As one of my goals for this year is to build up enough ‘passive income’ to live off of I thought that I would take this one step further and try and develop websites with ‘passive content’. So just what is passive content? Well first it might be useful to define passive income. I generally regard passive income as income that doesn’t come directly from what you’re doing (i.e.: not directly from a product or service) but from some other secondary source. For instance, with blogs, money can be made from advertising, but this is really just a nice bonus to your writing. Arguably many blogs are started with the intention of making money, but I still view their incomes as passive when compared to any other service-providing industry.

‘Passive Content’ on the other hand is taking this concept to a lazier extreme. If blogging is regarded as easy money (you get paid simply to write your thoughts) then why not try and get paid for doing nothing whatsoever? Furthermore after blogging for two months now I can assure anyone that it is far from easy, and takes a great deal of work to become successful. What I’m looking to do is to build up a network of sites that I can build, and then just leave completely. No promotion, no updating, no redesigns… You could compare these types of websites to turnkey websites, but turnkey sites are essentially sites that are built to be sold off quickly. I want to create sites that are valuable resources for people, but which involve no updating, and will over time gradually increase in popularity via viral marketing.

The first of these sites has been Css Gallery List. The site provides a list of CSS galleries to allow webmasters to quickly submit their website. A very simple concept, and with development/launch costs of around $30 (domain included) it will at very least break even… What’s great about sites like this is that I’ve done literally nothing to the site since launch, and haven’t yet bothered to promote it. However, it’s been consistently receiving around 100 uniques per day (more than many blogs) and got around 1000 uniques today after some nice person decided to stumble it. I don’t anticipate the site becoming suddenly unpopular, as people don’t expect updates, it’s simply a useful resource. In fact, as more and more people hear about the site, and perhaps start to blog about it, it should keep growing.

Now, the plan is to develop say… 10 of these websites to start with. Using CSS Gallery List as an example that’s around $300 in development costs, and thousands of combined uniques per month (before any of the sites really catch on). Think how expensive and how time consuming it would be to develop one large site that received that amount of traffic and exposure. I also like the idea of security, as like I said this type of website doesn’t look set to suddenly fail, and even if it does I’ll have 9 others to back it up.

What’s most exciting for me is the thought of one of these ideas unexpectedly taking off. I feel like if I keep launching enough websites then one is bound to catch on, and then things get really exciting.