How to Generate Passive Income from Your Blog [The Complete Roadmap]

These days everybody wants to earn more and work less. You have probably seen quite a few online ads promising to teach you how to effortlessly make money from a couple of hours of work, and it may be true. The pursuit of passive income has grown in recent years, given the multitude of means and methods to make a living today, besides your regular 9-5 day job.

In reality, the term “passive income” can be misleading. “Passive” means that once your business reaches a certain stage, it earns revenues even when you are doing nothing. Most of your work involves periodic tweaks and decision making, based on the analysis of the data in your monthly reports. However, much “active” work is needed in order to get there.

What is a passive income?

Let’s start with the basics: a passive income is independent of the time and effort which is usually required to generate income. In the passive income models, the majority of time spent is usually in the setup, but any time spent subsequently will not considerably affect the passive income level.

This is contrary to an active income, such as private tutoring for example. The more private lessons you provide, the more money you make, and vice versa. There is a direct relationship between the time you spend and the reward you receive.

Passive income is independent of the time you invest once it’s being generated. A popular example is an apartment you purchased for investment. You need to invest some time in finding the property, acquiring it and finding good tenants. But once the tenants pay rent, there is little you can do to increase that income. The amount of money coming in will be more or less the same regardless of how much time you spend on asset management.

Passive income requires active work!

It is very important to understand that passive income requires quite a bit of active work to set it up! Don’t be misled by people who claim to be making passive income with no effort whatsoever. Only once you have invested some active work in setting up, can you start generating a passive income.

It’s all about mindset

Passive income should be treated as a way of life, and not as an end goal.

If you are an employee and want to make an extra $1000 – $2000 a month as side income – that’s nice, but it won’t really allow you to quit your job, live independently and gain financial freedom. You should consider passive income in the full sense of the word: getting to the point where you have yielding properties that bring in weekly, monthly, or quarterly – enough money that allows you to live in prosperity.

A yielding property can be many things – an apartment you own that generates monthly rentals, a profitable stock market portfolio, or a website that generates a monthly income. In this article we cover the latter – a website or blog that generates income.

To sum up: passive income is consistent revenues from one or more sources and requires minimal effort (maintenance) or a one-time investment.

Note that if you have reached a stage where you have a solid income that is not 100% passive, but “only” 70-80% passive (meaning it does require some effort) – you are on the right path. You can probably outsource the remaining 20% ​​or 30%, thus making it a truly 100% passive income (if you wish).

A blog or a website?

It doesn’t matter really. A blog is actually a website with entries (called posts) listed in chronological order, with newer posts listed on top. Blog posts often include the date, author name and a comment section, which adds a layer of discussion between the blog author and the readers. A website on the other hand, is considered more static, like a company website for example, with pages for products or services, without comments or dates. Anyway, most websites also have blogs these days.

In order for any passive income model to work, you’re going to need considerable amounts of traffic, preferably free, organic traffic. The way blogs are set up, it’s often easier to rank them on search engines and get more traffic. Blogs are also considered more engaging and informative, and third parties might link to blogs more often than websites, which are considered more commercial in nature. So there are a few reasons why blogs might get more organic traffic than websites.

In any case, the words “blog” and “website” are interchangeable for the context of this article.

Getting traffic to your blog

In order to make passive income from your blog, you and your blog must follow certain standards:

• An active blog in a certain niche.
• Regularly updated with new posts.
• Be interesting and provide value to readers.
• Have a community of repeating visitors.
• Generate free, targeted traffic.

Writing for a profitable blog requires investing numerous hours each month for research, content preparation, writing, adding images and responding to comments (all of this can be outsourced).

Is it worth the investment? You bet! It may take a few months or even years, but successful blogs eventually have loads of content that brings in traffic, leads and sales calls in your niche, or passive income if you so wish.

We are not going to get into traffic generation methods in the article, but there are five stages to your blog becoming profitable. Not every blog goes through these five stages, and not every blog generates income. It much depends on your actions, community and blog dynamics. You can however learn how to advance from one stage to the next, and how to provide value for your readers and build a community around your blog. Here is an example of an art blog:

Stage 1: A hobby

The artist is at home, crafting a certain item such as a necklace, embroidery, greeting card design, etc. When she encounters a particular problem, she searches online and finds several communities of like minded artists, whose discourse allows her to flourish in terms of problem-solving, using tools, professional lingo in the field, and other creative ideas.

Discovering these online communities makes the artist feel that she is no longer alone, and is not considered “a weirdo doing crafts.” The legitimacy of engaging in her artwork was created.

Stage 2: Engaging with the community

At first, the artist is a silent participant in online communities, as she is still not confident enough to present her artwork or ask questions. She learns from other conversations already taking place. At some point she gains her confidence, and wants to share her thoughts and any professional knowledge she has in the field, so she starts openly participating in online groups.

This stage includes a mutual dialogue of the artist with others in the group, and the magic of networking is created. The artist shares her knowledge and her products, meets with other artists in online sessions and even offline. At this stage, other artists start appreciating her artwork, her knowledge and her approachability. Other artists in the group urge her to start a blog, in order to have an online “home” for her artwork, knowledge and talent, beyond the scope of the online group.

Stage 3: A junior blog

The artist launches her blog, and a new community is created. In addition to her artist friends, casual readers come by, enjoying the artwork she uploads, and the professional knowledge she shares with the readers.

The artist feels that she must develop for the benefit of her blog readers, so she takes courses and workshops related to photography, graphic design and other creative fields. A supportive community is created around the blog, with active discussions, engagement and appraisals which leads to her personal and professional empowerment, both as an artist and as a blogger.

Stage 4: An established blog

The blog becomes a very significant element of the artist’s life. The blog serves as a source for networking with other bloggers around the world, as a place for developing relationships in the community, and as a source for generating more audiences and activities.

At this point some blog readers ask for personal tutoring, coaching or product purchases, and the blog has created a business networking platform. The artist is still unconfident in leaving the blog boundaries, so any attempts to do a workshop, product sales, or any other activity beyond her comfort zone is carried out through the supportive community of the group, which has been accompanying her from the first stages. Once the artist receives additional reinforcements from her community and is considered an “expert” in her field, she will move on to the next stage.

Stage 5: A profitable blog

The blog is now a platform that allows the artist to reach a supportive audience willing to pay for her products, knowledge, tutorials, workshops, lectures, etc. Transactions are being carried out online, and the blog generates a significant income.

A blog is an amazing platform with an online ‘butterfly effect’, that even experienced bloggers are often surprised by its power and the community it creates. In order to advance from stage to stage, a certain process must occur:

Something happens that incentivizes the blogger to change behavior, and increase or change her online activity. Once the blogger carries out the new activity, the result produces feedback and empowerment, which brings her confidence to continue to the next stage.

The example above is very slow, natural and unplanned. The income opportunities for the artist are workshops and product sales, which are not passive at all. However, if you plan ahead, know what to expect, and produce massive content with lots of value to the readers, your blog will have enough traffic to start generating passive income as well, so let’s dive in.

There are 5 major passive income models for a website or blog:

Google Adsense

Google’s main source of revenue is advertising, and your blog can also be a lucrative advertising space through the Google Adsense service. For many years, Google Adsense has been one of the most popular platforms for bloggers to make money online, but it’s certainly not the only one. These platforms are called ‘Contextual Ads’ (as they are being automatically generated on every page of your website according to its content) or ‘Native Ads’ (as they blend in with your content, as opposed to banner ads that stick out).

Pros and Cons

The main advantage of this passive revenue stream is that Google does all the work for you. All you have to do is get a piece of code from Google Adsense, and add it to your website template so it will automatically appear on every page – even on future pages you add. That’s it! This one piece of code will serve relevant ads based on the browsing characteristics of each user and the content you have on each page. If you’re using WordPress as your website platform, you can find quite a few plugins for adding the Adsense code to your template.

There are quite a few downsides, though:

• If you use Adsense you can’t use similar contextual ad networks as well. You can however use other ad types (banners, native ads, pop-unders).
• The appearance of most Adsense ads is not very professional and they tend to not blend well with your content.
• You’re getting paid for clicks, and each click usually pays a few cents (it can be higher in certain niches). You would need a considerable amount of traffic (tens of thousand of visitors) to generate a meaningful passive income. If you have more than one blog, the revenue potential dramatically increases.

How to do it right?

Google Adsense is a complex ad ecosystem of publishers and advertisers. In order to make the best of it, follow these optimization best practices:

• When customizing ad styles in the AdSense interface, choose font colors that match your website, but set ad border color that stands out against the background.
• In order to maximize your earning potential, don’t assume which ad types work best. Instead, spend some time testing various ad sizes and positions.
• Leverage the Adsense Search Box, which pays a percentage of the ads revenue on the search results generated on your website.
• Make sure the Adsense code loads fully on every page, and is not blocked by robots.txt file or other script conflicts on your website.
• Follow these guidelines from Google: don’t use duplicate content, don’t click your ads or ask others to do so, don’t use deceptive ad layouts, make sure your pages load fast and are mobile friendly, prevent accidental clicking by moving ad units 150 pixels away from your content.

In case you want to diverse, there are quite a few Adsense alternatives, the most popular ones are:

Media.net: Very similar to Google Adsense, operated by Yahoo and Bing.

RevContent: a Native Ads network, in which the ads look like “related articles” suggestion, blending with your content with minimal interruption. RevContent offers high quality ads and a fast approval process.

RevenueHits: An advertising network that offers geo-targeted ads, high rates per click, 100% fill rate (ads will always be displayed on your website) and an algorithm that serves the most profitable ads for each ad spot.

Adsterra: One of the leading ad networks, with over 25 billion ad impressions per month. Adsterra offers a large variety of ad formats (native ads, banners, pop-unders and more) and CPM, CPA, CPC monetization (which means you can get paid for views instead of clicks).

Infolinks: A platform that offers unique ad placements to improve click-through rates without changing the look and feel of your website.

These ad networks (and many others like them) are not necessarily “Adsense Alternatives” as most of them can work well alongside Adsense ads. However, make sure not to oversaturate your site with ads, banners and pop-unders as advertisers might unlink your domains if they see a low performance with your traffic.

Selling Ad Space

Selling advertising space (usually banner ads) is another popular method to monetize your website. It’s mainly appropriate for websites that already have a lot of search engine traffic from diverse keywords, or other organic traffic sources. Blogs, informational websites and news websites are excellent for this purpose.

Unlike programs like Adsense, where you are very dependent on the niche of your website and the type of ads that Google chooses for you, in this model you serve banner ads on your website and have much more control over your revenue channels. If your websites receives high quality traffic, your bargaining power with advertisers will increase accordingly.

There are several ways to sell banner ad space on your website: using a banner ad network, working with affiliate programs that offer banner ads, or directly offering your ad space to interested parties (business owners who want traffic to their website).

In some niches, it makes sense to strike direct deals with other businesses that want to put banners on your website, but unless you have a good reason, it’s recommended to use one of the established ad networks.

Pros and Cons

The advantages of banner advertising is that you don’t necessarily get paid for ad clicks. You can get paid for ad views (called ‘Ad Impressions’) which can generate higher income than clicks.
When someone visits your blog, they may see several banner ads on a single page, and each ad counts as an impression. Another advantage is that in most cases you can use banner ads in addition to Google Adsense or other contextual and native advertising, which means higher monetization of the same traffic.

The main downside of banner ads is what is known as “banner blindness”. Banner ads have been around for more than 25 years, and most people are so accustomed to them, that they ignore them completely and never click on banners. This can be solved however with a Pay Per View model (PPV), but if your visitors don’t click any ads, some advertisers will choose to exclude your blog for their ad campaigns.

How to do it right?

Same as with contextual ads – test different ad networks, different ad types and different ad locations on your page until you reach the combination which generates the most revenues.

Most of the ad networks listed above offer image ad types (ie: banners) in addition to contextual ads or native ads, but there are some networks that specialize in banner ads:

PropellerAds: An ad network that offers a variety of ad formats, such as onclick ads, interstitials, widgets and banners. PropellerAds work with a variety of advertisers in every country and every niche, so you can monetize your traffic globally.

Amazon Native Shopping Ads: A platform that displays relevant products based on your page content and keywords. If a user makes a purchase via your ads, you get a commission from this sale.

Popcash: An advertising platform that generates “pop under” ads (a new window opens unobtrusively underneath your website). Popcash offers fast approval, daily payments and 80% revenue share.

Monumetric: An ad network that offers high payouts, custom reporting dashboard and personal support. You need at least 10,000 page views per month to get approved.

Bidvertiser: An ad network that offers Native Ads, banners, push notifications, pop under ads and sliders.They have a low withdrawal threshold ($10) and no minimum traffic requirements.

Selling Leads

In this model, you make money by selling leads (online inquiries) to other businesses looking for customers or subscribers. The cost per lead varies considerably in different industries, from a few dollars per lead to a few hundred dollars per lead. For example, leads for plastic surgery will cost much more than leads for a smoking cessation workshop, because of the profit potential of each paying customer.

For this model to work, you need a website in a certain commercial niche, and relevant traffic – preferably organic, and geographically targeted. There are many niches you can sell leads in, from “payday loans” to “web hosting”. However, local services work best for this model, for example, “roofer in New Orleans” or “landscape design in San Diego”. Once you have such traffic, all you have to do is add a contact form to your website and forward the inquiries to a local service provider. There are quite a few ‘local service’ niches with relatively low competition. With some SEO knowledge you will be able to rank your website in a couple of months for relevant keywords, and get targeted high quality leads to sell.

If you can’t find buyers for leads in your niche, you can always check out lead networks, such as LeadPoint or EquiLeads, but there are probably thousands of small businesses in your city that would love to get inquiries from interested prospects.

Pros and Cons

The advantage of lead generation is that it’s much easier to get someone to leave their contact details than it is to generate a sale. The downside is that your commission is considerably lower than a sales commission, but higher than ad clicks, though. Naturally, this model works great in addition to contextual ads and/or banner ads.

How to do it right?

In order to position yourself as a high quality lead seller and charge more for the leads you generate, it is recommended that you have prior control over the leads before you sell them. During this process, called ‘Lead Optimization’, you first have to make sure the leads are properly targeted. Depending on the industry, this might mean targeting by demographics, location, income level, profession, age, gender, etc. Lead generation for a dating service vs. leads for an accounting firm will require much different targeting.

Next, you should verify that the people who leave their contact details really have a purchase intent, and will not be surprised or irritated when being contacted for a sales call. If you sell low quality leads and the buyer cannot close any sales, they will stop buying leads from you.

Lead optimization helps you maintain your credibility and charge more for leads that convert well for the client. Some lead sellers go through the trouble of using a call center service to contact the leads and make sure they are properly targeted and interested in the aforementioned service, and only then they send the contact details to the client. Additionally, it is customary to charge more for “exclusive leads” which you sell to only one client. This way the client can close deals more easily since they are the only ones contacting the leads.

Affiliate Marketing

The basic concept of Affiliate Marketing is very simple: you recommend a certain product or service (of a company that has an affiliate program) and add a special coded link to purchase that product or service. Any user who purchases through your referral link will earn you a commission – a sum of money derived from their purchase volume.

The Internet is full of affiliate marketing opportunities. There are affiliate networks for online and digital products, such as ClickBank, ShareaSale and JVzoo, and affiliate programs for physical products, such as CommissionJunction, Amazon, Ebay and Giddyup. In case you want to promote a product or service which you don’t find in any of the large affiliate networks, you can always search Google for the [product name] “+ affiliate” and you will probably find a vendor with an active affiliate program you can register to.

Pros and Cons

The advantage of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to do any selling, logistics or customer service. The downside is that you only get a portion of the profits. This is not always a small portion, as there are some very rewarding affiliate programs – especially in digital products (courses, tools, software, etc). Whereas the production cost is one-time and there are no shipping costs or logistics involved, it allows the product owner to pay up to 50% to affiliates, and still make a nice profit for each sale.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the most powerful and popular channels to make a living on the Internet. However, many active affiliate marketers do it as a hobby, which generates anywhere between a few hundreds and a few thousands of dollars each month. A smaller number are full-time affiliates which make a living from it, and only a very small number of people around the world are Super Affiliates who make millions out of it.

How to do it right?

Naturally, it is possible to simply promote products of companies that run affiliate programs, but in order for the passive income to be significant you should first brand yourself as experts in a particular field and then recommend relevant items. For example, gadget experts can create a blog that reviews interesting technological developments, offer comprehensive reviews of new products, and compare similar items. A direct link to a recommended gadget from a high traffic blog can yield fair amounts of money. Another technique that can increase your sales volume is using special offers – for example, a discount for those who click your link and purchase the item in question within 48 hours.

Selling Information Products

Creating and selling information products is a huge subject, worthy or its own post. In short, an information product is a product which delivers knowledge or information for educational purposes, usually in the form of “how to” do something. Most information products offer a process and tools for the customer to overcome a problem, or to transform from a given state A to a desirable state B.

There are many types of information products, some of which are not digital, such as tutoring, coaching or workshops, but in order to be considered as a passive income model, we’re talking about digital products which customers can download or access online.

The price tags of information products vary considerably, according to the amount and depth of information being delivered and the perceived value to the customer. A one page cheat-sheet or checklist can be sold for $7, while a robust online video course can be sold for $5,000.

Here are some popular types of information products:

• Cheat-sheets and checklists
• Templates and workbooks
• Reports and analysis
• Ebooks and white papers
• Membership websites
• Online courses
• Webinars and live events recordings

The topics for your information product are endless; from gardening, fishing or dating advice, to weight loss, baby care or business coaching. Any question or problem your audience may have, any skill or expertise they may need is viable for an information product. Naturally, the information products you’re offering should be relevant to your website’s audience. If you want to know what burning questions and problems your audience may have, check out Quora, Yahoo Answers or Fluther.

Pros and Cons

The main advantage of (digital) information products is that they are downloadable or accessible online, which means that you create them once, and you can sell them over and over to thousands of customers. Another advantage is that in order to generate a significant income, you don’t need as much traffic as you would need for contextual ads or banner ads. Information products have a high perceived value, and some people are literally making millions of dollars by selling high-end online courses or membership websites.

The disadvantage of this model is that you need quite a lot of work to create info products. It can take days or even months – depending on how comprehensive your product is. Another issue you might face is the selling process – from persuasive copywriting to credit card processing.

How to do it right?

First you need to decide how comprehensive your information product is going to be, and how much time you are willing to invest in its making. It’s recommended to start with a relatively short info product such as a 20-30 pages Ebook (selling for under $20) and confirm that customers are willing to pay for your knowledge and expertise, before creating a complete online course with hundreds of hours of video lessons.

• Take a couple of days to gather the required information, sort it and outline the basic structure of your info product.
• Break it down to sections, add headlines, images and captions.
• Use Google Sheets or MS Word to write and edit your content and export to PDF format.
• Design a cover in Canva, or hire a freelancer to design one for you.
• Come up with an attractive title, highlighting the benefits of your product or what customers are going to achieve with your product.
• Set up online payments with Paypal or Stripe.
• Create a “Salespage” on your website, emphasize the product’s benefits and how it’s going to help customers reach their desired stage. If you have an email list, offer the product to your subscribers.
• Additionally, sell your product on one or more of the various digital platforms, such as Sellwire, FastSpring, PayLoadz, Pulley, SendOwl, ClickBank, FetchApp, and many others.
• If you’re selling an online course, you can use Thinkific, Podia, Udemy, Teachable, Uscreen or Zippy Courses.
• Consider any technical skills you may need to acquire or outsource, such as creating a PowerPoint presentation, video editing, voice over, payment setup, etc.

Selling information products is the pinnacle of passive income. You create something once, then sell it over and again. If you have the knowledge to help people get rid of their most pressing problem, answer their most burning questions and guide them to accomplish what they want in life, you can make a lot of money with information products.

Putting it All Together

If you read this far, you’ve probably noticed an interesting pattern – the more you are involved in the monetization process, the more money you’re likely to earn. Pasting the Google Adsense code (or other contextual ads network) to your blog’s templates takes 30 seconds, but you’re likely to earn a few cents per click. Setting up lead inquiry forms and dealing with local service providers takes longer, but you’re likely to earn more per lead. Finally, creating your own information product can take a few weeks, but its earning potential is much higher. This is true for almost every business model – the more you are involved in the process – the more you’re likely to earn.

For quite some time, passive income from the Internet is not a pipe dream or something imaginary. It’s very realistic and attainable.

It’s true that there are a few charlatans who pedal bogus “passive income courses” and make a bad name for the industry, but the truth is, a lot of honest people are making passive income from their website or blog..

Even if you have no intention of leaving your day job, and you just need an extra side income – it is very attainable. All you need to do is enter the appropriate mindset and get started.