Since my first blogging days back in late 2008, I’ve always been obsessed with having a passive income.
And that’s where blogging comes in, it promises many people that all you need to do is to set up a blog, get some content up, and then leave it be and you’ll be earning money while lying down on an inflatable bed like the girl above.
But the truth is, for most people, especially beginners, the blogging/niche website business model is far from being passive.
However, some people like Jon Dykstra and the Income School guys inspired me on how to make my blogging/niche websites business more passive.
Here’s how.
1. Focus on evergreen content.
Technology is one of the most popular niches picked by beginners, and for a reason.
Usually, people who blog tend to be the more tech-savvy demographic. I mean, setting up a self-hosted WordPress blog and learning those SEO terms surely will turn off many people.
And they tend to blog about something they like and understand, like technology for example.
The thing with the technology niche is, it’s always changing and what you write today will be obsolete in a few years, if not less.
If you write a review for the iPhone 13, the new iPhone 14 will be out in the market even before your iPhone 13 review got some serious traffic from search engines (unless you’re already pulling some serious traffic).
In order to get the traffic keeps rolling in the tech and similar niches, you must pump content regularly, like a lot. Furthermore, you have to update all of your old content to keep them from being outdated.
So, not only do you have to push a lot of content regularly, but you also need to update them periodically. That’s double the job for a niche that is VERY competitive.
To make my websites more passive, I decided to stick to niches that are more evergreen or at least have evergreen topics within them.
For example, video games is a niche that is always changing and have new games coming in every year, but people who played the PS1 back in its heydays will still search for ‘best PS1 games’. So it’s a not-so-evergreen niche with evergreen topics within it.
2. Focus on ads for monetization.
I’ve tried numerous ways of making money online, however, if you’re a blogger, it all boils down to only two things: ads and affiliate marketing.
Ads make less money (in most cases) but it’s easier to set up and usually involves some kind of AI (like Ezoic) to optimize itself to make the most out of your traffic.
With affiliate marketing, you have to search for the products, insert the links (either manually or using a plugin, either way, it requires extra work), and make sure you replace and update the links if the products are sold out and not getting restocked (or if you change affiliate programs).
It’s obvious that using ads is much more passive since you only have to install the plugin they provide and choose some ad placements that you like, and then the ads will run automatically and you don’t have to update anything.
Plus, you can write anything like informational content and not bound by only writing product reviews content, so yeah, the potential traffic is much BIGGER.
Last, ad rates keep increasing each year while affiliate commission usually decreases when the website you’re promoting is getting more popular (looking at you, Amazon).
3. No plugins.
This decision has something to do with my minimalism philosophy, but hear me out for a second.
Making a niche website more passive is not only about not having to update the content regularly, it’s also about not having to update the sites and their plugins, too!
Sure, you may say that turning on the automatic updates feature on, but there will be another problem.
You see, not every plugin will be compatible with everything, forever. Sometimes an update on a plugin will break your site, and believe me, having a broken website is frustrating.
The best practice is to wait a few weeks or months to make sure that there isn’t any bug that will do harm to your site. This means that you have to update your plugins manually.
The fewer plugins you have, the less likely your website will break.
I use only one plugin for my websites, which is the ad plugin provided by the ad network itself.
After all, simple works.
4. Turn off the comment section.
Long gone are the days when people used to leave comments on blogs and have a discussion with one another.
Nowadays, people prefer to engage in a conversation on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube.
It’s easier that way because you will get notifications whenever someone replies to your comment, and, you don’t have to insert your name and email again and again only for the system to catch your comment as spam (who remembers this? XD).
And because of that, I turned off the comment sections on all my websites. Not only I don’t have to deal with spam and reply to comments (that will be ignored anyway), the look on my websites is much cleaner anyway.
Blogs used to be a place where people converse, but they’re not anymore, so move on!
Note: If you still think having a comment section is beneficial, just so you know, you don’t have to completely turn off and remove the comment section. You could just ignore it and let it be without intervening at all. Just make sure you have a great spam filter plugin installed.
5. No fancy formattings.
Here’s the thing, the fancier you format your content, the more like it will break when you use ads or change to a new theme.
And when your content break, guess what? You’ll have to reformat them again, one by one.
Imagine if you have a few niche websites each with hundreds of posts, that’ll be a lot of work. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.
Time and time again, simple works.
Now I stick to a simple format where I don’t have to align images or elements to the left or right, I align them to the center, always. I also stopped using shortcodes plugins because I realized they’re not that important for what I’m doing.
I don’t even use the Gutenberg feature to its full capacity. I just need some text and images combined with the standard formatting practices that you see commonly in best-selling business books, that’s all.
Why complicate life when it can be simple?
Of course, everybody is different, but as I stated in the title, this is how I do it.
The logic behind these things can also be applied to other types of online business models, like YouTube channels for example, and that’s what I’m doing with mine.