Investing has gained popularity over the last decade (artificially extended bull markets can do that to you) and it made many people aware of concepts like active, residual, or passive income.
Meanwhile, the internet has grown and grown and the idea of generating a full-time income online has become widespread.
It is therefore not too weird to ask whether or not the two can be combined (wouldn’t that be nice?). Passive income is great and all but paper gains or only, well, paper gains, and if you want to generate a full-time passive income using dividends only, you’d better plan to live at least 200 years. So why not use the power of the internet to get you that full-time passive cash flow?
The short answer is NO, running a blog or content site will take time creating and updating content, looking for new ways to monetize while checking up on existing ones, and keeping up with the day-to-day administration. The long answer is NO BUT… You can turn any business (including online businesses) almost entirely passive by just making a couple of tweaks.
Generate Passive Blog Income
With some minor actions, you can turn your blog almost completely passive so it better fits your lifestyle. Keep in mind that outsourcing eats into your profits, so ensure your site already has some money coming in or you have a dedicated budget allocated to making your website grow.
Outsource Content
Step one is to outsource all content, this is by far the most tedious and repetitive task and also very easy to be outsourced. Depending on your budget and personal wishes, there are different options for you to realize this. Do you still want to do your own topic research and outsource the content? Or do you want to complete service to take care of everything for you? Let’s go through the available options.
Hire Your Own Writers
The cheapest and maybe the quickest option is to look online for content writers. General places for selling services like Upwork or Fiverr have an abundance of writers on them, although they can be hit or miss, and their monetization model where sellers are paying a commission makes it very attractive for starters on a low budget.
But there are also many options dedicated to finding writers like contentwritingjobs.com where you can pay per job post and find some great writing talent.
Alternatively, you can just source through social media like Twitter or Reddit to find your writers.
All of these platforms can enable you to find some great and affordable talent but will require some time to comb through all the applications. If you have no interest in doing such a thing, you might be interested in using one of several content writing services that did the vetting for you. You might have to pay more per article, but win back the time it takes to vet all your writers.
Use A Content Writing Service
Content writing services like Contentgather or BuySellText offer you a great content creation service that doesn’t require you to do any vetting. Just give them the topic you want them to write about and they spit out the article.
All that’s required from you (or your VA) is to do your own topic research (and pay your bills) and upload the content to your blog, although some services also offer that as an additional service.
Don’t want to do any topic research yourself? Why not go for an all-in done-for-you service instead?
Hire A Complete Done-For-You Service
If you want to outsource the complete content creation process, services like Niche Website Builders will take care of everything for you. Just sign up for one of their services for your website and their team will take care of topic research, content creation and upload everything to your blog.
This service takes a monthly subscription with a minimum amount ($700 at the time of writing), so they might not be the best recommendation for starters (unless you have a big budget to spend on your new project).
Get An Editor
Outsourcing content creation is a great start to passify (or passivify?) your content site but unless you hire a complete done-for-you service, you’ll still need to upload everything and make it all look pretty.
If you also want to skip this task, an editor will come in handy. Some editors are also skilled in SEO topic research or if you’re still a bit of a control freak you might still take care of this yourself. The final option would be to hire an SEO specialist to just do your topic research so you can hand over the list to your editor who takes care of the writers, while you’re spending the day at the beach.
Hire A Virtual Assistant
A great addition to your team of writers and editors would be to add a VA to the mix. Some virtual assistants also have some editing skills so you might get a 2-in-1 deal there.
But even apart from that, VAs are great for answering your e-mails and phone calls or being an intermediate between you and your content team. Closing the loop and further making your content site as passive as possible.
The best part is all of these functions have freelancers available, there’s no need to immediately hire full-time employees and get into long-term commitments.
Content sites are a great form of location-independent income and with the steps above can even be made almost entirely passive as well. Making it truly one of the best businesses to run today.
