Passive Income Copywriting

Copywriting, aka ghost writing, allows you to outsource your services as a content writer and make money from the comfort of your home by writing articles, press releases, eBooks, newspaper gigs and even infographics. However, most copywriting jobs consist in active income, not passive income.

There are two main ways to generate passive income as a copywriter: creating a monetized blog or copywriting agency. Niche site blogs with enough well-written monetized content can generate $1,000 upwards per month. Copywriting agencies can generate excellent monthly passive income for owners.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can make a passive income with copywriting, notably by creating a blog and monetizing the traffic, or creating a copywriting agency. We will touch on freelancing because it may be a great place to start if you have no experience copywriting.

How to Make Passive Income Copywriting

There are a couple of ways you can make passive income as a copywriter. One way to start out is by freelancing. You could also write for your own blog or build an agency.

You can earn a passive income as a copywriter in two main ways: by creating your own blog monetizing your traffic, or by creating your own copywriting agency. Otherwise, you will spend quite a considerable amount of time writing articles for others.

We highly recommend Project 24 by Income School to learn Copywriting for the web!

1. Write As a Freelancer [Not Passive]

Writing as a freelancer for others is a great way to get started and gain experience. This can be a fulltime job, or something you can do on weekends, during down time or after work to supplement your income. However you will not be making passive income, you will be making active income (definition on our blog here). Do not be too harsh on yourself though, it is a great place to start if you have no copywriting experience.

Find Clients on Your Preferred Platform

You could look for customers online, but a great place to start is on iWriter.com. It is an excellent platform that puts writers in touch with companies and other freelancers looking for content. iWriter.com is a great place to write for others and ramp up your skills.

Other platforms like People Per Hour, Freelancer, Content Mart and Upwork offer well paying jobs and contracts of up to $1,000 a month from larger companies. You can use all of these platforms to interact with customers, set up long-term partnerships, find unique projects and develop your skills.

Make $1,500 Per Month From Home

The average yearly salary of new copywriters is $41k and experienced writers (10 to 19 years) is $60k. (source PayScale)

You could also aim for an active income side hustle, by writing articles for others on platforms and creating connections with clients. You could start making $1,500 a month writing with the right clients and jobs from the comfort of your home if you are new to the job.

Working per project or hourly is active income though. However, if you get to a point where you have your own copywriters working for you, then you can gain a constant stream of passive income without having to write the articles yourself anymore.

Transform Freelancing to Passive Income

In addition to being highly rewarding from a work-balance perspective, a career as a copywriter allows you to expand your horizons and become an expert in a variety of areas. This is however an active income stream as it demands your time and physical presence. But we are interested in passive income 😉 So let’s see how you can eventually transform this into a passive source of income.

2. Create a Monetized Blog [Passive]

Creating content for your own monetized blog is an excellent way to create passive income. In Project 24 by Income School, Ricky and Jim explain exactly how to make passive income through blogging. They provide a very clear, proven way to write articles and build blogs, and monetize them to become passive income sites.

Learn more about Income School’s Project 24 here

If you decide to create your own blog you may have to learn new skills, like how to build a website, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click ads). A cool thing about this is that you can easily learn from others and from Ricky and Jim’s Project 24 which will save significant time.

However, you can easily create and write for your own blog while you are still working a full time job, or while you are freelancing as a copywriter. We highly recommend Rick and Jim’s course for beginners, as you can quickly learn from two professionals, and a large community of people, who have been building successful passive income blogs for years now.

Hire Writers to Make it More Passive

Another thing you will enjoy in their course is that they just recently hired a team of writers to build their passive income blogs They actively cover their hiring process, what’s working and what isn’t, and provide videos to train writers so you don’t have to. You could also hire an editor to ensure quality is maintained.

Make $1,000/Month Passive Income

According to Project 24 by Income School, following their methods, once your traffic is around 30,000 page views per month you can earn around $1,000 monthly passive income from a well monetized blog.

According to Income School, copywriters for a monetized blog can make over 7,000$ / month of passive income once the traffic reaches about 170k monthly page views which takes about 24 months according to their timeline.

You can monetize your blog through affiliate programs (guide on how to sell with affiliates available here on our site) and through Google Adsense. And then, once you are financially stable and have enough experience, then you can hire writers to write for you.

3. Create a Copywriting Agency [Passive]

Creating a copywriting agency is a more advanced step and it will not be passive at first. You will have to setup the business in a way for it to become passive for that to happen. But it’s a move you can take once your blog is making comfortable passive income or once you are ready to take things to the next level. Starting your own business and hiring a team of writers to grow it is a great way to produce more content and serve more people while boosting your income.

If you began as a freelancer and would like to transition out of it, you can start by working with other freelancers on the platforms where you sell your copywriting services. Hire a few freelancers and send them jobs that you have. You can basically outsource your content writing to them, pay them a lower price and keep the difference for yourself by being the middleman. You could also hire them to write for your blog to build up your content.

Start Your Agency

If you see that things are going well, you may even consider hiring people in your city and creating a business entity. Rick and Jim did that and talk about it in their course, Project 24 (learn more here). They explain how, with “Project Rexburg”, their goal is to build up their passive income sites as fast as possible by hiring college students and training them to write. They have hired over 50 people so far! There is a lot to learn from them if this is the route you would like to take we highly recommend their course.

Once things are rolling smoothly, you can set up a team to run your business. At that point, the business will be less dependant on you. You could take time off knowing that your team will handle creating content, meeting deadlines and keeping all your customers happy.

Build & Acquire New Skills

It’s important to note that no matter which route you decide to take, being a copywriter freelancer, building your own passive income blog or starting a copywriting agency, this will take time, perseverance, determination and motivation.

One way to stay motivated in more difficult times is to join a community. Passive Income School’s Project 24 offers a huge community of people who are also creating their own blogs and writing content to create passive income. It’s an excellent place to learn how to build a successful blog from people who are doing it every day.

Just keep in mind that you don’t want to become an employee. You don’t want to have a 9/5 job (freelancing), but you want to be free to write content anytime you can (blogging). Keep in mind that you can also boost that passive income by outsourcing or by creating a copywriting agency.

How Passive is Copywriting?

Copywriting is by nature an active business opportunity. As a freelancer, you will need to spend quite a lot of time connecting with clients, setting up your profile, writing high-quality articles and discovering new ways to grow. You get paid a flat rate for every article you make.

However, writing for yourself on a blog can provide you passive income. And once you start hiring people and letting them do the job in your place, you can make this business more and more passive. You can easily outsource your work and only deal with management between your clients and your writers. If you really want to make it passive, you can hire someone else to manage your writers by creating an agency.

Startup Costs

The amazing thing about copywriting is that you can start with no upfront investment. All the platforms you can work on require zero upfront fees. You just need a computer and an internet connection. You don’t even need to have Word installed on your computer, Google Docs does the job just fine.

You simply join a platform, match with clients and make money. However, you might need to invest some money if you decide to create your own business. You’ll need to invest in an accountant, possibly rent a location and pay your employees salaries.

Scalability

Freelancing as a copywriter is not scalable, however, blogging or outsourcing can be passive and is very scalable. The more high quality content you can produce quickly, the more you can scale. Rick and Jim are in this process and talk about it in their course Project 24. It’s a great place to learn more.

Difficulty

In the beginning, copywriting might seem a little difficult, especially if you’ve never written articles before. However, after a few years, you’ll notice your grammar getting much better, and your business skills improving.

You may have ups and downs, like dealing with unhappy customers, low ratings and rejected articles. You might want to give up, but persevere. Move forward and after 4-5 years you’ll look behind and be super thankful for everything you’ve accomplished.

Time

In terms of time investment, expect to invest around 3-4 hours a day freelancing. In 3-4 hours, you can easily earn around $100 at start. However, as you grow and improve your wiring speed and quality, you will be able to double, even triple your income for the same amount of time. 

For example, on iWriter, as a standard writer you can earn around $5 an hour, as a premium $10 an hour and as an elite $15 an hour. If you work four hours a day for 25 days, that’s over $500 as a standard writer and over $1.5k as an elite writer. If you invest more time, you’ll earn more. Once you get to a point where you have your business up and running, you can only spend one-two hours a day managing it.

Following Income School’s formula and courses, you could build a $7k passive income blog in two years by writing 100+ articles in a profitable niche. Your site would need to have 170k monthly page views, but it is doable with Rick and Jim’s tested formulas. They are currently testing the agency model, and we can’t wait to hear about the results! Learn more here.

Risk

Copywriting is not risky. Make sure to quote your sources and write quality content for your clients. You can always stop whenever you want. Also, if you do create a business or agency, you can close it down if you suddenly stop having clients or if income gets tight. At that unfortunate point, you can move back to writing articles online, or invest your acquired income into something else.

Seasonality

This is a huge advantage of this passive income making method compared to other methods. There are always people looking for content to be written and you can become a copywriter anytime, in any season. The content may be seasonal, but there is always someone looking for a good writer.

ROI (Return On Investment)

In terms of ROI, as a freelancer, you can start making around $500 a month and then rapidly scale to over $1.5k a month. Then, once you land larger contracts, you can earn up to $10k a month for writing more specialized articles. Of course, that is active income, as a freelancer.

Ultimately, as a business owner or blogger, you can earn as much as you can produce. If you can produce quality content, get it to the right audience in a profitable niche, you can monetize your blog in multiple ways (learn more here). Depending on how large your business is and how many content writers you have, you can earn beyond $50k a month after taxes.

Related Questions

How much can a copywriter make? On most platforms, new writers make $5/h, premium writers $10/h and elite $15/hour. When working for a company, a copywriter can make between $25 and $35/h. However, following Income School’s courses, you can build a $7k passive income blog in two years by writing 100+ articles in a profitable niche.

How can I make passive income as a beginner? This site, Beginners Passive Income is dedicated to providing beginners guides with how to build passive income streams. Check out our blog to learn more.