Ahhhh, passive income. The process of earning money from little to no active work or effort. It’s the American Dream. Heck, it’s a worldwide dream!
Who wouldn’t want to kick back, relax, and watch the dollars roll in while they sleep, work a regular job, vacation, watch tv, and just live their life? It’s a dream most of us are chasing, and it’s a dream that I’ve made a reality. Well, sort of.
I earn at least $300 a month passively, and I have blogging/Internet marketing to thank for that.
I have an ugly, unassuming website (not this one where you’re reading this article) that I’ve owned since 2011, and I haven’t done much work on that website since 2011, yet it still brings in an average $450 a month without me doing anything.
At its peak I earned more than $600 per month in passive income. The monthly revenue is generated solely from advertisements on the articles I’ve published and Amazon Associate commissions from Amazon products I promote or recommend on those articles.
I added articles here and there in 2016, but the last bit of real work or new article I posted on this website was exactly January 17, 2017.
This website doesn’t even have hundreds of articles, let alone one hundred (It has 69 to be exact), yet it’s still pulling in a pretty penny every month. You can read more here about why my small website is doing so well.
Five-hundred dollars a month in passive income certainly isn’t enough to retire from active working life just yet.
However, when over half of Americans have less than $400 in their bank accounts at this very moment, watching $500 deposit into your bank account every month with zero work or effort is nothing to sneeze at.
Additionally, in the Internet marketing world, a website isn’t only a passive income stream, it’s an asset.
I could sell my website for anywhere from 25x to 30x monthly earnings, so that means I’ve built an asset that’s currently worth anywhere from $11,250 to $13,500. I must say I’m somewhat proud of myself for what I’ve built, and I’m a little upset with myself too, but we’ll get to that part later.
Monthly Costs to Maintain My Passive Income Stream
Whether you’re earning passive income from real estate holdings, stock investments, annuities, or even royalties from licensing your intellectual property, there’s going to be some costs or fees involved in maintaining your passive income stream.
Luckily for me, the maintenance costs of my website are significantly low in comparison to what I earn.
I pay exactly $9.99 a month to host my website with Hostgator, and I pay $12.98 a year to renew the website’s domain with Namecheap.com. So, that comes out to a little over $11 a month in fees to maintain a passive income averaging $450 a month.
That’s a monthly return on investment of 3,990.91%. I don’t know too many stock or real estate investment opportunities producing returns of this magnitude! Not too bad if I do say so myself!
The Truth About Building Passive Income with a Blog
While most people dream of and desire passive income, what most of those people don’t understand is that passive income through blogging isn’t exactly passive, at least not in the beginning.
Of course, you could outsource all the work and hire writers to create content and a virtual assistant to maintain your site for you, but if you had that kind of money you probably wouldn’t be reading this. So, for the broke and passive income wannabes like the rest of us, you must invest another precious resource, time.
If anyone tells you passive income through blogging is easy or a way to get rich quick, please run the other way!
Passive income through blogging requires a ton of sweat equity, and herein lies the biggest challenge to building a passive income stream: doing the work for no upfront reward or return.
Most of us are busy with jobs, significant others, kids, pets, family, and friends, so who has the time to put in extra workday after day with no significant return or reward insight for months or perhaps even years? Well, I do!
For years I earned very little from my ugly website. In the beginning, I technically “lost” money because there was no return on my monthly maintenance fees. However, now that I enjoy the fruits of my labor years after putting the bulk of the work, I can’t say I have a single regret.
I put in the time to plant the seeds of passive income, and now I can look at the tree that I’ve built and sit under it’s shade or awhile.
But whoa there, friend, don’t cheer for me just yet! Yes, I admit, it’s pretty cool to earn several hundred dollars a month from work I did years ago, but there’s also a major fail on my part.
Why I Should Be Earning $5000 Or More Per Month in Passive Blogging Income
I believe it was a guy by the name of Zechariah who said do not despise the day of small beginnings, and while I’m grateful to have a passive income stream of several hundred dollars of month, my passive income stream could and should generate several THOUSAND dollars per month.
The reason why I haven’t crossed the $1000 threshold in passive income? My own procrastination, insecurities stubbornness, and outright ignorance.
For starters, I’ve published less than 100 articles on my ugly website (I know I keep saying that, but trust me guys, it’s amateur).
While it’s cool to earn so much money from so little content, imagine if I’d published new articles each week for the last EIGHT years. I’d be swimming in dough like my fictional uncle Scrooge McDuck!
I’m not going to beat myself up, but sometimes I can’t help but think of all the money I’ve missed out on simply because I was too lazy and fearful to keep going.
I’m not the best writer (I do have a 4-star rating on Textbroker), but I’ve already proven my concept and content works, so there really was nothing to feel insecure about. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20.
If there is nothing else you take away from this post, please don’t be like me. Just start today and put SOMETHING out there.
You don’t have to be a stellar writer or content creator. You can suck at writing, run your content through a program like Grammarly before posting to your blog, and still succeed at this blogging thing.
At the very least, you can always go back and edit your content as many times as you want, the bottom-line is don’t procrastinate or let your fears of not being perfect stop you from acting.
In addition to my fears, my ignorance caused me to leave hundreds if not thousands of dollars on the table. For years I monetized my blog through the Google Adsense advertising network.
Adsense is the most well-known ad network among bloggers and perhaps the easiest to join because there are no traffic requirements to sign up.
I’d heard of bigger ad networks like AdThrive that required a minimum of 100,000 of monthly website views to join, and since I had nowhere near that in monthly traffic, Adsense it was until I reached that threshold someday.
Oh wait, I heard of the Media.net ad network and I did apply, but they denied me. No explanation, no tips on what to improve, just nope, you can’t sit with us.
Then one day in 2017 while scrolling through I believe Warrior Forum, someone created a thread about ad networks for bloggers, which is where I discovered MediaVine.
MediaVine is a smaller ad network that requires 25,000 sessions per month to join, and I’d read that the payout was good; much better than Adsense. Bloggers were getting upwards of $13 to $15 RPM (Revenue Per Mille or Thousand) and earning hundreds of dollars per month.
I logged into my WordPress dashboard, and because I was in ‘set it and it forget it mode’ for so long with my blog, I had no idea I was getting 30,000 session per month! Mind blown!
I immediately applied to MediaVine and got accepted even faster.
My first month with the MediaVine ad network I earned $467! That’s a huge increase from the $100 or so a month I earned from Adsense, and imagine my surprise when I found out Google Adsense is MediaVine’s largest media buyer!
So, I still was displaying Google Ads through my website, but MediaVine allowed me to keep a larger portion of the revenue those ads generated each month.
Lesson number two for those of you reading this, blogging income can be a passive income stream, but if you want to maximize your blog’s earning potential, don’t set it and forget it.
The blogging world and Internet is constantly changing, and if you aren’t doing your part to stay educated on all the blogging world has to offer and stay on top of industry changes, you could be leaving money on the table.
Had I simply researched ad networks besides Adsense and Media.net, I would’ve found MediaVine much sooner and enjoyed those $400+ months in passive income.
My stubbornness and tunnel vision brings me to my final and biggest, I could really kick myself in the butt mistake: Pinterest.
When I started blogging, the ruler of the land in terms of online traffic and getting more eyeballs to view your blog was SEO, also known as search engine optimization. So, I had no choice but to learn SEO.
I don’t regret the hours and hours I poured into learning all I could about search engine optimization, because aside from writing thoroughly researched evergreen content for my ugly website, it’s the main thing that has allowed me to continue to generate clicks and earn revenue without adding new content for eight frickin’ years!
However, around 2011, the whole concept of traffic generation started to change. Enter social media, and the holy grail traffic generator for bloggers, Pinterest.
I remember the day I discovered the power of Pinterest so vividly. It was 2013 and I was perusing Lisa Irby’s now defunct 2 Create A Website Forum (have you noticed I have a thing for Internet marketing forums?).
A forum member posted a link to one of Michelle Schroeder’s income reports. She was earning tens of THOUSANDS of dollars per month and most of her traffic came from something called Pinterest. What is this Pinterest sorcery, eh?
How the heck was this blogger who started blogging after me earning more than me, and what the heck was Pinterest?
Now I know people will say it’s bad to compare yourself to other people’s success, especially if you haven’t put in the work that they have, but competition can also be a benchmark and an opportunity to evaluate and change your own blogging strategy.
I opened a new tab to find out what this Pinterest thing was about. I went ahead and signed up for it to see just how this thing works. I pinned some pins, joined a few group boards and pinned there too, but then concluded Pinterest was a fluke, certainly was no match for SEO, and would eventually die out. A complete waste of my time.
Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong.
Pinterest did not die out, certainly was not a fluke, and because of the site’s built-in SEO, turns out it was a match for actual SEO as far as search engine rankings and traffic generation was concerned.
I.really.dropped.the.ball.here. Especially since my blog’s topic is one of Pinterest’s top niches.
I feel a little faint when I reminisce too long on not only the money I’ve lost but the eons and eons of traffic I missed out on by obsessing over SEO and not taking Pinterest seriously.
Luckily, Pinterest has only gotten more popular since I first discovered it, and there’s still more room for me to utilize the platform to grow my site’s traffic and income.
My third and final lesson, don’t get so wrapped up in one traffic generation strategy or method of growth for your blog.
Remain open and try different methods to grow your following and income because as I mentioned above the Internet is always changing, so you never know what method or strategy will help your blog’s income explode.
Passive income is great! I love the fact that I’m not one of those people who just dreams of passive income, I’m actually earning it. However, I realize, if I want to earn more in passive income, maybe I shouldn’t be so passive about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Funny how that works!
So, I’ll be adding new content to my ugly website, updating existing content, exploring new monetization methods, and finally diving deeper into Pinterest to drive more traffic to my blog and increase my residual earnings.
But, wouldn’t that mean my blogging income wouldn’t be so passive anymore? Well, not necessarily, because I’ll still be earning residuals from the articles I wrote years ago, but adding new articles will sweeten the pot for future earnings.
Let’s Chat — Do you see the power of passive income? Do you think passive income is possible for you, and if so, what types of passive income streams do you hope to build? What lessons have you learned from my mistakes that you’ll avoid in your passive income journey?
Did you enjoy this post? If you did, don’t forget to pin it for later and follow me on Pinterest!