Is Blogging Passive Income?
I’m fairly confident this topic has been covered by other bloggers before, as I vaguely remember seeing a title similar to this. But I never actually read the article, so this is my 100% raw interpretation. And as lame as it sounds my answer to ‘Is Blogging Passive Income’ is…. is that it depends on your blog and style of writing (could I be more on the fence about this issue? 
). I shall elaborate a bit more into how you need to write in order to make your blog passive income. However no matter how you write, the more content you create the more money you will earn. Even if you write the perfect passive income style you will see a drop in income as soon as you stop writing.
Well all blogs will yield some passive income after you stop writing, the blogs that talk about news and news related items are generally on the lower end. This is because the popularity
of your posts are relative to time. So a post covering yesterdays news won’t be very attracting to users 6 months from now. Most of your users will be checking your blog day to day to find the out the latest news and will be very disappointed when you stop writing. After they realize the blog is ‘dead’ they will stop visiting and soon forget about your site.
The type of blog that can retain a lot of passive income after the writer stops are blogs that include ‘timeless’ topics, such as how to guides, or posts that can be referenced later. Have you every read one blog post and then spent 30min, 2 months later on trying to find it. Chances are that post has some type of reference value in it. So despite the fact the post in 6 months old it will still hold value to a lot of users. By building a large library of these type of posts you should be able to essentially leave the blog alone and still earn money.
If for some reason you plan on leaving your blog try to get as many backlinks as possible. They are important for 2 reasons, 1) they are roadways to your site, so people may stumble upon it a couple months from now. The second reason is to build your search engine rank, search engines will provide residual traffic 24/7 and it doesn’t depend on whether you’ve posted recently or not.
I’d appreciate any feedback in the comments, thanks
If you liked this post, please subscribe to Money Management And You's RSS feed.
Filed under: Articles, Passive Income
I think the active work that goes into a blog is the active component that you really can’t get around. Yes your old posts might end up providing you with all sorts of passive income but in order to remain relevant and have the blog actively linked to you need to keep up the writing.
Take this blog, which has some posts I’ve really enjoyed in the past, as an example. If there were no new posts on it for the next 6 months do you think that timeless content would be nearly as highly ranked as a newer version of the content (even if its only similar to the original content)?
I think that blogging brings in active income because you still have to do something at some point to bring in the money.
As your blog grows and grows the effort you put in might diminish according to the amount of income you generate in the future, but you still have to build great content to get people to come to your site.
Passive or not, I think what’s more important is that we earn, right?