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Earning passive income from blogging seems way too good to be true. Making money while you sit back and relax? That sounds like an insanely awesome deal to pretty much anyone!
First of all, what exactly is passive income? Is passive income through blogging even possible? Is it worth the hype or is it just another overblown internet myth?
I’m here to assure you that it’s definitely not an internet myth and is certainly worth the hype.
For the past 5 years, my partner Tom and I have been traveling the world. We’ve lived in 4 different continents and have traveled across multiple countries. Throughout all of this, our blog has been consistently giving us passive income, allowing us to earn while we travel and explore.
Passive income through blogging has totally changed my life and allowed me to have complete freedom (both literally and financially!) But, best of all, compared to my old job as a school teacher, I’m no longer trading my time for money.
If you want a few ideas on how you can earn passive income of your own through blogging, keep reading this article as I am about to share what passive income is, strategies on how to get started, and why blogging is one of the best sources of passive income.
What is Passive Income?
Most people think that passive income is earning money while you sit back, relax, and do nothing. While this is partly true, it’s not the entire story.
Before the rise of the internet, passive income existed in the form of rental income, stock dividends, and other similar strategies where you’re earning money from an asset you own. These require a large capital investment to get going and afterwards, the owner of the asset could sit back and watch his investment grow as people paid rent or stock prices increased.
These traditional methods of earning passive income gave rise to the idea that you can “make money while you sleep”. But the reality is, even these people had to put some effort in to get the passive income results they were hoping for.
Rental properties need to be maintained, stocks need to be carefully researched… These things require time (and money), making the idea of passive income a little less romantic than the notion of coming home to piles of cash.
With the rise of the internet and online businesses, the allure of passive income has continued to rise as there are now loads of different ways to earn money online without working around the clock.
While there are many different methods of earning a passive income online, we truly believe that blogging is one of the best ways.
But just like the traditional ways of earning passive income, passive income blogging doesn’t just happen on its own. In the blogging sphere, passive income is the money earned on your blog through a system that’s already set up.
This may through affiliate marketing, selling a digital product, advertising, or something else entirely. Once these systems are built up and put in place, bloggers are able to sit back and watch the money roll in.
With this in mind, we define passive income blogging as a stream of money earned from your blog through systems in place that run on their own. This means that your blog is consistently earning even if you aren’t actually working.
Although, you need to remember, just like the other sources of traditional passive income that I mentioned earlier, once you have your systems set up, they also need to be maintained in order to keep seeing results.
Sounds like a dream right?
This is probably even more true if you’re sitting in an office everyday struggling to make ends meet. The ability to earn passive income is what makes blogging so attractive, especially as a side hustle or a way to supplement your main earnings.
And if you do it right, passive income can even be your main source of income (like it has been for us)!
Passive Income Through Blogging
Passive income blogging may seem like a pipe dream, but I’m here to tell you that it’s possible.
After about 2 years of working hard to earn an income from our blog, my partner Tom and I started to see our hard work pay off. Each month, we were beginning to see our revenue increase and the work that we had done compound into actual dollar signs.
But…we found ourselves working harder than we were when we still had 9-5 jobs! We knew we didn’t start our blog just to be chained to our desks with little time to actually enjoy the traveling.
After this realization, we started getting serious about making changes to our blogging strategy. We took courses, learned from experts, and found a system that works for us.
One of our proudest moments was when we took off on a vacation to hike to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. Tom and I spent 3 weeks in the middle of the mountains, completely disconnected from everything.
After the trip ended and we made our way back to civilization, Tom checked on the status of our blog to make sure nothing had crumbled in our absence.
To our complete disbelief, we discovered that our blog had made $12,000 in the time that we were away hiking. $12,000 earned completely passively! Now that was a business model we could really get behind.
We believe in the power of passive income so much that we’ve made it one of the main pillar in our Fast Lane mindset, along with striving for success, staying focused, and doing everything with passion.
Creating a passive income blogging is central to what we do and has led both Tom and me to a life of complete freedom. This is what we hope to help our students achieve, too.
Top 4 Ways You Can Make Passive Income Blogging
There are tons of different ways that you can make a passive income blogging, but here’s a breakdown of the 4 main methods.
1. Transform Your Blog into an Affiliate Machine
The way we developed a stream of passive income from our travel blog, Adventure In You, is by turning it into an Affiliate Machine.
While yes, anyone can make money through affiliate marketing, we believe the true key to passive income blogging is turning your entire blog into an Affiliate Machine that works around the clock to maximize your earnings.
But let’s start with the basics.
Affiliate marketing is an extremely popular method for bloggers to earn money online by promoting services and products by other companies. It involves inserting specific company or brand links into their content and then they earn a commission each time the link is clicked and a sale is made.
Affiliate marketing is seriously one of the greatest ways to make money online because it’s super easy to implement and can be utilized by any kind of blogger.
There are thousands of affiliate programs for bloggers, making it an attractive option for websites in any niche.
This is a pretty good deal for everyone involved as brands and companies get free advertising and referral traffic, readers get quality product and service recommendations, and the affiliate (aka you, the blogger) earns some money.
Our real success came when we took affiliate marketing a step further on Adventure In You and actually turned the process into a system – the Affiliate Machine.
Instead of only inserting affiliate links, we coupled this strategy with strong funnel foundations, SEO improvements, and email marketing. When working in conjunction with one another, these components make up a complete Affiliate Machine.
In the Blogging Fast Lane, we not only teach our students about affiliate marketing but show them how to turn their blogs into Affiliate Machines because we’ve found that together with automated email marketing, bloggers can double their affiliate income.
With this strategy, bloggers can appear in their reader’s inboxes and then drive them back to money-making articles.
This system ended up skyrocketing our affiliate income, turning our blog into a huge passive income stream.
Here’s a quick look at how our blog’s affiliate earnings have grown from January 2019 to January 2020. For us, this is just one income stream as we also earn passive income from selling digital products and display ads!
As I mentioned earlier, passive income blogging is all about having a system set up and in place to help you earn. Based on our experience, we believe this Affiliate Machine system is the best way to earn passive income blogging through affiliate marketing.
This is why the Affiliate Machine system is the crux of what we teach our students in the Blogging Fast Lane to put them on the fast track to success!
You can learn more about this system in our article: How to Grow Your Blog into an Affiliate Machine!
How to Get Started:
If you want to increase your affiliate income (using a sytem that has been tried and tested), check out our free training! We share tons of useful information on how we transformed our blog into an Affiliate Machine allowing us to earn a consistent income despite traveling the world.
2. Create and Sell Digital Products
Besides helping brands and companies sell their products, one way to create passive income blogging is by creating and selling digital products of your own.
This is a really common way popular bloggers earn passive income because they make their digital products, market them, and then put them up for sale.
That said, while it’s great when people start buying them, it does take some time to not only create the product but also put in place a marketing and sales system for it as well.
The best part about digital products is that they can be just about anything. Popular examples are editing presets, eBooks, and online courses, but it can even extend as far as photography, graphics, and digital art… even software!
On Adventure In You, we created a series of Southeast Asia travel guides that could be purchased, delving into our favorite spots, with insider knowledge and local tips.
Since we’ve created this a few years back, it has earned us well over $10,000! Not bad for something we created as a way to help our readers make the most out of their travels.
Any blogger can create a digital product. No matter what niche your blog is in, you can create something surrounding it that will be valuable to your readers.
For example, you could create an online course. Fitness bloggers can make a workout training program, food bloggers can offer cooking classes, graphics bloggers can create a design course… the list goes on and on.
Digital products are highly versatile, making them a prime source of passive income.
Once you see success with digital products, you can even look into creating physical products!
Whether this is developing something of your own or selling physical products through dropshipping, this is another common method of creating a passive income blogging.
Dropshipping is a method where a blogger or online retailer sells a physical product directly from the wholesaler. This means that the person selling the product doesn’t have to keep track of a huge inventory, but rather acts as a middleman between the consumer and supplier.
This is a pretty good deal because it means that you can work from anywhere without being weighed down by physical products and constant shipping commitments.
It may take some time to find a physical product that people actually want to consistently buy, but once you do, you can kick back while the orders come through.
How to Get Started
If you want to create a digital product, first start by identifying a problem that you can help your reader’s solve. Once you have identified the problem, you can then get started by doing product surveys, brainstorming how to deliver the product, and doing competitor research.
Every great product is built around solving a problem or a need for others. In our case, when we created our Ebooks, we wanted to solve the problem of travelers missing out on epic adventures around South East Asia.
3. Create a Membership Site
Another way to earn passive income blogging is to start a membership website. This is the process of offering exclusive content to those who purchase and sign up for a membership.
This option is extremely attractive for bloggers who just want to earn an income from blogging, and just blogging. It doesn’t mean inserting affiliate links or selling products, but rather having people pay to access your content.
Membership sites can work in different ways.
An entire website can be membership-based, but another option that’s generally more attractive to bloggers is having a portion of the website be accessible by members only. This can include premium content and members-only perks that are paid for on a monthly or annual basis.
Basically what this does is allows you to charge readers for premium content on your blog. This means you get to continue writing and publishing content the way you have been, but profiting off a portion of it. Pretty good deal, right?
For example, the popular fitness blog Fitness Blender offers the option to sign up for Fitness Blender Plus, a membership portion of the website that features exclusive content, additional features, and an ad-free experience.
Scott’s Cheap Flights started out as a blog with an email list. Now, it is one of the best membership sites designed to help people find cheap travel airfare deals.
Maybe your membership offer includes longer workouts, premium recipes or advanced craft projects. Maybe it includes pre-planned trips or language resources.
No matter what niche you’re in, you can get creative with membership sites to create passive income from your blog.
Plus, since memberships are typically monthly, you get recurring income from those who have already signed up PLUS new members each month.
How to Get Started
When it comes to starting membership sites, the first thing I would think about is if there is something you can offer to your readers on a monthly basis. Remember, people pay for membership sites if they feel that they can get value.
If you want to test out this model first, you can also test out Patreon which is a site which allows you to create exclusive content for your followers.
4. Have Display Ads on Your Blog
Finally, you can create passive income by displaying and running advertisements on your blog.
Companies are always looking to buy ad space in hopes of capturing potential customers. And guess what? Your blog probably has some of this valuable space that they’re so interested in.
Display ads are the most common form of advertising for bloggers. Typically, a blogger goes through an ad management company (i.e. Google Adsense, Mediavine, Ad Thrive etc) which targets readers with relevant ads on your blog.
What this does is allows the ad company to display dynamic advertisements on your blog in hopes of converting more individuals.
With contextual display advertising, bloggers can be paid for the number of times the ad is clicked (cost per click) or even how many times the ad is seen (aka cost per impression)!
This gives bloggers the potential to earn money even when they’re offline.
Display ads seriously allow you to make a killer income, totally passively once they’re set up on your website. And the best part is your readers don’t even have to click on the ads for you to earn!
If you’re curious about the potential earning power of display ads, in 2019 alone, we earned almost $45,000 from display ads on Adventure In You. And this isn’t even our main source of income!
This passive income method has really changed the game for lots of bloggers who are able to monetize their site with really minimal effort on their part.
Alternatively, you can also sell ad space on their blog and display a specific company’s banner or other ads, in return for a set payment. Payment terms can vary, but it can range from daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, meaning there’s always a form of money coming in as long as the ads are displayed on your blog.
How to Get Started
If one of your goals is to get into a Display Ads Network, make sure you research on what the qualifying limit is. Companies like Google Adsense don’t have a traffic requirement but leaves you with little ways to control the ads on your site.
Ad Networks like Mediavine now require 50,000 pageviews per month while AdThrive requires 100,000. While these pageviews sound crazy- they are very much doable if you apply the right SEO strategies.
While the two above are the lagest networks, other alternatives are:
- Media.net
- Ezoic
- BlogHer
- ProperllerAds
- Monumetric
Passive Income Blogging: 3 Things to Know
Passive income blogging sounds like a total dream come true… and it is! But there are certain things to keep in mind if you hope to reach actual success with it.
You Need a Strategy
Building and maintaining passive income blogging is all about a strategy.
You can’t just go about inserting affiliate links willy nilly or start a membership site and not keep up with it. Rather, you must be strategic about the approach you take and have a plan of attack to get it done.
Otherwise, it will be impossible to create a steady, consistent passive income.
In our Blogging Fast Lane course, we teach our students the exact strategies that have worked for us so that they don’t need to figure it all out on their own.
You Need to Work Hard in the Beginning
Creating a passive income blogging isn’t always about rolling around in money. Actually, it takes a lot of hard work, especially if you want to make enough money to roll around in.
Most of this hard work comes at the beginning when you set up your passive income machine and get the gears in working order. This work is done upfront and often has little immediate payoff as everything needs to be set up and in place in order for you to start generating revenue.
It took a lot of time and effort to build our blog into an Affiliate Machine and we failed a lot. Trial and error became our best friend, and we constantly had our nose to the grindstone for more than a year before we found something that worked for our blog.
But once we did, all the hard work paid off. Let me tell you, passive income is absolutely worth the hard work.
You Need to Be Patient
The last thing to keep in mind while building passive income blogging is that patience is key.
It takes time to get money consistently rolling into your blog. It’s not something that will happen overnight. In fact, it may take months, even years to get off the ground!
But as soon as it does, you’ll experience the Compound Effect.
This is when everything that you’ve worked on begins to snowball into real results. Hard work truly does pay off, you just have to be patient enough to see it happen.
Are you dying to start creating a passive income of your own? Remember, the best way to get passive income blogging rolling is by having a solid strategy and setting up systems to ensure success.
We show our students how to create passive income with their blogs by guiding them through the steps of creating an Affiliate Machine of their own using our tried and true methods… methods that actually work!
Check out one of our student’s who now earns anything from 1800-2600 Euros PER MONTH thanks to her blog!
If you want to learn more about how to get started with this process, be sure to sign up for our free online training where we walk you through this step by step.
Why Blogging is the Best Source of Passive Income Online
While the numbers speak for themselves, here are a few reasons why we think blogging is one of the best sources of passive income online.
As mentioned, unlike other online businesses who rely heavily on large capital investments, inventory, and customer service, blogging is one of those businesses that really provide you with time freedom.
Most of our friends are digital nomads so trust us when we say we’ve seen the headaches that come along with dropshipping, Amazon FBA, and other online businesses.
While blogging takes some time to gain traction, one it does, as long as you have a smart strategy, you will continue to see success.
No More Trading Time For Money
In the “real world,” aka the world of suits, ties, and a strict work schedule, people are constantly trading their time for money.
I would know, I was once there myself!
I used to work as a school teacher and every day I would wake up at the crack of dawn, commute an hour to school, spend the day working in an office, commute an hour home, and then tutor in my downtime.
Because I needed to make ends meet and wanted to still be able to save for traveling, I hustled and worked 12 hour days….for 6 years.
This is a sentiment that most people are familiar with. No matter where you’re working or what your job is, chances are, you trade your time for money too.
With passive income from your blog, you don’t have to trade your time for money.
Yes, it takes a little while to get the systems set up, in place, and rolling, but once they are, the money you make isn’t necessarily dictated by the time you spend working.
When passive income systems are set up properly, you actually won’t have to spend a set amount of hours in order to make money on a consistent basis.
When it comes to your blog, once you have things up and running, passive income will allow you to stop trading your time for money and focus on the things that matter.
Ask yourself…how much is your time worth?
No Limit on Earnings
With most jobs comes a set salary or hourly wage. You always know how much you’re going to earn because you work the same number of hours every week.
Even if you feel like working more, oftentimes overtime laws get in the way and don’t allow you to put in extra hours. And if they do, it’s constrained.
This means complete limits on earnings because the money you make is tied to the work you do. And since there are limits around the amount of work allowed, your income is something that’s pretty much set in stone.
But what about raises?
Sure, you can ask your boss for more money and he can give that to you, but there will still be a cap on how much you can earn. Raise after raise, you’ll find that there’s always a ceiling on how much money you can make working in the system, no matter how hard you grind.
In short, when you work a traditional job, there will always be limits as to how much money winds up in your pocket.
Passive income is a completely different game.
The amount of money you make is not tied to the number of hours of work you put in. And since it’s a system that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, there’s no limit to the amount you can earn through passive income blogging.
As long as you are strategic with the keywords that you are going for, you can earn a substantial amount of money per month- without working 12 hour days!
It’s safe to assume that the top high-income bloggers are raking in a regular 5-figures each month! And most of this earning power can be attributed to their passive income streams.
However, I also do have to point out that like any business, there are no guarantees for how much you earn each month unlike a regular salary. This is part of entrepreneurship. Although with that being said, you can expect a steady stream of income just as long as you take the time to properly maintain your blog.
Ultimate Time Freedom
More than anything, passive income is so outstanding because it grants bloggers ultimate time freedom.
There’s plenty of upfront work to set up the systems and get the process moving, but once it’s in place, you have the ultimate freedom to do what you like with your time, with the reassurance of income no matter what.
For Tom and me, having passive income means less time on our laptops and more time traveling. It means disconnecting without fear of our business collapsing and spending time offline while still being in a comfortable place financially.
Besides less time working overall, we get to plan our days as we please.
We can go to the beach for hours in the morning and do yoga mid-afternoon just because we feel like it. We can cook a feast for lunch because we can or stay up super late because we have the freedom to sleep in the next morning.
Since we’re full-time bloggers earning passive income, we get to spend as much or as little time working as we want, freeing up the rest of our days to be used as we please.
Passive income blogging is so great because you don’t have to be a slave to the system, but rather someone who gets to design a life on their own terms.
Ultimately, focusing on turning our blog into a business that consistently earns us passive income has impacted our life in more ways than we can imagine.
The best part is that we get to share these strategies with others along the way.
For this blog and our Blogging Fast Lane course, our main mission is to help 10,000 people profit from their passions.
We know that by doing this, we are not only helping people design their dream lifestyles but also create a business around something they love which can consistently bring in passive income!
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