Can Your Blog Truly Earn A Passive Income?

Sep 1, 2011, Blogging

If you’re familiar with what I talk about and teach on my blog, my videos, and in my coaching, you know that, in general, what I promote is building yourself a business doing things that will create a passive income for you down the road…that is putting work into something now that will continue to […]

If you’re familiar with what I talk about and teach on my blog, my videos, and in my coaching, you know that, in general, what I promote is building yourself a business doing things that will create a passive income for you down the road…that is putting work into something now that will continue to pay out cash to you long after you stop putting work into it.

 

You’ll also know that I am involved in several different endeavors that do provide passive incomes to me each month; niche review websites, my TileShowerDIY niche website, day trading, and even having some land with oil production I receive royalties on.

But some people have asked me the question along the lines of, “If you promote and teach doing things that create passive income, then why do you run this blog and teach blogging, because that’s definitely not passive.”

This is a great question, and I always welcome and appreciate your feedback and interaction here on the blog. Keep it coming!

At first thought, I would agree with everyone asking this. It’s something I do to create more exposure for me and my brand, and get leads for the different aspects of my business…in other words, just one more form of marketing.  You’re either going to spend dollars or time in marketing; PPC and other instant traffic cost you dollars, and blogging is simply marketing that just takes my time.  Without reservation, I’ll tell you a blog takes a lot of constant and consistent work. If you want to build an interactive community within your blog, and build authority and trust within your niche, you’re definitely not going to be able to write 5-10 posts and let it run on auto-pilot like you can with a niche site.

With that said, let me run this interesting thought by you. A blog can earn you a passive income, just not 100% hands-off…sort of a hybrid between traditional and passive income.

Let me explain what I mean. If you post an article that promotes a product or service you’re an affiliate for, or discusses a topic that will attract leads you can recruit into your network marketing business, once it is published it’s there on your blog forever – as long as you keep your blog alive.

The more you post, the wider you cast your net to catch fish, so to speak, giving yourself an increasing chance of getting traffic from the search engines or social media sources.  And, once they’re on your site, there’s a great chance they’ll click on a link that gives you an affiliate commission or fill out a form to join your business.

So, essentially every article you write and post is a passive income opportunity. Even if that individual post doesn’t link directly to something, it provides you a chance to gain the trust of the reader and show them a little bit more about you…then they’ll stick around and eventually they’ll land on a post that does link them to something that pays you!

So each individual post provides a passive income, but in whole, you will need to maintain the blog, keeping it active, responding to comments and such, to keep your community growing and thriving.  So, it’s not 100% hands-off, but you’re leveraging your time with each post you put out, with the power of compounding your efforts, gaining more momentum each time, with just the same or less amount of effort.

This is why I continue to advocate building a blog for yourself, whatever direction your driving your business.  It builds a great marketing platform, builds personal brand, and so many other benefits.  The first thing I would do if I had to start all over, would still be to start a blog around a topic I enjoy writing about and discussing with people.

If you’re involved in network marketing and main purpose of your blog is to be a source of acquiring leads, let me give you one big piece of advice.  The ultimate goal of building your network marketing passive income is likely so you don’t always have to keep working it and it will continue paying you.

But a trap I’ve seen so many people fall into, is they get caught up in all the different internet tactics and teaching those on their blog.  So, when their prospects join them in business, the new business partners see them as their technical support.  They then get bogged down helping their team with how-to’s on technical issues and have once again just created a never-ending job for themselves…not the original goal at all!

…So here’s my advice.  Keep your posts centered around mindset, why’s instead of how-to’s, big picture thinking, and dream building.  Then just recommend them to various products (whether you create them yourself or you’re an affiliate) that teach them the various aspects of building a business; blogging, getting traffic and leads, building a marketing funnel, and prospecting and recruiting, etc.  This way, they don’t automatically look at you as their technical support line, and when they do come to you with a question, you can simply refer them to a product that will help them (and make some money while doing it).

Okay, that’s it for today.  Keep writing, keep building, keep dreaming, and keep on pushing along!

 

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