A roadmap of how to get started building a website that will bring you passive income revenue.
Many people get interested in passive income and the enormous potential that websites have to offer, but have no idea where to start.
Here’s my advice for newbies.
First, keep earning money the way you know how.
Don’t start any passive income project with the idea that it will make you rich overnight, or in the next year. It won’t. It’s a long term investment. Stay grounded. Stay away from "get rick quick" schemes and focus on building a body of content and a network of connections. This can be hard becuase there a lot of "get rich quick" ideas in the online space talking about passive income, so you will need to learn to sort through the cruft and find the good stuff.
Next, start a blog on a unique topic that you are passionate about.
Why a blog and not another form of website? A blog is the easiest tool by far to create content on a regular basis without having any technical knowledge. Blogging also makes it much easier to get started in marketing your website by developing connections with the community of bloggers in your niche.
It is important that you choose a topic you have sustained interest in so you will keep blogging. Your writing should not just benefit the readers, but benefit you as well. What would you enjoy blogging about? What is a topic that you would enjoy learning more about and discussing with others? You might choose a topic you are not an expert at already, as you will have more opportunity to learn and grow and thus stay interested in writing.
Here's how to start a blog:
Last, commit to three things:
If you do the above and sustain it for a year, you will have:
If you decide after a year that you want to start an online store drop-shipping golf clubs instead, you will be starting with a much better knowledge of online marketing, and at least one site that gets traffic and has some PageRank which can provide a substantial boost to other projects you wish to start, especially if they are in a related field.
The best way to learn is to jump in. Whatever your passion is, there’s a successful niche in there for you. Go for it!
Learn more about the author, Emma McCreary.
What down-to-earth advice, Emma. In my opinion, the term "passive income" has been misused by the get-rich-quick companies who make their online promises of making people wealthy while they sleep. We all know there is much more work involved than that.
I love your advice to "keep your day job" ! And I think a blog is an excellent way to start exploring the possibilities (while building value and credibility at the same time). A very helpful article. Thanks.
Thanks Judy! I always encourage people to create passive income, but some people get turned off when it turns out to be work. For me it's worth it - I don't want to just make more each year, I want to make more AND work less.
For websites, it's essential to build traffic, real long-term traffic from free sources like search engines and links, not depending on AdWords. And that takes time - a year or so at least. So I encourage people to start a website now, commit to it, and then learn on the way before trying to monetize it. I see people putting AdSense on their site with hardly any traffic and I think "that will just discourage you!".
On the other hand, once you have a website with good PageRank, that's a real asset. When you start a new website, if it's at all related, you can link to it from your fist site and it gets a boost. So you never have to start from scratch. It's like real estate in a way, you build on what you have.
Hey Emma,
Nice article, but that sure doesn't sound like passive income to me. Passive income is when you create (or buy) an asset that throws off money for you without you actually having to do the work.
(Real estate, businesses that you don't manage on your own, etc.)
Using a blog as an income stream is great, but it's not passive. I guess it could be "Semi-passive" if you would do the blog anyway and then figure a way to monetize it.
Later.
Yeah, I'm talking about creating an asset. It is passive income, but you have to make the asset with traffic and PageRank first. For people who can't just up and buy real estate. =)
It's true I didn't get into how you can make it completely passive. You need to monetize it and/or hire other people to blog so you are creating a system that makes you money without you being there. That's covered on problogger.com somewhat which is why I included that link.
As I said, this was in intro to how to get started, not the full plan. Perhaps if I had added the rest of the roadmap it would have made more sense to you how this was an entry into the passive income model.
I think that the term "passive income" has different meanings for different people. And it's been used in so many ways that don't really make sense.
I agree with Chris that real estate is one way to generate passive income. But when I read Emma's idea of starting with a blog, I didn't see the blog itself as passive income. For our business, our blog is just the first step in developing that income stream, to get people to your site to find out what you actually are selling. (For instance, information products like e-books that you write once and sell over and over. In a way, e-books are passive income.)
I guess I am defining passive income as "income earned in ways other than hourly work-for-pay". It's definitely a broader definition than just real estate or investment type passive income and perhaps that is inaccurate. This is giving me some great feedback for future articles. =)
I saw the blog as a way to generate an online presence, which you may or may not be able to monetize directly. Blogging at first was not very monetizable because the blogging community wasn't open to it, but that has changed as blogs become more mainstream.
However, once you have a blog that gets good traffic and has good PageRank (and I think blogs are the best way to grow that right now because of the accessibility of all the RSS tools that lead to more backlinks) - then you can use that as a leg up on your next project.
Hello Emma, this is just the article I was looking for.
I am indeed launching a passive-income, content-heavy blog this year... and it passes the "sniff tests" for something I want to keep doing and doing. I have lucked into finding a topic that NOBODY is writing about, and it happens to be a big part of my life. Not to be secretive, but it has not hatched yet and, well... I guess I am being secretive, but not for long!
Thanks for the problogger link, will check that out.
A few asides: Did you ever do the "Pay per Post" thing - that never suited me! And, re Chris's comment, since when is Real Estate passive? Never heard of that, unless you are strictly investing silently, otherwise RE is all hard work and little play.
Anyway, thanks again for the great article. Bonnie
Oh, also, my structure idea for the upcoming blog is to use the blog as the Index page, then link out to more detailed "real" Web pages that I'll create and host myself. I think having that cross-section will make it easier for SEO and still exploit the best of blogging. Any ideas or comments about doing that hybrid approach? Also, seems like Flickr galleries are really workin' it...
I think there are different ways to do Real estate - if you do it as an invester and hire a property management company for instance. But that's off topic!
I haven't done Pay per Post myself. I haven't monetized my own blogs, as of yet - I have a content site that is not in blog format that I've monetized through AdSense that I do pretty well with.
Bonnie, regarding hybrid blogs vs SEO - I would try using the blogging platform but formatting it so some things don't look like blog posts, but are still within the RSS feed. The feed is really the key element in blogging for SEO, I think.
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