Passive Income, or How To Make Money Without Trying
For the uninitiated, passive income is defined as an income stream where money is received on a regular basis without continuing effort. It can start out as hard work and then end up requiring absolutely no work at all. As I bounce from website to website, and blog to blog, I see opportunities for people to make passive income being ignored. If they aren't ignoring it, they're doing a good job of hiding it.
Brian Lee of Genius Types asked the question, "Is Blogging Income Passive Income?", just a week or so ago. In his analysis, there is no such thing as 100 percent passive income. His early blogging days started with modeling the techniques of Steve Pavlina and then he later became jaded when he perceived that blogging couldn't produce 100 percent passive income. I won't argue with his points, because blogging in itself isn't passive. There are ways, however, to make blogging income as passive as possible. Affiliate sales and CPC (cost per click) advertising are a couple of techniques that work really well if they're handled the right way.
I'm going to focus on CPC advertising, because I see it as the best passive income stream available to most bloggers. I've read time and time again, from many blog sources, about how little people are making from CPC advertising (especially Google AdSense) and I don't quite understand why they complain about an income stream which practically requires very little, if any, work at all. It certainly doesn't require any investment other than the time to set it up and see what the most effective ad placements are.
Set It and Forget It
I don't know if you've come across them before, but there are a lot of static websites that haven't been updated in YEARS that are drawing passive income for their owners. This is probably the best kind of website to set up for that purpose, as long as you can make it content-rich as soon as you set it up. For the rest of us, well, we have to do things a little differently.
Victor, the Blogger Unleashed, dedicates his entire blog for things like this. If you can ignore the sometimes colorful language he uses, there's a lot of good information there about "set it and forget it" techniques you can put to use immediately.
Advertising to Search Engine Visitors Only
This is one area that many people may disagree on. From my personal experience, however, I can tell you that my regular readers NEVER click on ads, unless they think they're doing me a favor. Why not focus your aim on the target that actually does click on your ads, your search engine visitors?
Stephen Cronin of More Than Scratch the Surface recently completed a Shylock AdSense plugin hack to avoid smart pricing, a hack that's designed to target only search engine visitors. He ripped the relevant code from "Who Sees Ads?", another plugin from planetOzh (the one that I'm currently using). I'll probably start using the Shylock AdSense Plugin on other blogs because of its simplicity. I used it on this blog at one time.
One WordPress Theme is NOT as Good as Another
Courtney Tuttle, of Court's Internet Marketing School, has been diligently working to make a lot of SEO (search engine optimized) themes available to all of us. His "SEO WordPress Themes" area currently has 90 themes available for download. Court has gone through each and every one of them and corrected the things that needed to be corrected.
Most of the themes are available at other places, including their original locations, but why not get them from Court instead? When it comes to SEO, he knows what he's talking about. The themes he provides are perfect for use with CPC advertising.
Don't Limit Yourself to Blogs
You don't have to use a blog, or any particular kind of website, to make passive income. Your imagination is all you really need, even though certain software platforms make it a lot easier for you to get it all set up.
I made a mistake and did away with a website, sitting on a subdomain, that required very little work to maintain (once a week at the most) and it was making me passive income that I ignored. I need to have my head examined for tumors or something. Anyway, I designed it and put it into place in just a few hours and put a grand total of maybe 12 hours of work into the content over the course of several months. I used no software platform at all, just XHTML and PHP (for including the header, sidebars and footer).
I'm not saying everyone can create a website without using a software platform of some kind, but it's an idea that shouldn't be overlooked.
And Finally…
The only reason I bothered to write this was to give my regular readers, as well as my not-so-regular readers, something to think about. If you have a personal blog (like mine), you can still make passive income if you take the time to do it the right way and use the right tools. You'd be surprised at how many search engine visitors will click on your ads if you take the time to focus on one topic at a time.
(Image Source: Five Ways to Create Passive Income With Little or No Money at Genius Types)
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Do you think putting CPC advertising on my book reviews site (harishankar.org) is a good idea?
It's not a blog, but the content is usually focussed and most of the visitors on that site are (I guess) search engine visitors looking for reviews.
hari's last blog post..Charlie Chaplin
It can't hurt. Since you're looking for search engine visitors, it won't hurt at all.
It' was a pleasure reading your blog! Thanks for sharing you should come visit me sometimes and drop your blog
I normally just stick to CPC ads
Google for the win!
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I just did. Interesting. Another digg-like service for bloggers. I'll need to go back and check it out some more when I have more time.
This is a pretty good overview, RT. I had never considered ads for search traffic only.
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I knew that, Tim. You could say I wrote this to make YOU think, but not really.
This is exactly what I keep in mind with many of my "authority" posts that includes some affiliate link or a book review etc. My search engine traffic has definitely increased, and I've been keeping close watch on the keywords used to get to my blog posts, in order to build on that.
Some of my posts are personal blog type stuff, like my dogs running off in the high winds here, but I'm definitely trying to stay very focused on these things you've mentioned.
When I switched to Wordpress, I didn't even look at any other themes except for Court's. Why anyone would want a theme that isn't SEO friendly, I just don't know.
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Because some people think they know better than other people, even if they don't have any experience. Did that make sense?
Hi RT,
Great post. This lays it all out neatly. I've come to the same conclusions and I'm going to focus on search traffic and CPC advertising. Mostly I will do this off my two main blogs, but I'll show CPC ads to search traffic on those too – and try to focus on one topic at a time.
I'm going to have to try Court's themes sometime – I've hacked mine, but it would be better to have the real deal…
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I keep looking at those themes. I'll be using a few of them as I branch out into different areas.
As far at this theme, though, I've become quite attached to it. It could probably be better, but I hacked the heck out of it and it isn't the same theme I started with at all.
Stephen, if you get this, the comment thing is working again. Let me know.
I have just uploaded the hacked AdSense code and I like it!
I have noticed that most of my clicks come from search traffic but what of SU traffic? Does this plugin also show ads to SU traffic?
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Nope. Not SU, Not Digg, not anything but search engines. If you want to show SU, it would be pretty simple to add it the code. In my observation, however, stumblers don't click anything at all except the toolbar.
I have another site that I would like to use this on but I would also want it to show ads to refferal traffic as it is a stock site and I get a fair amount of traffic from other stock blogs (including the Wall Street Journal online!)
HMTKSteve's last blog post..Lost is back
Well, you can change this line to include anything you want:
$SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
Or remove anything you don't want. If you want to play it safe on a particular site, don't use the hack.
Hey RT, great post. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one reading GeniusTypes.com, I love Brian's stuff. In fact, I wrote a post on Life In the Internet about how Genius Types is Not Just A Great Name. And going one better, I'm doing the bulk candy thing too! So far my first batch of candy is paid for and I'm well on my way to paying off the first machine! Anyway, back on point… one of my best producing sites (% of visitors clicking ads) is one of my set and forget sites. It makes me laugh every time I check AdSense and see how it's out performing some of the others that I'm really putting effort into.
Keep up the good work!
-Thom
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I had to edit your comment to make it appear. I think it invisible due to the way commentluv added its part onto it. The new version seems to have fixed it for newer comments.
Very informative post. I have been thinking a lot about monetiing my blog, thats not the primary reason I blog. But as you say it doesn't hurt to get a few pennies.
Utill now, Adsense doen't work for me at all! Also, I have myself never clicked on a Adense ad on other sites ever so I dn't expect many takers for my ads either.
I would look forward to a rather detailed monetiation ideas for bloggers like me, who are not hardcore probloggers!
Your imagination is the limit. If you hide any type of monetization items from your regular visitors and concentrate on search engine visitors, you'll actually make more than exposing them to everyone.
Hmm, This is interesting, I never thought who is going to click on my cpc ads, but now I know id and would rather concenterate more to do seo than any other thing.. thanks to you..
I would love to see your commennt or review on my blog if possible for you..
http://themmonline.blogspot.com/
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Oops, I didn't see this before. I've added it to my list.
Glad I found you through Shankri-la, this is an interesting concept I've thought about but never heard spelled out. I think of passive income as the holy grail of monetization, but I'm not even managing to make any active income. Even on a new blog like mine, though, I've noticed old posts have started to resurface as popular again, which is probably the same kind of effect that over time builds to momentum and this kind of revenue you're talking about. For my niche, it's probably a lot easier to write timeless posts than say a news blog, where things get buried by the sands of time.
Timeless posts ARE the holy grail of blogging. Once you set them up with CPC advertising, you can practically forget about them (unless a problem comes up).
I don't have too many of my own, I'm afraid, or I'd be blogging from a more expensive home with a lot of amenities I don't have right now.
Wow that was a quick response. You've turned me into a subscriber!
The comment notification of WordPress comes to my gmail account which I pull with Thunderbird every 5 minutes. That's how I'm able to respond so quickly.
It really isn't magic.
I'll believe you, this time…:P
This really is a strategy worth adopting when I start to get comments, very smart! For now, I just subscribe to my own latest comments RSS feed, but that requires a certain amount of refreshing
.
This is obviously one great post. The information are very insightful
and helpful. Thanks for sharing all of these.
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Vince James’ business model that he started out with also changed the way I looked at earning money online. Although I’ ve thought about it before I wasn’ t using it except for one affiliate program I was promoting which paid me recurring income every month from just the initial sale. It also gave me other ideas as far as getting someone to subscribe to membership programs and I recently saw someone using one of the techniques to get signups to their membership site.
I don't look at blogging as passive income at all. In fact I kind of regret having started up a lot of blog sites. If you have a lot of blogs, then you end up… you know, having a lot of blogs to update! Building websites that don't need to be updated all the time seems to me to be the way towards long term residual income. But of course that's easier said than done.
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Passive income is nice.
I believe blogs are semi hands free. It really depends on what your intentions for the blog are. If you're looking to build a big following of readers and have an authority site, then a blog is probably not going to be very hands free.
However, if you're just using a blog as a content site to post articles, etc… then yes it should be a very good passive income earner. You won't have to post to the blog on a set schedule (like many pro bloggers) because your main concern is not building a loyal following of readers.
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I love passive income, its the best kind of income anyone can have.
Great post, did get me thinking. Actually that had been on my mind lately.
However I can't help but wonder how my income would be, if I had posted every day on one of my blogs for the past three months? It does seem to make a very big difference in the search engines when you post regularly.
But I guess it also depends on the nature of what you are doing.
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When I first started my blog, I thought that posts would be easy to write and take less than a few minutes. Was I ever wrong! Blogging is not passive, but a very active income opportunity. I now treat it like any other writing activity that takes time and effort.
Court'ss themes are indeed perfect for use with CPC advertising but also for small niche sites.
You're right Geld Lening! I have some small niche websites and they almost all run on Court's themes. They're great!
Some great points you've got here, particularly the blogging one; up until a few months ago I only owned blogs, I've now expanded 'my empire' (lol) and have moved onto bigger things, and I must say its becoming very profitable
. Thanks for sharing!
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Just happened upon this old post. This is my New Years resolution. I have begun some passive income but I can really gear it up in 2009!
Here is another great way for blog owners to make passive money. http://www.inlinks.com
This is a new service that will pay you for providing in-context links on your blog. Neat.
Yo basically pick-up half of the rental fees each month. Build up more blog posts and add their links.
Google's adsense is my favorite method of earning passive income, but it's hard to get traffic these days unless you SEO your sites.
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To get that passive income, doesn't your site have to have alot of backlinks to be found in the searches or have keywords thats get searched for alot?
Building passive income is extremely difficult. In fact, I would wager that most people give up long before they start to actually make any passive income.
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