Guest blogging takes much time and effort. Usually, people start a blog for fun rather than to make money. If they like doing that, they get good at it and focus more on quality content and target audience.
However, if you are good at blogging and have good traffic and a loyal audience, earning money from your blog can be a great bonus for your hard work.
Adding passive income streams will give you more money, flexibility, and freedom. The amount of money you can earn from your blog will depend on how much effort you put in and how large your target audience is.
So, if you want to make a tidy sum every month, prepare for hard work and no time to spare. In this article, you will find the ten best ideas to generate passive income with tips and examples to start today.
Let’s get started.
What is Passive Income?
Passive income is any income that doesn’t require much work and maintenance. Unlike active income, passive income is often automatically generated, even when you sleep.
Algorithmic trading software can assist in alleviating anxiety and stress associated with trading time for money, bolstering confidence in your financial prospects.
Passive income can come from selling products, online courses, real estate, or other additional earnings in which you don’t need to participate actively. There are a surprising number of ways to generate passive income from blogging.
11 Legitimate Ways to Make Money Guest Blogging
1. Sell products via dropshipping
Many people fear selling physical products on the blog because they find it challenging.
Fortunately, nowadays, you can quickly sell products without having any store, package, or delivery. You can find many dropshipping companies that can do it for you.
Dropshipping is one of the most influential business models to help you transmit orders directly to the supplier. You can create an e-commerce store for customers to see and buy products.
The best thing about it is that you don’t need to manage the products you sell physically, and the supplier will take care of everything from packaging to shipping the product directly to the customers.
Starting a dropshipping business is not a get-rich-quick scheme because it requires some upfront investment to generate income.
You can still earn solid passive income if you don’t have much money. According to this report, some dropshippers make more than $100.000 per year.
However, you should be careful when investing in a particular product, especially one that doesn’t have a market. Take some time and find trending products in different niches to sell in your store.
The best way to build a successful dropshipping business is to set up a website on eCommerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, and Opencart to manage the inventory you can get from the product suppliers.
2. Create and sell eBooks
If you are an expert in your niche, you can write and sell an ebook. Doing that can take time and effort, but it is an excellent way to generate passive income for a long time.
You can gather valuable information and best tips in one PDF file, convert it to an ebook, and sell it on your blog or other places like the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing platform. Don’t expect instant success once your ebook is ready.
For example, Nomadic Matt, a travel blog with a vast following, sells destination guidebooks for budget travelers on his website about the places he visited many times.
Here are a few tips for selling your eBooks successfully:
- Give a reasonable price to your target audience to generate passive time in no time at all. In general, the pricing starts from $2.99 to $4.99. Anyway, check out what prices other writers offer in your niche.
- Promote your eBook through social media, webinars, regular emails, or guest blogging to tell the more relevant audiences about your ebook.
- Offer discounts on your ebook.
- Include experts or use case studies as examples in your work to reach out to those people.
- Give a few chapters of your ebook to download for free. In exchange, you can collect those email addresses to send them a friendly email to close the sale.
3. Promote other products and get steady commissions
You love and use some products related to your niche. If so, you can make the most of them, recommend them on your website, and get affiliate commissions.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective and simplest ways to profit from your blog by promoting other products.
You earn money when people use your referral link to purchase your recommended products. You need to create traffic sources to let people click on your links, and you will reap the benefits. Some things give higher commissions than others.
Fortunately, there are many affiliate networks out there to choose from. Select products or tools relevant to your audience and that you stand for to build trust with users.
For example, Adam Connell, the founder of Blogging Wizard, uses many valuable SEO services to manage his daily marketing routines. So when writing blog posts, he often mentions or writes reviews about these tools naturally.
4. Create challenges
If you want to change your life, start doing something. Any tiny changes like blogging daily, waking up earlier, or reading a book will positively impact your life.
The best thing about it is that all these small changes transform into good habits and stay with you for a long time. It is difficult for people to start changing their life instantly, and they want someone to kick them up the rear.
That’s why participation in different challenges can help positively change their lives, generating much passive income.
The PT Studio, a leading personal training company in Wigan, offers an online challenge for 30 days to get in shape with professional trainers and nutritionists.
They also provide prizes for the best body transformation over 30 days. It costs only £20, and users can easily buy it on the website.
Even if you launched your challenge 2-3 years ago, it still offers much value and generates passive income, although there are a lot of free challenges in an online world.
5. Offer consulting services
If you are an expert in your niche, why not offer consulting services to make money with your blog? You write and publish helpful information, tips, and tutorials about your expertise.
People read your blog posts and probably trust and know you.
One of the simplest ways to make money is to offer one-on-one consulting. For example, Cesar Ornelas provides individual consulting services about wrongful death to his target audience on the website.
Moreover, he evaluates your case for free to encourage more people to take action. The negative side is to make less per hour but reduce the number of people you can work with.
Another way to save time and improve your ROI is to offer productized consulting that helps people regarding a small part of the process.
For example, you can submit an SEO analysis or a diet plan to serve many people and save time on every consultation.
6. Sell online courses
Expectations are that the online education market will grow by $150 billion from 2022 to 2027.
Bloggers sell online courses in every niche, from Online MBA for working professionals to artificial intelligence and machine learning course, from weight loss to golfing.
People pay for these online courses because they offer solutions.
Like digital marketing tools, you can create and sell online courses without keeping stock or inventory to make money.
If you have specific skills, you can easily teach people those skills to fulfill people’s goals by creating an online course.
The best thing is that you don’t need to do it personally; it only requires some upfront investment in time, outline, and course recordings.
Before starting an online course, always learn how other people succeed and turn the main idea into an online course. That allows you to automate your cash flow and generate passive income once people buy your course.
Once you start, fix a reasonable price from $100 to $1,000. Don’t expect people to purchase from $5,000 until you are a known expert in your niche. It takes time and effort to grow your audience and build trust.
“If you want to sell your online courses at higher prices, you can do it, but make big promises. If you're going to sell them at low prices, you can also do it, but make small promises,” said Jay Knispel. “Anyway, the value of your promise should be at least 10X the price.”
7. Start an Etsy shop
If you create and sell handmade goods, you can benefit from an eCommerce platform like Etsy and make money online. It is one of the most popular platforms for creative people worldwide to sell handcrafted things. Here are a few tips to start a successful Etsy shop online:
- Optimize your product listings on your Etsy shop. Add relevant keywords for your listings to attract more potential customers to purchase from you.
- Get more 5-star reviews to convince people to buy things from your shop. Try to use quality photos and add compelling descriptions to your product listings. Once you deliver products to your audience, send a thank you notice for purchasing from you, give a 5-10 % discount for their subsequent purchases, and leave positive client reviews.
- Offer fast shipping and uniqueness. People don’t want to wait for ages to get their orders. Offer fast shipping of their products from 2 days up to 24 hours to make them buy more from you in the future. Another way to increase sales and passive income is to add uniqueness to your product listings. Tell about your unique features and stand out from other 100 shops.
8. Create a membership site
Creating a website with a membership fee is one of the most effective sources to get passive income on your terms. For example, you can offer a subscription box with your products or create a Facebook group with exclusive content.
Charging a monthly or lifetime membership fee will give you access to the group or site, use your resource, exclusive content, and special offers, and become part of your community.
Here is an excellent example from Elise Dopson, a well-known B2B writer who created an online community called Peak Freelance for writers and offered access to their private Slack group, expert interviews, paid products, and exclusive content.
What concerns content do you offer due to a paid subscription? Digital products like online courses, podcasts, webinars, ebooks, and guides don’t require shipping.
But if you offer physical goods, make sure that you should provide them based on your promises.
Creating a membership site won’t be a huge problem, primarily if you use a WordPress platform. There are different membership plugins you can try out and install additional membership plugins on your website.
9. Start display advertising
Display advertising is an underestimated source of passive income for bloggers.
If your blog generates massive traffic and has lots of helpful content, you can add your site to display advertising, such as Google Ads. The main requirement is that your website should have valuable content.
Once Google Ads approves your site, you can benefit from Google’s AdSense and monetize your website or YouTube explainer videos through ads.
AdSense shows ads on your blog based on your visitors and content. You will get a commission if someone clicks and buys the advertising product on your website.
Once you reach 200k pageviews, you can explore alternative options to AdSense for monetization. Consider these top alternatives to AdSense for maximizing your revenue potential.
10. Create a job board
If it makes sense for your website to generate passive income, try creating a job board. It is famous for employers to place job vacancies for job searchers.
You can offer premium features, such as unlimited access to your candidate database or sponsored jobs. People looking for a new job can take opportunities in-person or online.
There are many sites like ProBlogger, Inbound, or Upwork that you can check out for inspiration.
The best thing is that you don’t need to design a job board from scratch; you can purchase any proper theme for your job board and start earning money immediately.
But notice that building awareness of your job board is where the central part of your work must be to build killer customer relationships.
11. Offer sponsored blog posts
You can reach out to relevant brands and companies about potential partnerships if you have a large audience.
Let’s say you are an expert in your niche with a decent following. Sponsored posts can earn money as a content creator and promote relevant products on your blog.
You can write a product review or offer a piece of advice or recommendation by naturally mentioning any product.
For example, Katy Patalsky creates practical vegan recipes and organically includes different products in her blog posts.
If you find this way interesting, create a comprehensive and compelling media kit. One more thing you should pay attention to is learning more about your country's advertisement guidelines.
You must pay taxes on some products by law in some localities.
Wrap Up
When you start blogging, you probably want to share passion and knowledge with others and add value to people’s lives. Building your awareness and loyal audience can take some time and effort.
Once you do it, you can start generating passive income from your blog, giving you more freedom and flexibility to reach the next level.
That level will allow you to take a vacation and earn money without effort, find more help, and order new inventory.
The above-mentioned passive income ideas will help you earn money even when you sleep. You just need to figure out which way works best for you.
Author Bio
Irina Weber is a freelance writer and content strategist. She loves helping brands create, publish, repurpose, and distribute content through marketing channels. She regularly contributes to media outlets like SEW, Adweek, SME, SMT, and CMI. Follow her on Twitter @irinaweber048.
