I hate the term passive income. To me, it sounds like something you didn’t work for. The reality is that it takes a lot to generate ongoing income from your writing. The work that is considered passive writing income today, was blood, sweat, and tears yesterday.
Generating Passive Writing Income
In reality, there aren’t a lot of ways to generate ongoing income from writing.
Publishing your writing in a magazine is generally one-time income. The publication owns any extra reprint rights or even foreign translations. If the publication goes under, the rights may revert to you, but for the most part this is a one-time check. The good news is that most magazines pay pretty well.
Publishing a novel offers the opportunity for ongoing, passive writing income in the form of royalties. However, if you follow along with most authors, you will come to find out that your book has to sell very well to earn out the initial advance from the publisher. Once that happens, there is a significant delay between sales and royalties.
If the book keeps selling, you keep getting royalties though. So, just like content publishing, if you are in it for the long haul and can generate enough quality writing, you can get there for passive income from writing novels.
Create Passive Income Online
Writing online is the quickest and most viable source of passive writing income. However, it takes more than a couple of blog posts to earn online writing income.
Passive AdSense Income
The easiest way to turn your writing into ongoing income is with AdSense. All you have to do is at a snippet of code to the pages you publish, and Google fills in the ads. These days, with the new auto ads, you don’t even have to decide which type of ad to use, or where to place the AdSense ad.
As a writer, you can forget all the tutorial’s about how to generate income with AdSense and just do what you do best, write. The volume and quality of writing you generate will eventually lead to passive income.
Quality writing eventually gets links, and eventually rises into search rankings enough to generate quality income. Getting there, however, will take time, and lots of high-quality writing. You can speed the process up by developing and publishing multiple websites. The more you write, the more likely you are to find, and rank for well paying keywords.
Don’t get caught up in the race to find a single high-paying keyword, or high-paying blog post or website. Even if you are successful, someone will eventually come along and kick you off of your high-paying keyword rankings, or worse, a Google update will change everything.
Instead, focus on long-term consistency and base building. If you don’t depend on just a few pages ranking for just a few keywords, it is hard for your earnings to be disrupted.
Think of it like this. If you write a blog post that earns $1 per day, that is $30 per month in income. That isn’t much, but it pays for your hosting and name registration. You won’t get any bragging rights about your keyword research, or your high paying page.
However, if you keep writing, soon you could have 10 posts that earn $1 per day. That’s $300 per month. That won’t pay the mortgage, but it’s enough to start building your business — A second monitor so you can research and write more quickly. A better chair so you can sit longer and write more. A subscription to a keyword research service, or to website templates, or a faster internet connection. Or, hey, life isn’t all work. That’s a nice chunk of beer money… you know… for when you can go to the bars again after Covid.
Over time, your high paying pages will turn into $5 per day, or even $10 per day pages, and your $1 per day pages will increase in number. With enough online content generation, even your $0.25 per day pages mean something.
Online Passive Income Profile
Hypothetically, consider this profile of passive income. (Note this wouldn’t necessarily be from a single website or blog, in fact it will be easier to get to something like this with more than one.)
- 5 – $10 per day webpages
- 10 – $5 per day webpages
- 50 – $1 per day webpages
- 100 – $0.25 per day webpages
Add it up and you get $125 per day in passive income. That adds up to $3,750 in monthly income. That is approximately equal to a $45,000 per year salary.
Imagine what a single $30 per day page, or two or three of those pages can do to your monthly income. That, plus your love of writing, will keep you wearing out those keyboards.
Now, what if you had two websites earning like that… or three… you can see the potential, but it isn’t passive. It takes ongoing work.
Is There Really Such a Thing as Passive Income?
It’s time for a reality check. Generally speaking, in order for the traffic to your articles and online content to continue generating links, and getting traffic, you need to keep publishing. Over time, your articles will become dated and stale, and Google notices when websites go dormant.
As a result if you stop writing, that profile above will not online stop increasing, it will atrophy. Although some income is likely to continue for months, or even years, after you stop publication, there will be nowhere near those amounts.
So, is that income passive if you have to keep working to keep earning?
High-Paying Keywords
Remember, a writer writes. If you don’t like the idea of constantly writing, then, you need to find another path to passive income. You can find hundreds of tutorials on things like keyword research, link building, and beating Google’s algorithm, all of which exist so people don’t have to write. In fact, many of those posts include where to hire writers for cheap, because those folks just don’t want to have to write.
As a writer, you could do all of those things above automatically by writing lots of high-quality content.
The good news is that if you find any of those additional things beyond basic SEO interesting, you can always do them too. Good keyword research might point your writing into a faster earning direction. That will only speed up and enhance your writing earnings.
Affiliate Links
If you want to put a different kind of effort into your passive income creation, you can try affiliate links. Affiliate links tend to pay more per click than AdSense, but they happen less frequently, and they take more effort.
If the idea of researching affiliates, how much affiliates pay, and how well their links covert, this is another way to increase your earnings.
If the idea of affiliate links appeals to you but you want to focus your time and effort on writing, you can try Viglinks, which automatically adds affiliate links for you rather than you having to track them down.
If you can setup referrals to services you already use, they almost always pay more than “professional” referals. For example, the folks at Rakuten pay $25 per “friend” who signs up with your link. You get cash back for shopping. It’s a good deal. Here, sign up with my link and I’ll earn $30 of passive income, you get $30 too!
But, watch out for limits. Many services only offer a referral bonus for the first five friends, or worse, only offer credits to the service.
Amazon Associates
Amazon Associates is an affiliate program. Like other affiliate programs, you sign up and use a code in your links to get credit for sales made based upon your recommendations.
A lot of website publishers used to really like the Amazon program because the links covert well. I mean, who doesn’t buy from Amazon. But, Amazon has gotten increasingly stingy with both its commission rates, and how it credits affiliates for sales. It’s still a worthwhile program, but it will take a lot of traffic to generate much income here.