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Chapter 6: Making Passive Income From a Blog or Other Content
Those last three chapters have given you an insight to what are some of the most popular methods of generating passive income. Of course many people will also create a blog to help back-up their products and to strengthen their brand but you don’t even need that – just a landing page, an affiliate link and the right advertising campaign.
But what if you don’t want to sell a product at all? Can you make completely passive income from a website or blog alone?
The answer is: yes and no.
Over time, if you build a website up to be big enough and to provide a huge amount of free information, if you can rank at the top of Google and if you can build an active community, then in theory, you can get a massive flow of traffic that will be self-sustaining for several years, even without you having to have any consistent input.
If you then place advertising on this website, then you can potentially earn up to a few hundred dollars daily and profit. But this will take a lot of time and a lot of luck.
Therefore, most of the best ways to make money from a blog are going to involve regular input on your behalf, which will mean writing new blog posts and running a social media page. One way to get around this is to find a write (or several) and pay them to write content for your site. Make sure it is good though.
Another way to get around this is to buy a website that already comes with a big audience and a big community + plenty of content. To get this, you’re going to have to spend a large amount of money but this can be a good investment if you can make that up-front expense. Browse marketing forums and webmaster forums where you’ll be able to find people selling sites and try contact big sites directly. A good strategy is to contact people who have a massive audience but haven’t maximized their earning potential yet with ads and affiliate links – it’s likely that they’re not going to know just how valuable their site is just yet and that means they might accept a good deal.
Another strategy is to use insider information and to target a website that’s in a niche that you think is about to become more in-demand. In other words, if you have a tip-off that a big brand is about to take the world by storm and you can buy a website about that brand before that happens, you can stand to profit in a BIG way!
If you can buy a website that is already getting a lot of visits, then theoretically you can simply add some adverts to it or some affiliate links and start profiting immediately!
Content Marketing and Branding
But that said, there’s nothing wrong with running a blog the old fashioned way. This might involve a little more effort than a truly passive income model but it’s still passive in as much as you aren’t trading time for money. And if it’s a subject you love, then you shouldn’t mind writing about it regularly.
The key to being successful with this kind of business is again to get inside the heads of your visitors and to offer something really different. That means creating a brand that once again will appeal to a very specific type of person rather than trying to appeal to everyone possible. You need to think about branding your site so that people will instantly know what your site is all about and whether it is for them and you need to be very consistent in delivering quality content that is also going to offer something a bit different from the competition.
Don’t think that you can make a lot of money by populating a generic site with generic content like ‘How to Get a Six Pack’ (500 words). If you want to be the next Tim Ferriss, then you need to write about things that sound exciting and that no one has read before. That might mean a new training technique, or it might mean a challenging intellectual expose on a particular aspect of training. It means writing in a way that is entertaining and engaging and it means writing in a way that is in-depth and provides links to useful resources.
Then it means building up that brand visibility on social media, getting follows and getting people to repost and re-share.
It means being consistently brilliant and on-point in other words and having a clear mission statement that lets people feel like they’re part of a ‘movement’ just by following you. Again, it’s about their identity and knowing the psychology of your audience.
But meanwhile, there are also a number of useful growth hacks you can use to get surges of hits for your site. One is to write a post that will be particularly irresistible for a certain audience and then finding a route to market again – in this case that might perhaps mean a community on Google Plus or Facebook. Post there and if you’re fortunate, this can lead to hundreds of thousands of hits overnight!
Better yet is ‘influencer marketing’. This means finding a big influencer in the niche and getting them to promote your site. Of course that means you need to offer something else in return, whether that means you also link to them or it means that you provide them with free content. To be successful with this, the best strategy is to start with those smaller influencers that are around your level and then to slowly ‘climb the ladder’. Each time you get a shout-out from one of them, you’ll gain more new followers and you’ll be able to approach someone even bigger next time!
The best way to get influencer marketing and make big money from a blog quickly? Network in person with someone who happens to own a massive website. It’s not easy but it is possible!
More Strategies for Earning Passive Income From a Website
There are other ways you can earn even more truly passive income from a website too if you so wish. One is to use a subscription model. There are plenty of WordPress plugins that will allow you to do this easily and completely for free and if you content is compelling enough, you might find people are willing to sign up – creating a recurring income that is much more stable and reliable than you may get from ads! Even donations can work as a model! Or what about having a ‘pay wall’ for your very best content? This works particularly well for those ‘static websites’ that act like large repositories for information – and that kind of business model is most effective when you target a niche that relies on lots of information. Targeting specific careers and industries can work very well for example, as can providing a resource for people studying a particular topic!
Another option is to create a ‘SAS’ or ‘Software As a Service’. This might mean making an online calculator, a tool that organizes people by providing to-do lists, a CMS or a dating website. Then you charge for membership. This will require a little coding skill but you can either handle that yourself, or outsource it to a coder through a site like UpWork or Elance, as long as you have the good idea to
start with. (Quick-but-very-important-tip: not every idea needs to be ‘unique’ to be very profitable! Sometimes it’s best to copy what is working for someone else!)
Chapter 7: Service Arbitrage
The problem with a lot of the ideas that we’ve gone over so far, is that they may seem somewhat abstract or even quite confusing. If you’re someone who has never created a website and who would never read a PDF on their computer, then you might struggle to get into the correct mindset of someone who would buy these kinds of products. Therefore, you might struggle to make a business like this work.
So how about we simplify things for a moment and go back to basics: selling a service.
The good news is that there are a number of ways you can make money from selling a service and turn that into a passive source of income. One example was to create the ‘SAS’ or ‘Software As Service’, which basically means automating a service you provide. The best example of this comes from Matt Mullenweg, best known as the creator of WordPress. WordPress is a brilliant example of a service being ‘productised’ where Matt actually took his website creation business and turned it into a simple tool that would cut out the middle man. There were countless ways that WordPress could have been monetized but one option would simply be to charge people to create the site. Similarly, you could easily charge someone for a piece of software that might fix broken video files, or you could charge them to use a piece of software that would churn out images that could be used as stock photos. Another great example of this is ‘CopyScape’. CopyScape provides a service by checking to see if there are any duplicate copies of content on the web. This is something that might previously have been handled manually but with CopyScape, it’s possible to check countless articles for a few cents.
But if you’re not into making software, then this might still seem like a business model that is out of reach. Fortunately, we have another trick up our sleeves…
Reselling Services
Service arbitrage literally means that you are buying something and then selling it on for more. Arbitrage normally refers to the process of buying and selling securities or currency and selling them off simultaneously in different markets for a profit.
Doing this with services is simple. You find someone who is looking to hire a writer or a web designer for $30 an hour. Then you find a service that provides writing and web design for $20 an hour. Then you simply pass the order on from the client, straight to the service provider! This is another example of a near-perfect business model because all you have actually had to do is to refer an email that you received from the client on to the creator. This will take you barely any time, while at the same time allowing you to make a healthy profit!
- License: Master Resell Rights
- Category:Ebooks
- Tags:2017 Ebooks Master Resale Rights