8 Evergreen Ideas to Create a Blog That Generates Passive Income
Anyone with a blog can make money online. If you have a blog and you want it to generate some extra income for your home, I’m going to give you some tips in this post.
I understand some people are blogging full time. That means their blogging activities generate enough income to keep them going.
Maybe you are wondering if that’s possible. Yes it is. Blogging is a lucrative income-generating business and many are beginning to get into it actively.
But you do not need to be actively involved to make something reasonable from your blog. It can actually be an awesome source of passive income if you’re following simple steps that work.
One of the most beautiful things about blogging is that you can blog just about anything. If you are a professional in any industry, all you need is basic knowledge to setup your blog and start writing about the things you already do:
Are you a lawyer, pilot, nurse, real estate agent, housewife, driver, technician, teacher, etc.? You can add a bit of extra activities to your regular day and see some additional income flow.
And how much passive income are you able to generate from your blog?
Anything from Rs.0 to Rs.40,000/month and even more. For the most part, the more time you give to it, the more your income. In any case, here are some very helpful tips to start seeing income from your blog.
1. Treat your blog as a business
This is one of the things you hear so often but what exactly does it mean? about 5 points ring in my mind each time this is mentioned:
Invest money to get the right blogging tools: Buy premium web hosting, buy premium blog templates, plugins, computer equipment, etc.
Train yourself to blog professionally: Enroll in training programs to develop your blogging skills, buy the right books and read relevant materials, attend offline blogging events, etc
Dedicate time to blog: While you blog passively, give it regular time to do the things it requires
Promote your blog: There are many ways to do this. We will be touching some points below.
Connect with like-minded content creators: There is no successful business without profitable partnerships. You cannot succeed as an Island. You must collaborate with other businesses in many areas to succeed.
This basically sums up what you need to do to generate passive income from your blog. Let me give you more points to complete it.
2. Create content that solves problems
There is absolutely no set of rules on what must be created and published on any blog. That means you have the right to decide what to publish on your blog for your audience. But if you want to be relevant in the industry, publish content that solves readers’ problems.
Many people are out on the net seeking for solutions to different types of worries. If your blog provides answers, then it will attract income.
Sometimes, we create content for general information and entertainment (infotainment). Of course you may need this to relax but the more How-To content you come up with, the more solution-oriented your blog becomes.
3. Create money-making blog posts
Not all blog posts have the power to generate income. Generally, problem-solving articles can be easily monetized. However, there are some content types that are mainly crafted to earn income. These include product reviews, sponsored contents, etc. In this post, I came up with details on different types of articles that make money for bloggers.
4. Monetize differently
Creating money-making blog post types is one of the ways to empower your blog with money-making capacity. But there are other ways you may want to generate passive income from your blog. Some of these include:
Direct advertising
Affiliate Marketing Advertising
5. Recurring affiliate Marketing commissions
I want to underline this point differently because of its uniqueness in generating passive income. With Affiliate Marketing, you promote products owned by other companies and get paid commissions on sales you generate. There are two types of commissions you earn from Affiliate Marketing:
One-off payment: You get paid one time per sale
Recurring Payments: You generate the sales one time but get paid from month to month
With the one-off commission model, if you generate 10 sales this month, you are paid for those 10 sales and nothing again next month. This is good but requires more effort to make money every month.
The recurring commissions model are generally subscription platforms where you are paid commissions each time your referrers renew their memberships. If you bring in 10 sales this month, each time they make payments to maintain their subscriptions, you get paid a cut.
This is the blog monetizing method that transforms your blog into a massive passive income earner with time. The problem here is that it may not be easy to find good subscription platforms to promote in your niche. But once you find any, focus on selling it for maximum earnings.
6. Sell your services
Once you have your blog and people are reading it, besides doing affiliate marketing, sponsored posts and advertising, your readers may be interested in paying you for your expertise. There are two ways you should be thinking of doing this:
Direct consultation: Charge your readers hourly for consultation on the area of your expertise
Create a course and sell to your readers: This is quite lucrative as well. You may begin with a simple ebook or do a full-blown video course. As an expert, this will attract more sales and income from your blog.
7. Promote your blog correctly
Promoting your blog correctly means making it available to people who need your content. Not everyone on your blog is a targeted reader. It may be a good thing to share your articles on social media with friends but they may not be the audience you need to drive income.
There are some active ways to promote your blog and get the right readers but I recommend you work on ways that get the traffic that takes the right action.
Focus on SEO related activities to drive natural traffic from search engines. This is generally traffic from readers who are looking for what you’ve published. SEO isn’t easy at all and it is not cheap. You will need to get yourself trained on the basics to be able to create search engine friendly articles.
One of the areas you may have to spend money on (As you treat your blog as a business) is SEO. Outsourcing your SEO to agencies is what many blog owners do. What makes this exciting is the fact that your blog will generate income to handle a big part (if not all) of its expenses.
8. Capture your readers’ email contacts
One of the things you should be doing is trying to get your readers to submit their email addresses to an email list. First, get an Email Service Provider (ESP). A good option that massive used by bloggers is MailChimp or check out its alternatives here.
Once you’ve found a good ESP to go with, create your list, get the signup form and attache on your website. Off some incentives to encourage quick signups.
As your readers submit their email addresses to your list, you can always turn to them with promotions, special offers, announcements, new blog post alerts, etc.
Bonus tips: How to make your blog less boring
Some websites are really boring. But you can make yours exciting and attractive by posting different types of content:
- Well formatted text content spiced with high quality images
- Visual contents – Infographics.
- Videos – These are getting more and more popular these days. You don’t need to have a well equipped studio. Your Smartphone Camera or Webcam can serve the purpose for a start.
Conclusion
Your blog can generate passive income that’s big enough to handle your bills. It all boils down to treating it as a real business. Once you’ve started building a market place through it, you realize you can always monetize correctly and earn a nice income.