Passive and Active Blogging Income

Jan 29, 2007

Talking about blog income (I’m talking about myself here) at this stage sounds funny but I just now read an interesting post at Problogger.net where Darren discusses what’s passive blogging income and what’s active blogging income. Passive blogging income is when you don’t update your blog as frequently as you used to and your archives fetch enough traffic from the search engines to generate you decent ad revenue. Darren rightly says it doesn’t work for a long period simply because the search engines prefer websites and blogs that are constantly updated.

Ever since I’ve started working on the Internet I’ve been coming across people trying to set up passive income streams on the Internet so that they could retire and live happily ever after. It’s not just bloggers. The so-called “Internet marketers” have been selling stuff that is supposed to generate continuous passive income for their customers. I’m not saying you cannot generate passive income — of course you can. But the source of your income has to be extremely compelling and there has to be some way to get constant exposure. On the Internet, remain passive for a few week and scores of your competitors will leave you wallowing in the depths of oblivion.

Blogging income (whenever it begins to manifest) is mostly active income, whether you write for yourself or for someone else. I’m doing both right now, and sometimes I feel guilty about writing for others — will talk about this some other time. Active in the sense that you constantly need to update your blog with quality content. You constantly have to surf the Net for new information. Almost daily you have to act proactively to get traffic to your blog.

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