If you’re reading this I assume you have a pretty good idea what ‘passive income’ means, although I’ve seen a recent number of articles and videos on the subject with misleading information and wrong assumptions.
So, what is passive income?
Passive income refers to the activity of earning an income by way of an asset in which regular input by way of extra time, resource, further assets or money are not needed in order to earn regular income.
Dividend payments from an investment could be considered a passive income. Your investment asset earns you a return without your needing to, well, do anything.
A second example – a closer topic to a lot of the online earning methods we discuss here at Money Boost – could be a YouTube video. If you create a YouTube video today and upload to YouTube your video could be seen by hundreds, thousands or even millions of people each year. You could still be earning money from YouTube 5 years or more after uploading it. Your YouTube video is your asset and although you don’t need to do anything else, you’ll still earn an income for years to come. The creation of your YouTube video is the work, but all earnings after the first are a result of passive income.
If you’d like to find out more the topic, check out our feature on creating a YouTube video and earn a passive income
Now we’ve explored passive income in a little more detail, let’s talk about a way you can earn a passive income or side hustle with a blog.
Benefits of Blogging over being a YouTuber
In some of our features you may have read about the benefits of being a YouTuber and how today is the best time to start, but there are many people who prefer not to be in front of a camera. In fact ‘not wanting to be in front of the camera and have my face on video’ is the biggest reason people chose not to become YouTubers.
What’s not always considered is that a YouTuber is a vlogger (which means a video blogger). It’s the same concept but just visual instead of written.
If your skills side towards the penned word rather than spoken, writing a blog could be the perfect way to remain anonymous but still manage to create a following, readers and an income.
What could I blog about?
Anything! That’s the beauty of blogging, it’s your words, in your voice, covering almost any subject you want to (as long as it’s not hateful or illegal).
You don’t have to confine yourself to a set of rules, or way of doing things – it’s up to you.
Although any topic is open for blogging, you do have to consider three important points when considering what to blog or write about:
Would anyone want to read what I’m writing about – if you want to write about what you had for dinner, and your afternoon sunbathing in the garden, you may find friends and family may want to read you day to day activity, but you may struggle to find others who do.
Are there businesses that are targeting the audience I feel would read my blog – the whole point of writing a blog is to earn money, so you need to find a subject that no only will people want to read but you could find adverts to place on your blog to earn money. If your blog was about gardening, with lots of planting tips, techniques and tool reviews – there would be lots of advertisers to choose from like lawn care products or gardening tools like lawnmowers, hedge trimmers. The list goes on.
Are you answering questions – some of the most popular blogs on the net are ‘how to’ blogs teaching about niche topics or blogs that answers questions. Search engines such as Google are used billions of times every day and a very high percentage of these searches are questions.
‘What family meals can be made in 15 minutes’
‘How can I make my broadband faster’
‘What are the best beaches to visit in the summer’
‘How can I make video calls with my iPad’
With every question there needs to be an answer. Google answers those questions by providing what they believe are the best websites that answer those questions. The exact way Google decides on which websites to show has been a long-guarded secret but some fundamentals are known such as how popular the website is, how well the questions are answered, do people stay on the website or quickly return to Google and continue looking, do other popular websites link to the site etc….
If your blog can answer popular questions well, give in-depth advice with clear instructions on how to solve or provide a reply to the search – then you may find people finding your blog again and again.
How do I make money with a blog?
The most common way to make money through a blog is to show adverts. You can then earn a commission on the products sold (for example a % of the sale price) or you can earn money for every time someone clicks on an advert shown on your website.
The two most common ways of earning advertising money are:
Amazon Associates – you can earn a commission, which can be up to 10% of the products selling price, by promoting products sold by Amazon on your website. When someone clicks on the advert on your blog and makes a purchase, Amazon will give you a commission. You can keep track of all your earnings through your Amazon reports and dashboard and Amazon pay directly in to your bank account each month
Google Adsense – Google Adsense has been for around 15 years now. The concept is simple. Google Adsense gives you a small piece of code you add on to your blog. Adverts are driven by Google and shown on your blog which. The adverts shown are generally those related to either your websites topic, or using cookies Google will show adverts based on your visitors recent searches. You don’t have to worry about choosing which adverts are shown, as Google will take care of this – but what will be of interest to you is that Google will pay you every time someone clicks on an advert on your site. This may be as low as a few pence, but up to £1 or more. The more clicks the more you will earn. Don’t though click on your own ads to earn more money – Google has very intelligent and sophisticated tracking tools to prevent this and you’ll end up with your account being blocked!
How do I create a blog?
Creating your own blog can be straight forward enough. There are lots of tools and software to help you do this.
If you want to create a blog to earn money the best tool to check out is WordPress.
WordPress was built to allow anyone to create a website or blog with minimal technical skills. There is a small learning curve, but there are hundreds of great tutorials to be found to help you get started.
These are the things you will need in order to create your own blog:
A domain name – this will be your website address, something like www.johnsmithsblog.co.uk . A website address will cost around £8 per year
A Hosting account – you need somewhere to save your blog so that other people can see it. For this you need a hosting company. It sounds technical but can be pretty easy. A popular hosting company is Go Daddy and they have put together a great and low cost way to start up a blog for as low as £6.99 a month or even less during their sales. Visit the Go Daddy Start a Blog in 19 minutes page for more information
