I hear people talk about this one pretty often, is blogging passive income? I think it is, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. In this article I’m going to briefly talk about what passive income is, and give you my thoughts on this subject and tell you why I think the way I do.
Let’s have a look!
What is passive income?
According to the IRS, passive income mainly refers to income from rental properties or income from a business where the person does not actively participate in it. True passive income according to the U.S. government may be taxed differently than regular active income.
So going just by this paraphrased definition, blogging or internet marketing is not considered “passive income”. However, just because the IRS doesn’t want to treat it as passive, does that mean it isn’t actually passive?
That depends on your own interpretation of what passive income is.
Is blogging passive income?
I consider the revenue from my niche websites, aka blogs, to be passive. Once you get to a certain point as blogger, you really start to understand that. If you’re a good business owner and want to grow, then you are constantly working on your sites and publishing new content. This may make things feel less passive, but I bet you the income probably is.
Active income pretty much breaks down to you work for 40 hours you get paid for 40 hours of work.
Blog revenue doesn’t work like that. Let me share an analogy with you.
Compare creating income from blogging, to one of those hand crank generators. After you first get it home, you do nothing but crank (aka crank out articles) for a really long time. All that cranking and it doesn’t produce any electricity (no money!).
Then eventually one day, you notice that it’s creating a weak but steady current of electricity (your blog is earning a few dollars now). You can stop cranking and leave the generator for a while and come back to it and it will still be producing that current.
You decide you want a bigger current now, so you start cranking it again. You watch the strength of the current steadily grow over time. You crank your generator every so often then leave it, this goes on for a while.
One day, you eventually notice that your generator (passive income stream) has rewarded you with a strong, steady current of electricity.
You’ve officially hand cranked your way to a steady, reliable, and probably still growing passive income stream. If you set everything up right and targeted mostly evergreen topics, then you should be able to walk away for a year if you want and watch your income keep rolling in.
Now you should never abandon a business for a year, but the point is you can by this point because the income is passive.
Just like a hand crank generator, the amount of income will slowly die down over time if you don’t crank out more articles. Cranking the generator grows the current and makes it last longer, but you don’t have to in order to maintain the current levels. At least not for a while, all things eventually die.
Conclusion
In summary, I consider income from my blogs anyway, to be passive. My content is mostly monetized with display ads, which is the most passive monetization method in my opinion. I publish informational and evergreen content that are not going to become outdated. The information on my sites will be relevant in 10 years.
That’s one way to stay relevant for as long as you can. There are other ways, but the point is that you want to publish content that stands the test of time. This keeps the income from you generate as passive as possible which allows you to step away and work on other projects, or keep cranking that generator.