Posted: 12:30 am by tom in
Blog,
Blogging,
Making Money
We all know how difficult it can be to earn a living from blogging, and even great bloggers get the occasional financial dry patch. Whilst income that directly results from your blog is one of the best sources of motivation, streams of passive income can help to support your blogging efforts.
But just what is passive income? Wikipedia defines passive income as:
“An income stream where money is received usually on a regular basis, without continuing effort. This does not mean no effort at all; most passive income streams require great effort to start with.”
The key is finding sources of passive income that relate somehow to your blog. As the above definition states, most types of passive income will involve a lot of initial effort, but the beauty is that you can then just enjoy the profits. It is important to note that not all types of passive income work this way, some will take you just 2 minutes to set up, and then you can forget all about them.
Some of my favorite techniques include:
Write an EBook - This is a great way to earn from writing about what you love. If you spend the time writing a quality EBook on a subject that you’re interested in you’ll essentially be earning from doing what you’re doing blogging - that is, teaching your readers. Perhaps offer the EBook at a discount to your loyal blog readers and then sell it elsewhere at the full price. All the effort is in the writing, once the book is complete you can just sit back and earn from it. Of course the more you promote it the more you’ll earn, but it can be a great source of passive income driven largely by viral marketing (if your product is good, people will recommend it).
Sell Templates - This is a source of passive income that I’m very interested in pursuing. If you are a web designer and blogger, why not come up with a cool blog template for others to use? This can be especially effective if you add a link to your blog in the template’s footer for exponential self-promotion. You can also earn well from affiliate sales of your design if it becomes popular. If you don’t have the skills required to design a template just pay someone else to do it.
Donations - This is one of the easiest ways to earn passively from your blog. Just stick on a widget such as the Buy Me a Beer Widget and then forget about it. Of course donations will rely on you posting quality content and having a loyal readership, but you should be striving for these things anyway.
Affiliate Links - This subject is really too vast to delve into in this post. However, affiliate links are clearly a great source of passive income. By selling others products/services you can provide useful resources for your readership and earn revenue. Check out my friend Alan’s wonderful blog Affiliate Confession for more on the subject.
Adsense & PPC Advertising - Again, this subject is too broad to discuss within this post, but Adsense is a fantastic way to earn from your blogs. I have a small niche blog that uses Adsense and often forget all about it until I receive a cheque in the mail. There are many other alternatives to Adsense, but I’ve so far had the best experience with this service. This method of producing income will often not be regarded as passive as people will often have to work to create great content in order to earn from Adsense. However, I view Adsense as highly passive if you already own a blog, as you are just profiting from your ongoing hard work.
I hope that these tips were helpful. Obviously some of them are very well known, but I’m trying to share with you what I think works best and what is easiest. Good luck with your money making schemes!
Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Chris Moran
Thanks Chris, I hope that you’ll consider subscribing (if you haven’t already)
Tom, looking forward for more passive income ideas. I would love to quit my job one day and make a living from doing what I love, spending time on the Internet.
Wouldn’t we all
I think that the key to income security is to make your income as passive as possible and have as many income streams as possible…
I’m pondering on that idea, and want to invest (money and time) in developing multiple streams of income.I’m just getting started
Well good luck with it! I’m just planning a few website launches myself.
Passive income is always good. Thanks for the pointers.
No problem, I hope they were helpful
I know this is an old post but I just thought you might want to know that the first comment is actually comment spam.
I know because I just got the same comment and the performed a search and came up with the following:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Nice+writing+style.+Looking+forward+to+reading+more+from+you.%22&btnG=Search
As you can see, this guy spams everyone with the same comment and has been using the same comment for quite some time.
Unk
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll monitor future comments more closely.
maybe he’s just lazy and unoriginal, lol
i often find myself commenting with “good stuff - thanks for sharing” …but i mean it when i say it. i guess that makes me an unintentional spammer. :O
btw tom: good stuff - thanks for sharing
heh, I thought I’d give you the benefit of the doubt and approve your comments Beets
Thanks for reading!