Do You Leverage The Content You Create? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 6:21 pm – November 28, 2011 by savingadvice

Does anyone here leverage the content they write to truly create passive forms of income? Anyone that blogs quickly learns that blogging is the farthest thing from passive income due to the time and effort it takes to keep it active and up to date. What I did early on was take a topic that I had written about fairly often, rework the posts into "articles" and create a niche site by repurposing the content. Most of these sites never did well (the vast majority only cover their costs), but a few have turned into fairly good additional sources of income that are truly passive (I have left some there for years without touching or promoting them) Does anyone else do this?

When you set up those sites that don't get updated for months/years, how are you generating income?  Are you still actively working on selling advertising space or are you relying on AdSense?

I have 2 sites like this that are as passive as you can get. One was set up 3 years ago the other was set up 2.5 years ago. They're fairly thin – 5 pages of content or so – took maybe 5 hours to set up? I then spent a few weeks on each one doing some backlinking.

To this day each one consistently makes $100 per month. One is monetized using AdSense and other has a couple of CPA offers. 

Nothing. Seriously. All traffic is organic search engine traffic. From time to time one of the sites will get lucky and get a media mention, but that's not often. I do link to them on my blogs when appropriate, but that's about it. Basically it just takes time for the site to get indexed and make its way into the search engine rankings. It certainly helps if it is a niche topic.

I'd be more than happy to share some examples of exactly how I thought about it, the steps I took and how the site does if anyone is interested, but also don't want to bore anyone if that isn't of interest.  

Thanks for sharing. Even if a few sites generate $100 each per month, that's more than you had before right? I will definitely try this when I have more time… (same old story.)

Post edited 9:37 am – November 29, 2011 by savingadvice

MoneyBeagle said:

This is the key sentence for me.  Do you backlink (and if so, how)?  Do you choose topics with not much traffic to appear near the top of rankings?

You make it sound as easy as creating a site and pretty much ignoring it.  I'm sure that can work now and then, but my hunch is that you have to increase your chances by doing some work, and even then there are no guarantees.  

Not a boring discussion at all.  Very interesting, in fact.

Definitely not easy, but definitely doable. I would say for every 10 sites I put up, 8 will fail (that is they will break even or make a bit of money) 1 will do OK (generate anywhere from $10 – $100 a month) and one will do well (generate $100+ a month). The key is you never know which one is going to do well — ones that I thought were going to do great never did anything and others I put up on a whim ended up generating a good amount. 

Now I have enough blogs that I can simply do a post about a new site on those blogs and know that the search engines will find them. Before then, I would write articles for the ezine sites to make sure that they were found. I never made a concerted effort to get a lot of backlinks — just did enough to make sure the search engines knew they were there. 

Now that I do have a wide variety of sites, it's pretty easy to link to any new site I have (an added benefit even for those that don't take off) if the content overlaps at all.