Want to make a passive income from blogging? Well, it's possible. Just like any other passive income source, you'll need to do at least some form of legwork upfront. I'll highlight some of the most proven, successful methods to do passive income blogging.
Table of Contents
Is it possible to earn passive income from blogging?
I've built several niche websites over the past few years. I sold two different websites for over $250,000 in net proceeds.
All in the span of 1 year and completely part-time.
Those proceeds didn't include the income and cash flow that I received from those niche sites along the way.
I don't say that to brag. In fact, there are people out there doing much bigger stuff than that online.
I mention this because making money from blogging is real. A lot of my friends and family didn't believe it when I started.
A few people said: “You can't make money blogging. That's for old-timers. You should start an Instagram or a TikTok.”
Well, if you write blogs for passive income. You can in fact earn passive income.
You just need some precision and dedication upfront.
If you can have a passive income mindset in the back of your mind when building a blog, it can pay you over and over again.
Two principles to know in passive income
Passive income only exists because you leverage other resources to get there. People that believe passive income is not real do not have an understanding of automation.
- Outsourcing = Purchasing human time and effort
- Automation = Using computer time and effort
In order to increase the value of your time, you use outsourced resources or automation.
One thing that I learned is that no matter the form of passive income blogging, you need to have an engaged email list.
This is why I developed a free course that will highlight the exact steps on how I grew my emai list by 550%.
The free course will include some awesome bonuses along the way.
Passive income, like always, comes in a variety of forms and mediums.
9 Ways to Earn Passive Income Blogging
Let's get into the good stuff of how to earn passive income from blogging.
1. Buy a blog for passive income
- Earning potential: $10k-$100k+ per year
- Startup costs: High
- Time involved: Low, sometimes blogs acquired without change perform the best
This is obviously the easiest way. But it requires the most upfront capital in doing so.
The good news is there are plenty of blogs for sale no matter the environment and economic situation. There are willing sellers across the globe.
Buy a blog on Flippa to start your passive income journey. I've bought and sold a ton of websites on Flippa.
They simply have the largest selection of domains, start sites, apps and established websites.
When you buy a blog, you should expect to pay 2-3x the amount of annual earnings.
For example, if the blog earns $2,000 per year, you'll pay about $2,000 to $3,000 for the website.
This means that if the earnings stay the same for two years, you'll earn your money back. The rest then will be a return on your capital.
2. Harvest an email newsletter that is done on auto-pilot
- Earning potential: $1M+ per year
- Startup costs: Low
- Time involved: Moderate to high
With email marketing platforms like ConvertKit, you can set up a pretty seamless newsletter that will send to subscribers on auto-pilot.
So if you have old content, any new subscriber can view it as it's fresh new. It's automatically “DRIP” sending directly to that new reader of yours.
Okay, think of this as a one-page website with a blog roll. Any blog post that you create should drive leads through the funnel and into your newsletter.
You can do this with ease by creating a WordPress website on Bluehost.
With Bluehost, you can create a blog for only $3.95/month and you'll even get a free domain name along the way.
Pair this with a free trial on Leadpages and you can explode your email subscriber base.
You'll be able to drive leads through opt-ins and landing pages to have a completely automated funnel (and traffic) along the way.
3. Start an evergreen digital products blog
- Earning potential: $1M+ per year
- Startup costs: Moderate
- Time involved: Moderate to high
The evergreen digital product route is similar to a newsletter. Except in this situation you are constantly on the content wheel.
Creating and launching digital products are a TON of work.
Digital products have a TON of upside, however. If you create evergreen products that continue to solve a problem, you'll spend some time upfront creating it but you'll be paid handsomely over and over again.
So like the above on the newsletter, all of your content should go to driving leads that will help you sell your digital products.
Use software like Leadpages to capture leads at higher conversion rates than typical opt-in forms.
Here is how I use Leadpages. In fact, if you are really good at driving traffic, you can use Leadpages to build a one or two page website.
With digital products, you'll have to rely on a lot more paid advertising. Think of a value ladder to run readers through a highly sophisticated and automated drip email funnel.
See Related: Best Laptops for Blogging
4. Consider automated blogging
- Earning potential: $20k+ per year
- Startup costs: Low
- Time involved: Moderate to high
Automated blogging is likely a lot more common than you realize. It's likely just not displayed as a blog.
It's large media outlets or syndicates of content that share other content providers' article feeds. In this situation, it's all about leveraging other people's content.
People create content all the time. They don't need to be a blogger or some Instagram influencer to do so.
Think of the people that are creating pitch decks, consulting presentations, posting something on their Facebook feed, etc.
Content is all around us. There are a ton of people leveraging other people's content.
With this form of passive income blogging, you'll need to do all the promotion while you let other people or other content creators create the content for you.
See Related: 32 Best Passive Income Ideas
5. Create a directory or forum based blog
- Earning potential: $40k-$70k+ per year
- Startup costs: Low
- Time involved: High initially
The biggest hurdle here is spending the time to build a community. That is a big time constraint. Once you have that community, it can (should) run on its own.
Examples of creating a directory of forum blog include:
- RockstarFinance.com (RIP)
- NomadList.com Forums
- Personal Finance Blogs
- Bigger Pockets
Some of these sites started out as tiny forums where people would chat, but then grew into massive communities where people learn.
Even very niche based forums do okay with limited time. You just need to build the right infrastructure upfront.
This is another great example where other people create content for you.
See Related: How Bloggers Make Money
6. Grow and build a local news / news-oriented website
- Earning potential: $50k-$70k+ per year
- Startup costs: Low
- Time involved: Low
A local news website is all about sharing real-time content, breaking news or viral content. It's not about long in-depth tutorials.
The only gripe with local news is that you'll need to set up the infrastructure to promote your content. You can do mini-viral techniques like using Facebook ads to boost engagement and have people share controversial content.
At first, you'll have viral spikes and traffic. It will require a bit more ongoing work.
Once you find the sweet spot and use data to leverage new article ideas and promotions, your site can generate some serious traffic.
Imagine having 3-5 viral articles working all at once.
See Related: Best Blog Post Planners to Use
7. Create an evergreen content site for display advertising
- Earning potential: $50k-$100k+ per year
- Startup costs: Low
- Time involved: Low
Creating a website solely for the purposes of earning display advertising is not a bad play. It takes a little bit more work than an affiliate site as you need a ton of traffic to earn meaningful cash flow.
However, if you spend less time on affiliates or digital products, you can spend more time on producing more content. More importantly, you have free reign to target low competition keywords.
You'll have much more editorial freedom to post content about anything you want.
With this passive income strategy, your goal is traffic.
To make this as passive as possible, you want to target evergreen content (meaning it won't become outdated) that has significant search volume.
When you scale up traffic, you can use high paying advertising networks to continue your revenue trajectory.
These are some of the best ad networks to consider for display advertising.
See Related: How to Blog Anonymously and Make Money
8. Build a high domain authority sponsored advertising hub
- Earning potential: $50k-$100k+ per year
- Startup costs: Medium
- Time involved: Low
Did you know there are a ton of people that pay significant sums of money for backlinks and guest posts? I don't know what these people think they are getting when they pay for it.
But, I know a guy that makes multiple six-figures solely off running sites that get massive paid sponsored post inquiries. He doesn't even have to write or publish a single thing.
People provide the content and pay him. Just because he has a high “domain authority.” I don't care about much of that stuff at all.
In fact, it's probably more damaging for people paying for these types of posts. But as the publisher, he has limited risk.
He doesn't care about the traffic. If anything, that's just upside.
It isn't pretty but it sure sounds like passive income to me.
See Related: How to Create a Blog on Instagram
9. Create an hyper-niche, minimal pages affiliate review site
- Earning potential: $10k-$50k+ per year
- Startup costs: Low
- Time involved: Medium
One low upside, medium time-intensive way to make passive income from blogging is to build an affiliate review site with only a handful of pages.
Each of these pages is long-form buyer intent keyword type articles. When you conduct keyword research, you need to think about each article as your “silver bullet.”
Only high volume and buyer intent keywords. You'll likely need to niche down as far as possible to make it work from a competition standpoint.
Let's say you have 6-7 articles that are extremely long-form. Like 3,000 to 5,000 words long.
Then, you spend nearly all of your time doing outreach and link building. It's a tougher strategy, but if you can have a stranglehold on a top buyer intent keyword for the long haul.
You'll have no trouble earning passive income for a while.
This will require some optimizing as you go, but if you do it right, you'll be in a decent spot for a least some form of passive income.
See Related: How to Quickly Make Money as a Blogger
Conclusion
Passive income blogging is real. You just have to put in some time to scale and automate.
From there, you can have a full online business that pays you over and over again for little to no time involved at all.
It's a great way to make money online and operate a business that requires limited work.
I love the debate if passive income is real or not. I believe anything can become passive income. You just need to be an expert in automation and time scaling.
Time is money in today's age. Automation and time-scaling is probably one of the most valuable skills a person can have.