How to Make Money (Passively) With Your Blog

Today, Shaun Connell from Learn Financial Planning explains how to build a passive income from your blog without sacrificing value.

Trying to get the most “bang for your buck” has been behind the invention of the wheel, light-bulb, the Internet and pretty much every other major technological advancement in history.

True to this desire for efficient productivity, in the online business world one of the most popular quests for someone who is just starting out in their blogging business journey is to make money passively.

In this post we’ll talk about the nature of a “passive” income, how to avoid the short-sighted “greedy” tactics that can destroy one’s entire blogging income, and how this all relates to value-oriented blogging.

Passive Income: Short-Sighted or Good Business?

A passive income is, according to Investopedia:

“Earnings an individual derives from a rental property, limited partnership or other enterprise in which he or she is not actively involved.”

If you make money without actively working at the time to earn that money, then that’s part of your passive income. Rental earnings, dividends — both are often considered to be part of a passive income, though whether any income is “passive” is always debated.

Tragically, thousands of get-rich schemers have latched onto the desirability of a passive income, luring desperate consumers into their traps with promises of “unstoppable systems” that can just be “turned on” to make money forever. In a sense, these schemers have given a bad name to passive income, making it feel (to some, at least) almost like it’s cheating.

Of course, the schemers are wrong — as are those who reject passive income streams out of a (reactionary) principle. Building a passive income isn’t about “get rich quick”; it often takes longer, usually takes more work, and almost always takes much, much more planning.

Before we move on to the exact tactics you can use to make money passively, let me reiterate what should be one of the most important concepts here: trying to make a passive income doesn’t mean that you try to stop writing valuable content, or that your goal is to make money online so you can “stop working.”

The exact opposite is true.

Writing valuable content and maintaining community is not at odds with developing a passive income. You can do both at the exact same time. Even more than that, developing both a passive and an active income with your blog leads to more success, more financial security, and a stronger income.

The best passive income strategy is multiplied by blogging with valuable content. Every single tactic listed below is simply deadly effective if mixed with value blogging.

How to Make Money Passively With Your Blog

By definition, a passive income from your blog is any money that you make if you completely stopped working. Not income without work — but income that continues to come in indefinitely after work.

The 3 tactics listed below are just to get you started — there are tons of different ways. If you have an idea, be sure to share it in the comments section.

• Search-Engine Marketing.

Search-engine marketing is a little different than just writing “for the search engines.” For example, Brian Clark over at Copyblogger has one of the best “user oriented” websites around. He’s the copywriting guru of blogging.

Yet if you look at his left sidebar, you’ll see a collection of links to pages, including one to Copywriting Courses. On the page he lists two reviews of affiliate products that can help you master your own copywriting. Of course, that page is the first result for “copywriting courses” on Google, and will continue to stay there.

To build a passive search-engine marketing income stream from your blog, just write enough valuable content that gives your main domain a great amount of authority because of “real links” from other bloggers. Then write an SEO page for the sidebar. I’ve done this with topics like “online savings account” and it certainly does make money.

• Subscription Marketing.

The best affiliate programs out there are those that offer residual returns. In other words, if you are an affiliate for a magazine, it’s better to make $2 per month the person signs up than it is to make $20 one-time… the reason should be fairly obvious.

If only 1/5th of the subscribers stay on for several years, then that 1/5th of the buyers alone will earn you more than getting paid one-time from all of the buyers combined. Plus, you also make money from the 4/5ths who didn’t stay on for several years — all-in-all, you can double your income by earning on a subscription/residual level.

Also, if something happens to you and/or your blog, building a residual income will provide a “safety cushion” for your income.

Bonus tip: mixing subscription marketing with search engine marketing is simply deadly. Then you have a passive income that is growing passively. Win-win!

• Project Outsourcing.

Of all of the tactics listed here, this is probably the least “passive,” given that you still need to oversee the projects, and aren’t making the entire blogging process passive — still, you can increase the “passiveness” of your entire online business in this manner.

Outsourcing is when you hire someone to do some of your work. That’s it.

Outsourcing is something all of us need to do, at least on some level. Unless you have your own server, design your own blogs, write all your own content and registered your domain without spending a dim to anyone else… you’ve outsourced to somebody somewhere.

Some people, like Timothy Ferriss, are famous for trying to outsource their entire business. Others, like Jon Morrow and Brian Clark, reject the idea that outsourcing is always the best call.

So what should you outsource? I’ve experimented with hiring people to design my projects, host my designs, write some of my content (all of it for some websites), build links and market my content. So far, I have not found the perfect formula for deciding what to outsource.

For smaller blogs with less competition, I usually outsource the content. For my “flagship” blogs, I almost always write my own content.

By writing my own content, I can make sure that I’m building a relationship with my readers on a personal level, that the integrity of my content is never compromised, and that the posts are optimized for humans and search engines with just the right balance.

Help Us Out

This is just the beginning, of course. This post is more of an introduction than it is a comprehensive guide. There are tens of thousands of different ways you can make money passively, and I’m sure you’ve stumbled across several of the methods, or are even using some yourself.

Of course, almost all of the tactics and tips completely depend on your blogging business model. Still, finding out new strategies allows you to customize your blogging plan to be perfect for your own personal blogging style.

What do you think about building a passive income? Overrated? Under-discussed? If you had to build your blog in a manner that the entire income had to become passive, what would you do? Which of the above tactics do you find the most helpful? The most risky? Let us know in the comments!

This post was written by Shaun Connell, the guy behind Learn Financial Planning, where he writes about everything from picking online bank accounts to learning how to make money online