Spend any time online and you’ll see clickbait articles and ads promoting passive income.
The content usually tells you it’s easy to make passive income from a website, blog or other online activity where you can sit back and wait for the money to roll in.
It’s just not true.
Some mentions of passive income offer paid guides or premium access to content showing you how to do it.
Most of them are regurgitated content that will tell you nothing you cannot find out for free.
There are ways to make money using blogging and websites but they certainly aren’t passive!
According to the Collins English Dictionary, passive means:
‘A passive activity involves watching, looking at, or listening to things rather than doing things.’
Which means not having to do anything to earn money.
Sources of passive income
It is possible to earn genuinely passive income but you typically need to have money first.
Sources of passive income include:
Returns from assets – Rent from property you own, returns on stocks and other assets
Money from investments – Stocks and shares, high interest savings and bonds can all provide passive income
There are others of course but these are the most common forms of passive income.
As you can see, you need to have money in order to earn this kind of income. You need property to rent out, a portfolio of stocks and shares, significant amounts of savings in high interest accounts and so on.
Not really achievable for most of us!
You can earn money from ads, blogging and websites
It is possible to earn money from having a website, blogging and from ads. It won’t be much though. Not at the beginning anyway.
It’s far from passive too.
You’ll need to:
- Build a website (easy)
- Create a steady stream of engaging content (not so easy)
- Promote your site (easy but time consuming)
- Engage on social media and use socials for promotion (easy for some not for others)
- Continue producing content throughout the year (hard)
- Use SEO and marketing tricks to gain visitors (moderate but time consuming)
- Rinsing and repeating all the above while you get around 10,000 unique hits (hard)
- Engage with ad platforms, affiliate networks and sponsors (easy)
- Deliver consistent content featuring those ads, affiliate links or sponsored products (hard)
- Continually refine all the above until it’s a smooth, efficient operation (hard)
Don’t let any of that put you off though. It is achievable to earn money from a website. It just takes time and a lot of dedication.
You’ll never hear much about that though, certainly not from influencers and other internet personalities.
They build their brands on selling a dream, not the reality of the hard work, late nights and weekends!
You can also open an online store and earn money from that. But that requires the same amount of work managing stock, promoting, marketing and engaging, so that’s far from passive either.
Can you make money from a website? Yes, absolutely.
Is it passive income where you can sit back and watch the money roll in? No, definitely not.
Not for those of us without a million followers on social anyway!
