number of affiliates assisting you in selling the product, you can still earn income without having to make a sale yourself. The very definition of passive income. You may want to explore the Free Traffic System or Socialoomph which are good examples of subscription as well as a tiered affiliate style programs that can help your blog generate passive income.
Promoting old content on your blog.
Many people forget that you can generate passive income blogging with your own blog. When you write a post that generates traffic or clickthroughs to affiliate links, you’ve put in the work to generate passive income for yourself. But that post quickly goes to your archive and the income stream from that one post may trickle down. But you can easily revive that post simply by promoting it. It’s much less work to promote and old post than it took to create the content itself. Plugins such as tweet old posts will tweet out your old content on a schedule. Every once in a while you can go through your blog and stumble or amplify an old post and get some readers coming back to your blog to read those posts. Another great plugin is old post promoter which essentially strips the date and re-publishes your old posts. All of these methods can help you keep your old content alive for ages to come.
Publish an ebook.
Publishing an ebook has many advantages. You can promote yourself and generate traffic back to your blog to generate passive income. You can also sell the ebook itself and generate income from the sales. Of course, you’ll need to have plenty of premium content in your ebook to generate sales. However, this is not as difficult as it seems. Many bloggers will use their old posts as a base and add to that to compile it all into an ebook. You can either give it away as a promotional method to generate traffic or even charge a small fee for the download. The beauty of an ebook is that once it is published it is online virtually forever. You put in the effort to write it once, but it continues to sell for years to come. You can purchase a publishing package with Free e-books for a one time fee of $19.97, less than the price of lunch for two, and they will market the book for you to their customers for years to come.
These are just five methods that you can use to generate passive income with your blog. While you will still need to put in some amount of work, the idea is that these passive income blogging methods will help you free up some of your time and effort to work on your other endeavors.
Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.
Good advice Richard. I know I want a piece of the Passive Income pie. Of course, it takes a lot of work to create one, but once you do it is a work-less cash flow.
I am currently in the process of building up my blog and audience. I am also doing research for an e-book which I will be writing full-time starting in November. I expect to have a steady passive income around mid-January of 2011.
Cool and useful advices, Richard
Some are hard and some are easy but hey money can just fall off from the sky.
I would say that number one would be the hardest. I find it difficult to keep creating great content for your readers to keep, unlike creating an ebook which is a one time feat and with good marketing you could score a lot of money!
You really have to have specialized knowledge to do a paid membership site, but if you are able to accomplish that, then you really have direct control over your residual income.
Nice share, Richard.
The last one is the most hardest one because you have to refine your knowledge and write a helpful guide for people
It takes a lot of time as well but the reward would be awesome. I'm trying to write one my own and I hope to finish it soon. Besides that, you can try direct advertising like Buysellads. It can help you earn, not much, but I expect to break-even the money you pay for web hosting, etc.
Hi Mike. It looks like there's starting to be a consensus that the paid membership is one of the harder methods. That's probably true, especially if you are building a blog from the ground up. If you already have specialized training or knowledge to share, then it may be easier. I'm actually moving away from advertising as a source of income and going more towards affiliate marketing. I think I can actually create posts that give more value to the reader and at the same time support this blog. In a way it's a bit more fulfilling.
Hi Richard
I want to eventually write an ebook in my chosen niche and thanks for the helpful information about how that can distrubuted. Have bookmarked to refer back to once I have it completed.
Coming along slowly as monetizing my blog with products I want to sell is my first priority. Very informative post thanks
Patricia Perth Australia
Hi Patricia,
Thank you for bookmarking my post! I'm glad that you found my post so helpful. Good luck on your e-book!
This is awesome tips..Thank you
Affiliate programs give you nice income, but we have promote a good and correct product.
Nice post.
Thank you Goutham,
Yes, it's very important to be selective with the programs that you chose. If you pick the right programs to back, you will be much more successful.
Hi Richard,
I'm actually looking into the subscription part and I think it's something i wanna do. I just started what you could call an online youth magazine and i want to have a companion print version. I'm yet to start the print version because i'm still gathering ideas on how to go about it: maintaining content and subscriptions and all. so far, its one month of starting the website and maintaining content is starting to burn me.
also, i don't know how realistic it is for the website to generate income in the next 3 months to support the launch of the mini print publication
Hi Jovie,
I can definitely relate to the feeling that sometimes maintaining content can be hard. Probably the best thing to do is get a feel for how spaced out you can time the release of the content. Depending on your niche, you may be able to go a few days in between and give yourself a short break. I found that after the first month, I started to get a feel for my content frequency and it reduced my stress a little as far as releasing content. You might also look into finding guest authors to help you out.
Hi Richard:
Awesome post. Passive income. Here with you I want to confirm something stuck in my mind. Passive income can be made when a person has an out let with primary product and once he/she is bale to find a way to prove to the Internet world that business is doing great, passive income can be started right away.
Am I right. ? Your blog post is informative and it clearly describes all the five different ways to create passive income. Affiliate program itself is a great income producing source.
Well organized post with lots of information that every one wants to have. Five different ways are great, I like the last one.
Fran A
Hi Fran,
Yes, I would say that you can start working towards a passive income right away. When you establish your niche, you can look into specific affiliate programs that give residual income, or you can produce your own product.
I really enjoyed reading this post, I was just wondering do you trade featured articles or blog posts. Thanks for sharing your Blog with others. You really share valuable information,
It's a function of my theme that it does swap out my featured blog posts automatically for me. You can read all my blog posts by going to the blog section in the navigation menu. That lists all my posts in the typical blog fashion, chronologically.
My blog income increases every month promisingly and gives me a hope to continue the same.
Btw, this is a Good article for newbies
Cheers.
_Robin
Fantastic article, Richard. I am a full time blogger too and I am trying many methods to make passive income since I cant do what I am doing 24*7. Hope these passive methods helps me to make some money online even when I am not working. Thanks for sharing an useful article.
Richard,
Some really good methods. An eBook with (hopefully) a strong affiliate program is one I have been building up to for a long time. From my previous (non-blog) online businesses I know that this is a path that definitely can turn a very solid profit long term.
The only one I am hesitant about is paid membership. In my opinion so much out there is free, and maybe it is my self doubt, but while I know that I can put together an eBook that (I think) will be worthy of peoples money I am not sure that having a paid portion would be viable.
My opinion is that is something that works when you have huge and vibrant community, as a LARGE part of the real value of those sites comes out of the interaction of the followers on the forums.
Thanks so much for sharing some information about promoting some old content of certain blog. So thankful to have read over this post; be back for more readings.
i've tried some of the tips and I've actually earned a good amount. I will focus on affiliates this time and I hope it will give me a positive result.
It takes a while to make income from your blog, but it is possible. Can you make a post on how to make more from Affiliate ads?
Absolutely. I'll work on a post that goes into more detail on affiliate marketing.