Earning on Auto Pilot with Blogging

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One thing I realized about taking a 12 day vacation from my daily life is that my technology blog finally reached a level where it earned a fair passive income without having to do any work on my part. I mean I did leave an incredibly competent team of bloggers and writers to manage my site while it was gone and they made sure new content was posted every day, responded to reader comments and kept the DragonBlogger site live and operating even while the owner was on vacation.

My team however doesn’t actively monetize Dragonblogger.com and I am the sole person who works with various programs to monetize my site. Two of the most successful online programs to passively earn income online are Amazon Associates and Google AdSense. With AdSense alone I was literally earning $5 – $7 per day on average from AdSense while I was enjoying a cruise vacation. I came back from vacation and my blog earned $75 on it’s own just sitting collecting on banner revenue while I was enjoying the Mediterranean ocean.

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B004UW29IK” alt=”WordPress Power Guide – Using WordPress to Blog Your Way to Success – Blogging Guide” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51JUWmy1MIL.jpg” align=”left” width=”250″ ]This is petty and small income compared to where I want the site to be, and I still recommend many methods to make money online when blogging. SocialSpark continues to be one of my most promoted and highly prized program for earning money from writing reviews on products and services from major companies.

The dream however to passively earn is something that you can make a reality with an online venture to some extent. Blogging in itself requires interaction with readers so that you can engage them and build a relationship with your audience. There are other online ventures, microsites, affiliate sites however where you don’t associate an “author” or personality into your site just merely showcase a product or subset of products and namelessly promote those. This is harder in many ways though I am attempting such a niche site with my weight loss belts site which showcases fitness products and primarily focuses on The Flex Belt which was given to me by the company to test and do a true review on.

I still see bloggers make lots of money selling the latest Clickbank offerings and by leaping on top of other blogger products the moment they go on sale so as to build a secondary niche site around it and in some cases I have seen the blogs rank higher on the SERP for the original blogging product than the product site itself. IMAGINE THAT!

Banner ad sales can be automated with services like BuySellAds or AdvertiseSpace which can help sell ad slots if you are out of town. I sell only about 2-3 ads per month with BSA but this is about $25 net profit per month (BSA does take 25% comission for themselves).

I don’t think you really can passively monetize a site with services like AdSense, Chitika..etc until you have at least 10 – 15k visits per month. There just isn’t enough casual clicks in less than that, but if you have a microsite focusing on a single product where you can get $20 – $50 commissions on a single sale all it takes is 2-4 sales per month to make a few hundred bucks. As I mentioned however this is easier said than done and my new fitness site just reaches about 200 visits in it’s first month but has yet to sell it’s first product.

You can earn money passively from online ventures and I highly recommend you experiment with different methods that work as your blog grows online. Remember though that you must put hours of research into products, domain names and even find a “market” that will potentially be profitable in the first place. So many sites are hit or miss that you shouldn’t feel like a failure or be discouraged if your first or second site don’t reach the goals you want. If you really feel after 6 months no progress is made start a new venture or experiment with two or three at the same time as I did with my own 3 blogs.

Out of the 7 blogs I created over the last 3 years only 1 has reached over 50k visits per month and only this one has made more than $300 a month in earnings. My two smaller blogs at best get between $10 and $40 per month in earnings.

-Justin Germino

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Updated: July 16, 2011 — 6:43 pm