That’s what running a blog is like. Any type of passive income will require some maintenance. Even if you’re collecting royalties from a novel (the most passive of income), you will still have to renew your copyright, watch for infringement, and engage in ongoing tax planning.

The way I look at it is, the streams of income for a blog can be passive but the blog is not!

You could leave a blog for a couple of weeks and still be able to make money especially if you have recurring income streams. But you’re ranking etc wouldn’t look as good if they were left unattended for a couple of weeks…

I have a blog that runs without me and makes income, not a ton, about $500 a month, but that money comes from a team of volunteer writers who are paid in exposure and other perks, not money. The only person paid is the lead editor who manages all the posts going live to the site.

I wrote quite an in-depth series on professional blogging as a sustainable business model – I think you probably read it already.

Keep up the PDA blogging!

Yaro

Sometimes, it depends on what type of blog it is. If your blog is about a topic that has to stay up-to-date, that is constantly changing, then it’s harder to earn passive income.

Your archives, if they are large enough, informative, and still relevant, can earn a lot of passive income.

In a similar vein, when someone is selling their blog on Sitepoint and includes “pay per post” types of income, I never use that in an evaluation of the domain/ site. At least with CPM and CPC ads, you don’t have to do additional work to earn money (beyond what you are already doing on regular posts).

So in this, CPM + CPC ads are a bit more passive than paid reviews. But without the work you do already to keep the site going, it’s not really passive. And with more emphasis on “momentum” of blogs, not maintaining a site means possible future loss of income. I’ve seen PR5 blogs drop to 0 lately, and PR4 drop 2.

A blog can earn passive income if your content is unique, highly useful, and is ranked high by the search engines for a long time. By passive here I mean income that you can keep earning even if you are not active for a few weeks. Interfaces like Digg and YouTube too are good passive earning resources because there the users are the ones generating content, and even competing with each other to generate high quality content.

If you wanna be a good blogger, then I don’t think it’s a passive income at all.

This is not a specific post comment so much as a general blog comment. Just a note to say that you have been knocking the cover off of the ball lately, and that your blog is becoming more and more helpful to me.

I wish I could find your old Amazon Afilliate links so I could buy some equipment through them. Email one to me if you ever get a free moment.

-DH

But, if you miss a day or two, you will still earn money from the ads you publish. You do need to actively work at it, but you can take a certain amount of time off, and still continue to earn revenue.

People talk about making the content of a blog timeless, but with blogs, I think that’s difficult. Blogs are beneficial because they’re so quick, so up-to-date.

I had a month or so where I needed to get other things done and didn’t write as many articles. I’d write multiple articles and have them set to publish in the future too. But that month, my earnings, visitors, stats across the board went down. So blogs can’t go stale.

True passive income comes from previous work and is not dependant on present works to maintain.

I think you nailed it on the head. Two more thoughts…

The more you can commodotize a business, large or small, the more easily you can “black-box” it and just set it and forget it. But, the more your core product/service revolves around the unique talent/voice of individual human beings, the harder it is to turn into a source of passive income.

Because, either that voice is yours, which means you have to keep working to generate revenue. Or, it’s someone else’s and, even if you pay them enough to truly be able to step back, you are always beholden to their talent, voice and not-too-fungible contribution to the bottom line.

So, if it’s truly a passive stream of income you are looking to create, I’d focus away from blogging, there are much easier ways. But…

There is an exception to this rule. And, the guy who proves it is Steve Pavlina. By focusing on creating very-large, authoritative, thought-provoking articles that are not tied to the news of the day, but rather are “timeless,” he has now created such a massive content library that is so rich, he could very likely stop writing tomorrow and the enduring-value of his published library would continue to drive enough traffic to keep a ton of revenue coming in for years.

FYI – for those who are looking to make a ton of dough by kicking back and setting up multiple streams of passive income, a study earlier this year revealed most of today’s pentamillionaires (that’s $5 million+) earned their money in one generation and almost none of it came through passive streams of income. It was all active, all the time!

Message – if you want to make a ton of money, motivate yourself by doing something so rocking you can’t imagine stopping, rather than trying to do something that will allow you to be able to not have to do it as soon as humanly possible.

Have a great weekend, Chris, congrats on the new house!

Missing a day or two of posting won’t suddenly cut off the income from a directly monetized blog, if there’s sufficient solid content to keep the search traffic flowing, but that’s hardly the same as a truly passive source of income.

“Blog” is a verb, as well as a noun!

I think all bloggers should think about developing a passive exit strategy. Unless you want to keep posting forever, you’ll have to develop relationships with freelancers and guest writers.

I don’t believe it to be 100% passive, especially when compared to something like an e-book, because you do have to work at it, at least a little each day.