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, 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).

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.

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