You might not know us but if you did then you would know that blogging is one of our favorite ways to grow an online business.
Why?
The passivity of it all!
We like how we can get passive traffic from Google using SEO. We like that this traffic can then be turned into passive income by selling digital products.
More importantly, we love that blogging doesn’t require us to always be around the computer once we have the foundation set up for everything. But that’s the important thing to remember. Blogging won’t do much for you until you have a foundation to work from.
For example, look at the first 90 days of this site.
Notice that things didn’t take off in the beginning and that every time things started to go up they then entered a period of flat growth.
That’s blogging but that’s okay as long as things continue to go up in the long term. But the question that you’ve come here to get answered is how you achieve passive income through blogging and more importantly, how much money can you make blogging?
So let’s answer that.
Why Blogging Is Great for Passive Income
No matter what, life always gets in the way. We can have the best-laid plans, but something is always going to happen to disrupt them and that’s why blogging can work so well in building an online passive income business.
But how does it work? Oh, if you still aren’t sure what blogging is then here is the definition of blogging. If you have the gist then let’s carry on.
First, it starts with building out a Topic Cluster. You need to do this to ensure that Google sees you as a topical authority. If you spend all of your time creating one piece of content per topic then you’re wasting your time and you don’t have time to waste.
The first topic cluster we created was around blogging and because of that, the majority of our traffic from Google goes to blog posts around blogging. From there we continued to build out other topic clusters which helped to build our topical authority with Google.
What happens after that is Google begins to send us traffic from people searching on their site. If Google thinks we provide the best answer to something it will rank us at the top.
It’s a different ballgame when you have 1000s of people coming to your site each day.
From there, you have multiple ways to make great income.
Making Passive Income Through Blogging
If there is a way to make money online then it can probably be done with the help of a blog. Let’s cover some of the ways.
Ads
We’re starting with ads not because they are the best way, but it’s the way that many people think of. The great thing about ads is that there is nothing that you have to do.
You get an ad company like Raptive to slap some ads up on your site and then you get paid every single month.
What are the downsides?
- Ads look terrible on a site and can ruin the experience. Although most people are used to seeing ads on a site that doesn’t mean it makes the experience more enjoyable. To put it simply, ads degrade the user experience.
- Big money doesn’t happen until you’ve got a lot of traffic and increasing blog traffic isn’t always an easy task.
We don’t have ads up on most of our sites because they can distract from the main purpose of the site. For example, if someone visits Drooling Sloths to get a website design then we wouldn’t want to put ads up there to distract them.
However, if your blog is simply meant to be used as a resource then ads can be a great way to earn passive income.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another great way to earn passive income through blogging. What is it exactly?
It’s when you place a link on your blog that points to a product or service. When someone buys the product you get a comission.
Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, that’s exactly how it works but the struggle is getting people to your blog and then getting them to click a link.
However, there is a whole industry of bloggers that do nothing but create sites with the sole purpose of making money through affiliate marketing.
If you want to learn more about how you can do well with affiliate marketing and blogging then check out our guide, Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers.
Digital Products
Alright, now we’re talking. This is our thing here at Odd Noodle. We absolutely love digital products.
Why do we love digital products?
- No inventory
- Easy to create
- Keep most of the money
- Infinitely scalable
- Set our own price
- People love them
But how do we sell them passively? Don’t you need to do a ton of wild things to sell digital products and the answers is no. Yes, you can set up funnels and do some crazy things but it’s not needed.
It’s just one tactic.
So how can you sell them with blogging? It’s best that we use an example.
Let’s say someone heads to Google and searches for how to create a successful blog. They land on the blog post here and they learn about the general strategy to building a successful blog.
They love the information and now they want more. They are ready to create a successful blog so we show them our book on blogging.
Most people won’t buy it because they aren’t ready for it, but there will be some. If 100 people come across the book each day and 3 people buy it, then that’s close to $100 a day.
So let’s look at the passive aspects of this by first looking at what we needed to create.
- A book
- A blog post
That’s it. Does work have to be done to get rank well on Google? Yes, but those are technically the only things that we needed to create.
We can improve this further by introducing email to the mix and getting people to sign up for our mailing list and then with each email they see one of our offers.
Once these things are created, none of it requires that we live on our computers. We can disappear for weeks on end and sales will still happen.
This is the passive income that people are talking about but it’s also why we prefer to call it absent income because there was a lot of work to get there, but once we are there we don’t need to be around.
You Need Traffic
The key to all of this is traffic. The more traffic you get, the more money you will make.
But looking at the different revenue streams you can see how traffic affects them differently.
There is a good chance that we can make more money with digital products than we can affiliate marketing or ads if we are under 10,000 pageviews. This is because with digital products we can focus on bringing in the right people and when they buy, we get to keep all of the money.
We used to run a health blog that was doing 500,000 pageviews a month which brought in roughly $15,000 from ads. But it was also doing over $50,000 a month from digital products.
These are the numbers from a site that was doing less than 100,000 pageviews a month. But the people that were coming to the site were the right people so it took off.
But how do you get traffic to make passive income viable with blogging?
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the main way to get traffic to your blog. When you can rank well in the search engines then you know you’re bringing the right people to you because peopel aren’t casually scrolling Google.
They are searching for specific things and when they land on your blog the hope is that you can provide them with what they are looking for.
However, Search Engine Optimization takes time to kick in and this is why so many people tend to avoid it. They think they don’t have the time to invest in it but the time is going to pass anyways.
So why not create some blog posts and then wait to see what happens with Google?
If you want to learn more about how to use SEO to increase the traffic to your blog then check out our guide to on-page SEO.
Yes, we are talking about that place where people pin pretty pictures of things. It’s also the place where people go to search for information just like they do on Google.
Similar to SEO, it can take a while for things to pick up on Pinterest, but once they do you’ll be amazed at how much traffic you can get.
If you’re interested in using Pinterest to generate more traffic to you blog then check out our Pinterest Workflow.
Social Media
This one is a bit trickier because not all social media platforms like for you to post links to external sites.
But what can work really well is to include your blog in your bio link which drives people to your site. This helps with SEO because the search engines see it as branded traffic.
If your site is good enough for people to visit without going through a Search Engine then it must be good enough for the Search Engine to recommend to people.
Get Started Today
Earning passive income through blogging is one of those things where the best time to start was 10 years ago and the second best time is right now.
If you sit around thinking about whether or not you should blog then you’re going to miss out on a lot because as we’ve said, it can take some time for things to build up.
