Exactly How To Create Foolproof Passive Income With Your Blog

The reason why I decided to go from an amateur to a professional blogger is that blogs have the capacity to make passive income.

My main goal for my blog wasn’t just that it supported us but that it allowed us to have a better lifestyle – which, for me, is all about working less (with more flexibility) while earning more. This meant I always focused on ways I could earn passive income.

Even if your goals aren’t lifestyle and you are happy to work all the time, who wouldn’t like money that you can literally make while you are sleeping?!

In this tutorial, I discuss how you can create passive income with your blog as well so you can decide you best path. Then there are handy links so you can accelerate your growth!

1. What passive income is and why it is the BEST type of income you can earn blogging

Passive income refers to income you earn without directly exchanging your time and energy for it. Basically, you earn the money whether you keep working or not.

I think a much better term for this is deferred income. This is because you have to put time and energy upfront into creating passive income streams and this activity is usually unpaid.

However, the pay off is that this initial effort can keep paying day after day, month after month, year after year with little ongoing effort.

This is why passive income is so attractive. Imagine working one day this week where you did an activity that kept paying you for the next couple of years?

I always concentrated on passive income sources as I didn’t want to be a blogger to work harder, I wanted to work smarter.

It has paid off very well. It was great to take four months off when I had my baby and not lose any income.

It’s been great to be able to spend my time writing courses and helping other bloggers via Digital Nomad Wannabe while my other sites paid for my life.

It’s great to be able to travel 3+ months a year while only checking my email and Facebook groups – no other work required.

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It is great to have the choice to work as much or as little as I like.

 

This is completely possible and is what I will discuss in this tutorial with the three main methods you can start doing now.

How to find the time

Before continuing, though, I also want to talk about the fact that it is hard for all of us to find time to work on these passive income streams when we need to make money NOW.

As much as you know it’s smart to build up passive income streams, I know how hard it is to find the time when you have to earn enough money to live.

Until I was able to build up passive income streams to fully support us, I was always balancing tasks that paid right NOW (like sponsored posts, freelancing and the fact hubby needed to work meaning I had to look after the kids)  with tasks I knew would lead to passive income (the ones discussed below).

Try to spend at least one hour a week (or whatever you can spend) on working on these tasks though. Treat it as being as important as directly paid work. After awhile, you’ll be able to take on less immediately paying work and up these hours until, in the end, you can chose to work on whatever you want.

This is what I did. I did what I had to so we could get by and I spent every other second working on passive income growth.

It was soooo good when I could say NO to every freelancing and sponsored post task.

It will feel so good when you can start saying NO to every task you don’t want to do.

So start with that hour or two a week or whatever you can afford and let’s start making passive income!

2. How you can earn passive income with advertising

There are three main ways you can earn passive income from your blog. They are advertising, affiliate marketing and selling your own products.

Putting advertisements on your site via an advertising network, like Google AdSense, Mediavine and Ezoic, is an easy way to earn passive income.

Once you have it set up, they keep bringing in money.

If you use a network like Ezoic, they will also keep working on optimal placement so you have the opportunity to keep earning more while doing nothing. You can find out how to get started with Ezoic in my full review here.

It is the simplest way to earn passive income.

However, it does have it’s drawbacks. Primarily, that returns can be very low.

If you are adding advertisements to a blog which you didn’t build around maximising advertising revenue, it’s unlikely you will get high returns unless you have huge traffic (well over 100,000 page views). This is because the topics you discuss on your blog and the readers you attract will affect how much you can earn from advertising.

It’s also distracting and has the prime aim of taking your readers away from your site so this can hurt other earning options.

However, there are ways to maximise your returns so you can make more money. I talk about this here.

How to get started now

It’s very easy to get started with Ezoic or Google AdSense if you have less than 10,000 sessions/month.

You can sign up straight, create some ads and add them to your blog and test what happens.

Learn tips on how to maximise this revene here.

3. How you can earn passive income with affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is my favourite way to earn passive income.

This is because it is quite easy to do in conjunction with SEO if you follow a solid strategy.

Affiliate marketing success is all about attracting readers to your site with the right intent, specifically people who want to buy items through your links. You can read more about reader intent here and how important it is.

This is straightforward to do using SEO as you can guess what actions people want to take based on what keywords they search for. For example, if someone is searching for best juicer, then they are looking for advice on which juicer they should buy.

You can give them this information and then a handy link so they can go and buy it 🙂

This means you can use SEO to keep getting readers to your site (which is a passive form of traffic) and then convert them with affiliate links.

This is very powerful and very simple at the same time. I find it works particularly well for product buying guides. For example, “The Ultimate Guide To Finding The Best Juicer”.

How to get started now

1. Look for buying keywords that you can rank for. These are keywords that contain a product and words like best, top, reviews, cheapest. To work out if you can rank, use my usual strategy for working out the competitiveness of a keyword here.
2. Write a detailed guide to that product that answers every question anyone coming to your site could have about the product. Include as many related keywords as you.
3. Publish and be patient. It’s normal that it can take 6+ months to rank well in Google. You can speed this up and rank better by building links to the article.

Read my guide to affiliate marketing here.

4. How you can earn passive income with products

Another way to earn passive income is by selling your own products.

This can work much like affiliate marketing – you can attract readers to your site using SEO and then sell them your own product rather than someone else’s.

Of course, this only works if your product is one that doesn’t need ongoing support.

For example, I would consider my eBook a form of passive income. My courses are not.

When someone comes to my blog, I encourage them to sign up for various freebies (opt-in offers) in exchange for their email address. If the offer is related to blog monetisation, they are sent a series of emails encouraging them to join my course. Many do.

If you want to see this in action, you can sign up for my free book chapter here 😉

The big advantage this method has over others is that I not only make a profit, but I keep the people on my site. I also get to keep providing them with value, so they are more likely to keep returning.

This is very powerful as it not only makes money for my business but gives me fans who I can keep helping and possibly help again with another paid product in future.

How to get started now

The first step is to create your own product. You can read how to come up with the perfect option here.

I use GumRoad to sell my books which is nice and easy.

You should also work on growing your email list as this is GOLD when it comes to selling your own products. Read how here.

You can then read about setting up your sales funnel here.

Final words

Passive income is not just some dream word marketers use to try to get people to buy their courses. It is a valid (and awesome) way to earn money from your blog.

It can be hard to work on some of the suggestions above with everything else going in on blogging but if you really want to have financial success with your blog and a better lifestyle, I highly recommend you prioritise working on passive income streams.

Pick one of the above and get started. It may be overwhelming to start with, but break it down into manageable tasks and work on it as you can.

Even if it’s just a couple of hours a week.

You can also find more posts on making money from blogging here.