passive income money

Many people have heard that blogging can earn them thousands of dollars of passive income per month, and it’s true. But what they don’t know is how to do it.

According to Income School, here are average monthly passive income earnings you can expect to make from a well monetized blog for posts that are at least 8 months old:

# PostsUnder PerformingExpectedStretch Goal
101 Pageview
$0
300 Pageviews
$0
1,500 Pageviews
$5
10020k Pageviews
$800 – $4,000
Average: $1,338
50k Pageviews
$1,000 – $5,000
Average: $2,815
100k Pageviews
$2,000 – $5,000
Average: $2,908
500100k Pageviews
$2,000 – $5,000
Average: $2,908
200k Pageviews
$5,500 – $13,000
Average: $7,270
500k Pageviews
$10,000 – $25,000
Average: $14,540
source

This guide to passive income with a monetized blog is specifically for beginners looking to better understand how to make passive income by blogging. We talk about Project 24’s methods as they have helped ourselves, and many others, to much passive income success 🙂

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What’s a Monetized Blog?

What’s a Monetized Blog? A monetized blog is a website where writers with experience, knowledge, or who have carried out research on a certain subject matter answer questions. The content may be monetized in various ways such as display ads, affiliate marketing or eCommerce.

A blog is a source of information on topics the writer cares about, and shares with the world. The first and foremost goal should always be to provide value to the people reading it, then to make passive income. If you receive a significant amount of monthly traffic (meaning people who visit your website), then you have the opportunity to make money from that traffic by monetizing it.

According to Income School, a monetized blog can expect to make 1,000$ / month of passive income once the traffic reaches about 30k monthly page views following their methodology.

Source

How to Monetize a Blog For Passive Income

There are many ways to make money from a monetized blog. For instance, you can monetize a blog through affiliate marketing, you could sell a product you have created yourself  you could turn it into a membership site, or you can post ads on your site, and so on. In order to generate passive income from your blog, there are some steps you should follow, and here is a closer look at them.

1. Choosing the Right Niche

Before you get started, you should have an idea of what niche, or topic, you would like to talk about. A niche is a specialized segment of a market, and often a niche can be related to a products or services. Your niche is your area of focus and the target audience you would like to talk to.

The niche you choose should be something you are passionate about. What are you interested in? What do you find yourself doing in your free time? What excites you and makes you happy? These are the kinds of topics you should write about. You should also be sure your niche has a big enough audience and that it does not have too much competition.

If you are still scratching your head, Income School offers an Excel spreadsheet with over 350 niche site ideas to help you make a choice.

2. Creating a Successful Passive Income Blog

In order to have a successful blog, you will need to provide quality content, establish yourself as an authority in your niche, and provide timeless content, among other things. Let’s have a look at what all this means.

Creating Quality Content

You have probably heard this a million times, but it is still worth repeating – content is King! People visit websites because they want quality content that answers their questions. Similarly, your website needs to offer quality to its visitors. Such content will help your rankings on search engines like Google. Obviously, the higher you rank on Google, the more traffic you will get. In fact, with some affiliate marketing programs, you need to have great content in place before you can promote the related products. But that does not mean you need to have tens of quality pages before you get a chance to promote your products.


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But what is “quality content”? Having thirty posts that are competitive in content and length and style compared to your competition is usually good enough to get you started. But how should you structure your articles, and analyse the competition to have a chance at beating them in Google’s rankings? At Income School, in Project 24, Ricky and Jim talk about how to generate income through organic traffic to grow your online business. We love their authenticity and how real they are about the work that needs to be put in to build a successful blog. Their webinar below covers mostly everything you need to get started blogging:

Follow The Content Mix

The content mix according to Project 24:

  • ⅓ Response posts: Answer a question in about 1,350 words
  • ⅓ Staples Posts: About 2,200 words, list-type posts
  • ⅓ Pillar Posts: Between 3,000 to 5,000 words depending on the level of competition


Learn More About Project 24

As a quick summary, they help you through the process of writing the first 30 articles on your blog, and creating EAT with a YouTube channel. Project 24 provides access to the entire process required to create a successful passive income blog. We highly recommend their course (we are Project 24 members 🙂 The surprise we got is that the course actually contains 12 courses and is updated weekly! Including their 60 actionable steps to building a successful niche blog. And their process truly works! Here is a testimonial from satisfied Project 24.

Creating Timeless Content (“Evergreen”)

Since the idea is to make passive income from your blog once you monetize it, you should create content that does not have a short lifespan. Therefore, be very selective about the kind of content you create, so that it can offer value to your site visitors several years from now. For instance, if you offer high-quality personal motivation advice, chances are that it will still be valuable to your readers several years later.

However, if you talk about the latest cell phones, the chances that it is still relevant in 10 years from now are very low. If you focus on providing information on products that quickly run out of fashion, then you will have a problem making sustainable passive income. For instance, if your blog is about the latest smartphones, of course you can make money off your site, but not passively, as you will have to keep updating your content as newer smartphones are released on the market.

Build EAT

Google has never put so much focus on “EAT” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). A blog should be a website that people trust due to the quality content and/or the authority of the person providing the content. For example, you will probably trust a blog offering medical advice that was written by a qualified MD, rather than a poorly written post by someone who does not work in the medical field. Google views such articles the same way, and they are currently lowering the rankings of sites that lack EAT.



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You should be an authority on the subject you decide to focus on in your blog. If you offer a guide on how to tour a particular part of the world, you should have some personal experience in your field so as to earn the trust, not only of your fans, but also of Google.

Be an Authority in Your Niche

Another reason you should be more than just a blogger and become an authority in your niche to earn a passive income is that people will promote your site for you even without your effort. When you offer someone true value through your content, they will gladly link to your site, and your posts will go viral and keep visitors trickling in years after you first uploaded it. Consequently, if such a site has products you sell directly or through an affiliate link, then they will continue to bring you a passive income even though you are not offering any new content to your site visitors. Here are some ways to make your blog more authoritative:

  • Write about a topic you are conversant about, that you know and have actual experience with. Be well-informed, well read, and honest about the topics you explore in your blog, and provide your audience as much value as possible.
  • Include a lot of personal details about your expertise and research in your posts thoroughly. Preferably base your content on your actual experiences or interview experts like we do.  Demonstrate your knowledge in your about page and add your contact information such as address and phone number.
  • Create a YouTube channel to share your knowledge. Google will also consider you more of an authority if you have your own YouTube videos linking to your content.

Learn more about establishing EAT in the Project 24 course that contains a step-by-step guide to building EAT.

3. Deciding How to Monetize Your Blog

You probably know that there are many ways to make passive income from a blog. Here are some ideas.

Selling Your Own Products

One way to monetize your blog is by selling your own products or services. Such products may be physical, or digital (eBooks or courses). For instance, you could sell a weight loss eBook. If your methods work, and you have established yourself as an authority in that niche by providing valuable evergreen information that has helped people lose weight, your product can, theoretically, keep selling indefinitely. Learn more about selling your own products (or dropshipping) in the article on eCommerce on our blog below.

See Our eCommerce Guide

(Note that the fitness niche is very competitive, learn more about evaluating the competition of a niche in Project 24).

Ad Placement (Google Ads)

Google Ads, among other ad brokers, allow you to monetize your blog by placing ads on it. This can be extremely lucrative and passive depending on how much traffic your site generates. You can also post paid ads from private businesses on your site, and they can pay you something in return. With a good amount of traffic, you can have many brands fighting for a chance to have their products advertised on your site. Project 24 contains a complete course on maximizing revenue for ads depending on your traffic.

Affiliate Marketing

Millions of people make passive income through affiliate marketing and with a blog, it is fairly easy to market your affiliate products to an established audience. If you would like to learn more about how to get started in affiliate marketing, click on our Affiliate marketing guide for beginners.

See Our Affiliate Marketing Guide

Memberships

Another way to monetize your audience is to create a membership site. However, keep in mind that members will be expecting up to date content and that will require ongoing work on your behalf. It can be very fun and lucrative, but if you are looking to create a completely passive website than keep in mind that memberships will require ongoing updates to keep paid users subscribed and interested.

See our Guide to Making a Membership Site Here

YouTube

Videos are incredibly popular and not only can they provide your site more authority, videos uploaded to YouTube can also provide you passive income through ad placement. To be eligible to have a monetized channel, YouTube currently requires you to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on your channel. You also need to pass the review process, but once it’s done you can make considerable income. YouTube also allows monetized channels that meet requirements to offer memberships within their platform. Project 24 actually also includes a full YouTube course!

See more in our YouTube guide!


Of course, you can combine these ways of monetizing your blog in order to have multiple revenue streams from the same blog and increase your income!

How Passive is a Monetized Blog?

A monetized blog can offer extraordinary passive income. You can literally go for several months and years without posting new content and still make money off your monetized blog. The trick is to set it up properly so that traffic keeps flowing because the existing content is good enough to maintain a nice flow of interested readers. You can even put in place measures that ensure that people post on your site and keep it active even after you have withdrawn your input, which can provide fresh content. We highly recommend Project 24 to learn how to do this. Check out another inspiring testimonial about their method below:


Learn More About Project 24

Startup Costs

Setting up a blog does not cost much, and many people have made thousands thanks to their successful blogs. They did not have to go into debt to get there either. Therefore, you don’t have to have a lot of cash to create a successful monetized blog that provides passive income. Your main investments will be buying a domain and paying for your hosting. Promoting your site does not cost much either. We highly recommend the following services which are excellent value for money (10$/year domain name with NameCheap and 4$/month for the first year of hosting with SiteGround):

Difficulty

Creating a monetized blog is fairly easy. Getting a site up and running is easy and if ever you are lost, there are thousands of free YouTube videos demonstrating how to, and choosing the right niche based on your passions might take some research. What many people might find to be somewhat of a challenge is actually putting in the “hard” work of writing enough quality content to launch their blog. Project 24 is real about the time it actually takes (24 months) to make it happen and even replace your current income. But really anyone can do it if they follow the right methodology and put in the work.

Time

Time is required to set up a successful blog that can offer a passive income. It can take a few weeks or even months to create the content required to generate enough traffic. And it will take Google and other search engines just as much time to index your site and start showing it in search results. According to Income School, you should aim to make $1,000/month with 30k pageviews on your site. They also state in their timeline that by following their methodology, you can lead you to making over $7,000 by month 24! Learn more here.

Risk

The financial risk of starting a passive income blog is very low, especially since you can make one for about $4.5/month (hosting and domain name fees). That is why blogging for a living is such an incredible passive income opportunity! The big risk is your time. If you spend hours and hours creating content for a blog that does not succeed, you will have wasted copious amounts of your time. You can save considerable amounts of time by learning from Ricky and Jim’s experience in Project 24.

Seasonality

Seasonality is not a problem that should affect your passive income potential too much, as long as your content is not seasonal. If the niche you decide to focus on can be affected by seasonality, then you need to be aware you will have dips in traffic. For instance, if your blog is about VTT biking, fishing or Christmas, you should obviously expect to see dips in traffic when the season for these events comes to an end. Try to focus on less seasonal, more evergreen topics.

Return on Investment

Being a passive income source that does not cost much to set up, but has the potential to make thousands of passive income dollars, a monetized blog can offer you excellent return on your investment. Additionally, since you are making a blog that should earn you a passive income, you will not have to spend as much money on its maintenance.

Get started with Project 24!

Related Questions

How do beginner bloggers make money? Beginner bloggers can make money from their blog by selling physical or digital products (eBooks or courses), dropshipping, affiliate marketing or ad placement. Bloggers can also offer services and other means to monetize their blog, such as coaching and consulting.

How can I make $1000 a month blogging? You can make $1000 a month blogging by following Project 24’s tested method which consists in 60 clearly defined and actionable steps. The steps include choosing a profitable niche, writing 30 articles based on competitive research, and creating authority (EAT) with 10 YouTube videos.

How much do bloggers make? According to Income School, blogs with 10 posts and 1 to 1,500 page views make an average of $0 per month. Blogs with 100 posts 50k page views make an average of $2,825 per month. Blogs with 500 posts and 200k page views make an average of $7,270 per month. The average EPMP is $29.08.