Passive Income or full-time job?

There are people I've heard of who spent a good deal of time building a website or blog, writing content for it, creating strong backlinks, monetizing the site,

and then sat back and watched the money come in for years. If you want to maximize the potential for the site, it is usually a good idea to continue to post updated content. But if the keyword is not overly competitive then this is usually not necessary.

People have created hundreds of miniblogs which may bring in only a few dollars a month. However as indicated earlier most of these sites can run on autopilot once the upfront work is done. So there is your annuity.

The only way I can think of to be on quasi-autopilot for a long time would be to

1) Create a great, evergreen product
2) Find some awesome affiliates to promote it
3) Hire a staff to handle refunds, affiliate support, etc.
4) Hire a manager to run day-to-day operations

If you just SEO the crud out of a site but then leave it, chances are Google will smack it down eventually- unless you hire a staff to keep its rankings

PPC might work, but then you (or someone else) has to constantly be monitoring campaigns

Soo yeah- completely passive forever doesn't come easily

Learn outsourcing. All those tasks you mentioned can be outsourced easily and cheaply, while still receiving decent quality. Putting new content on your site is great, especially if you are targeting more keywords.

You need to learn the foundations so you understand what needs to be done, but once you know that, hit up a site like Odesk and hire a few people (not full time, just for certain jobs) to handle certain tasks.

I mean to be completely honest with you after years of pursuing that elusive passive income I can tell you with 100% confidence that you will never find that type of passive income. Now that statement may ruffle some feathers or not sit well with some people but it's the truth.

On the bright side the good news is that if you take action on that plan you described then you might just end up with a great affiliate site that you might only have to look after for a few hours a week and makes you thousands of dollars a week. Or it may bust and make you no money. But the reality is you won't know until you try.

What most people fail to realize when they start out is that this does take a bucket-load of work. But that is no different to any other business model that you take on.

At 20 hours a week you will need to commit for at least two years and don't count on being able to give up your day job after that time.

BUT the freedom of eventually being able to work online full-time is great, but it does take work. Like all assets your online sites will still need maintenance and TLC

The only way to get truly passive income in life is to earn a bazillion dollars and put it somewhere that will let you earn interest off that bazillion.

I started a software program at the beginning of 2010. It was a ton of work.

Modifying the product, creating ads, posting ads, creating content, responding to requests, mailing the software, and tons more time consuming jobs. It wasn't a scale-able model.

I then learned SEO. Got the site ranked (It was #2 for a long time, I think it's #10 now; Stupid Panda), made the product 100% digital, automatic delivery, and started generating mostly passive sales (I was still posting ads and creating content). I think I was selling between $15 and $30 at the time, which was awesome, but not enough to live on.

The site currently makes enough profit to cover the majority of my living/driving/eating/drinking expenses. The sales aren't all from organic results. I do PPC and offline advertising as well (mainly have people put fliers on college campuses). Probably an hour or two of work on my part monthly (the work is optional, just the hourly ROI is amazing).

Passive income is possible once you learn the foundation, do the research, and take the action. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of effort; but it can be done.

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Someone above said "90%" passive income. I have a bunch of SEO clients who pay me a certain amount monthly for work that I outsource to my team. So after I do the on page SEO, the keyword research, the competition analysis, and the off page strategy; each client only takes a few minutes monthly. So unless you're counting it hourly, which I'd be making thousands of dollars an hour; the SEO is probably 99% passive.

It is a full time job to create and maintain passive income. Don't let anybody tell you different.

Sure, you can take longer vacations, but it is still something that needs to be continuously worked on if you want it to continue long term and grow.

Philosophically I'd say you gotta keep feeding the fire if you want it to burn or it'll eventually wane.

Ideally, years down the road you'll be making enough money to outsource all the work and will be spending minimal time overseeing the site's performance.

You should take a glance at the passive income blog for some ideas on the "set it and forget it approach".

smartpassiveincome .com

There are two sides of the question.

1. You update website/blog frequently.

Pros

i) If you're sharing really important information through site/blog, it gives a push for repeat visitors. (As you know repeat visitors become revenue markers very easily)
ii) Search engines also start crawling your site frequently. The result is your articles would've been indexed faster.
iii) Rapid growth of self awareness about the subject you speak.
iv) You update with new earning opportunities.
iv) It's (site/blog) growing.........

Cons

i) You need to dedicate certain time every day for website/blog.

2. You create a website/blog and let it to go with autopilot.

Pros

i) You're free, the only thing you've to do is watching towards earnings.
ii) If you can create 10 sites/blogs and if each site/blog approximately make at least $20 per day, you earn $200 daily with doing nothing.

Cons

i) You miss latest opportunities.
ii) When some one takes your position on search engines, you lost both traffic and profit.
iii) It makes troubles when search engines change their algorithms.

I won't claim to know if passive income is really possible, but my 2 cents is just that if you haven't looked into outsourcing yet through sites like vWorker or Elance you really should. There are a lot of tasks that can be handled by others, and you would be surprised how little you actually have to pay. Especially with the economy the way it is, a lot of people have lost their jobs and are now freelancing through these sites.

Good luck!
Lexi

Or maybe you can become super rich off affiliate products instead of your own? To save time you know? I'd rather focus on a product thats doing real good and create traffic to that (long term traffic).

Like any other business, whether or not you can make it passive depends on the business type and whether or not you know how to scale it, have someone else do the work where the expense is much lower than the earnings.

Hypothetically, if you know your small 1-2 page niche site can earn $100/mo after all the backlinking and article spinning tasks involved, you can most certainly create more but have someone else do it for $50/mo for example. You're making $50 passively per site per month already, right? Now scale that to 20 sites, for example, then you're getting $1000/mo without you doing anything - what if each site makes $500/mo and your cost is $250... That's 5G/mo...

Over-simplistic, I know, but it can be done with the right BUSINESS APPROACH.

Both are good. You can do full time work while having a passive income. It is a matter of managing your time and effort.