Yesterday I received a call from one of my students who said he wanted to understand the different opportunities in passive income.
He was running his boutique digital marketing agency but he said he is too busy and doesn’t have any time to do anything else.
So he wants to understand how he can explore passive income, sign up for affiliate programs, and earn passive income so that he can reduce the emphasis or the hours he is putting in active work.
From my experience, I told him passive income is not really passive and you have to work really hard to make it passive income.
In other words, you have to be very active to earn passively.
People read different success stories in blogs and articles they watch videos on YouTube regarding how people earn 10k per month and 20k per month through passive income.
Unfortunately, they don’t understand or don’t know what goes behind setting up the system to earn 10k or 20k per month.
So, in this article, I am going to share 3 reasons why passive income is not really passive and you need to be really active in order to earn passive income.
But before that let’s see the ways you can earn passive income
Ads
One way is to earn through ads you can sign up for Google AdSense or Ezoic and place different ads on your website.
And if you have a good amount of traffic you can earn a decent amount through ads.
You can also monetize your YouTube channel, however, you need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours to be eligible for the YouTube monetization program.
Affiliates
The second way is to earn through affiliates. Let’s say you are a digital marketing agency and you are using multiple tools in your agency.
And most of these tools have affiliate programs and you can sign up for these affiliate programs and promote them through your blog by writing some articles.
You can place affiliate links in your article that provide value to your readers.
These are the two major ways of earning a passive income
Generating traffic
Generating income through your blog or through your videos is a numbers game.
You need to bring as many people on your website to make sure you earn a decent amount.
Let me give you one example.
I was watching the Income School YouTube channel, which shows how you can earn through blogging and affiliate programs.
And in one of their videos, they said you need to write at least 150 articles in the first 3 months for your blog to generate decent traffic.
Now that means 150 articles in 90 days which translates to 1.6 articles per day.
There are two ways you can write these articles either do it yourself or outsource it to someone.
But you cannot outsource 150 articles to somebody else because your blog needs to have your own voice.
So you need to write at least let’s 100 articles.
Do you think writing 90 articles is a passive thing?
Of course not right from doing keyword research to finding what should be written in the article and then actually writing the article refining it is a long arduous process.
There is nothing passive in writing these many articles.
Now blogging is one thing but what about YouTube videos?
It is advised you should put at least 2 videos per week.
Now, video creation is a lot more difficult process than writing a blog.
Because you need a script then you need at least a minimum gear to shoot your videos and then you need editing software, music, and B-Roll videos.
From my personal experience, I spend about 10 to 12 hours creating a 15-minute video.
Now, I am not a very proficient person in talking about videos, but considering I am a beginner and assuming you are also a beginner you need to spend at least half a day creating a 15-minute video.
So, you can multiply 10-12 hours by the number of videos you want to create per week and find the time in your schedule.
Again I want to ask you the question.
Do you think creating videos is a passive activity?
Value-added content
Creating content day in and day out is a difficult job.
Writing your first 50 articles or shooting your first 50 videos will be a fairly easy task, but then you will start running out of ideas.
And that’s when you are really thrown a challenge.
You need to understand who is your readers or viewers of your videos, understand their problems, understand what they want to learn and then you need to do a lot of research.
Then only you will be able to come up with multiple topics that are worthy of your audience’s time.
So are you ready to slug it out and find out the different topics, do extensive research and then actually execute your plan and create that content?
As you could have understood by now, creating content is not a one-day activity and you need to be involved very actively in the process of content creation.
Create it and they will come your way
This is one of the biggest with passive income.
That you need to create your content one time and they will come your way.
It’s not like that, you need to bring the traffic to your content. now you can do that through collaborations, through social media, or any other medium that you think of.
You need to be on your toes because as I said this is a traffic game. The more traffic you have the more will be your income.
And to bring that traffic you need to work really hard to find out the different sources of traffic work on the sources and bring people to your site.
Sometimes you even have to edit your previously created content.
For example, you might have created one article on which plugins are best for creating a membership site.
But now some of these plugins are either old or their owners are no longer maintaining them.
Then you need to go ahead and edit your article and say that this plugin is no longer working or you removed it altogether or you find out the new ones and add it to the old list.
But for that, you need to be active.
So these are the 3 reasons why passive income is not really passive.
Understand passive income
What is passive income?
In the terms that I understand passive income means you create some assets and then you earn through those assets without working too much on the asset that has been already created.
For example, you might be an author, you have written a book on web development and now that book is getting sold on Amazon or through your website.
Now, this is the asset that you have created that is earning you money.
What does it mean you don’t have to work on your book again altogether?
No, it’s not like that.
You still have to publish further revisions, add new content, and remove old content that is not relevant anymore.
The same way goes for your blogging, you should write articles that will be evergreen and won’t need too many edits down the line.
So passive income is actually a passive income however in order to set it up and maintain it you need to be active.
I will highly suggest you watch the Income School channel on YouTube, they have excellent videos on generating passive income through affiliates and blogging.
The link to the channel is given below.
Just to mention I am not affiliated with them in any way however I am a regular consumer of
their content.
