How To Make Passive Income Blogging
One of the best goals to set for yourself if you intend to start an online business is to have income streams that generate income passively for you.
Passive income means that you do not constantly have to work hard to generate revenue; instead, you work smart and productively. There are many ways to earn passive income. Some are completely passive, while others (like owning an online business) become more passive over time.
One of the simplest but most effective elements you should consider creating as part of your online business is a blog.
Although it is not essential, businesses with blogs generate increased revenues, have more loyal followers and customers, and can create additional passive income.
Where To Begin
Before you start your blog and your online business, you should determine which niche or niches you want them to target. You can take several approaches to this, with the first being to have them in a niche that you know very well and are reasonably passionate about, such as a hobby you follow. This can work and will certainly be easier in the beginning as you will know what subjects to blog about.
The danger is that no matter how passionate you are about the niche if it does not lend itself to an online business, you will struggle to generate any income. For example, you might know all there is to know about competitive duck herding (Yes, that is a genuine hobby) but in all reality, there is hardly going to be an audience to which you could blog, let alone promote products to, and generate an income.
Instead, you want to choose a niche that is proven to have a large and captive audience, and more importantly, a niche which is proven to buy products online. .
Creating Your Blog
By far, the most popular platform for bloggers is WordPress. This content management system, which you install on your website, makes it extremely easy to create, post, and edit your blog content.
Most importantly, using WordPress on your website gives you multiple options with which you can promote your content, encourage others to share it and most importantly build up the loyal following you need to consume your content on regular basis. After choosing a CMS, you will want to find a hosting platform for your blog. Make sure you pick one with great reviews like HostGator or a handful of others.
Once you have your blog set up, do not go in all guns blazing trying to promote offers, or sell something. That is the quickest way to kill your blog before it even gets started. Instead, introduce yourself, say a little a bit about why you are interested in the niche you have chosen, and finish it by asking those who read your posts to leave their comments.
Continue posting every day to start with, as this will help your blog get noticed quicker by the search engines, especially Google. As you proceed, the hope will be that as you add more content it starts to get shared, and when other websites start linking to it, your search engine ranking will continue to improve. As a result, you’ll start getting ever-increasing numbers of visitors to your blog.
Content Automation
Bear in mind that you do not want to just post written content, so video and audio posts should also be used. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of having to create a lot of content is the amount of time it can take. If you want to earn passive income, that cause is hardly helped if you have to spend hours each week creating it.
Regardless of which format your posts take, you should be looking at ways with which you can automate your blog. One of the simplest ways to do this is to employ someone to create and post the content for you. By outsourcing this part of your business, you will free up a lot of time. The cost of doing this can be comparatively low, especially when compared to what you consider an hour of your time to be worth.
There are websites, like Fiverr, where you can employ freelance writers, voice artists, and video makers, who can produce exceptional high-quality content for you, for hourly rates, or one-off fees, that often have to be seen to be believed. With your freelancers doing all this work, you can focus on those parts of your business that generate the income.
Passive Income Streams From Blogging
With your blog well established within your niche and attracting lots of visitors, you should now have the opportunity to use it to support and complement your income-generating activities. You should also have created social media groups and pages, created an email list by placing an opt-in box on your blog, and occasionally post promotional blog posts which review products you are happy to endorse.
These promotional posts will form parts of your affiliate marketing strategy, whereby you earn a commission each time something you recommend is purchased via a link you have in your blog post. You can also promote affiliate products via your social media accounts too. For example, you can make a Facebook post recommending a product or service and do likewise on Twitter.
‘For Sale – One Blog, One Previous, Wealthy Owner’
The ultimate way in which your blog can earn you a passive income of a sort, is to sell it. Depending on the revenue that you generate from all your affiliate promotions, and any of your own products which you use it to promote, there are buyers who will pay a very high multiple of that figure.
It is not unknown for websites with a proven monthly income of just a few thousand dollars to be bought for a six-figure sum. While that would mean that your blog is no longer yours and therefore not earning you a passive income anymore, undoubtedly the $100k+ that you may have pocketed will be more than enough to encourage you to start again … and not forgetting you still have the passive income from your Twitter accounts.