Can Blogging Create Passive Income?

Dane Carlson ponders is passive advertising on a decently trafficked blog enough to sustain a living? 

Can Blogging Produce a Passive Income?

By Dane on Posts

ProBlogger:

The question I've been asked a number of times by friends is whether my blogging strategy is one in which I'm building a passive income?

Its a good question which I'd like to answer in the affirmative - but am beginning to see that I can not. When I first started blogging with a commercial mindset I had lofty dreams of my blogs getting to a point where they would be able to earn me an ongoing large amount of money - Passive. My hope that blogging would enable me to not only give up my day job but that it would enable me to give all of my time to community and charity projects that would benefit others (my true passion).

I've been asking myself this same questions recently, and like Darren, don't think that the medium is conducive of a passive income. By definition, weblogs are frequently updated websites. If I leave a site fallow, it will continue to earn advertising revenue, but eventually the free traffic will all but dry up.

Luckily the effort required to maintain and grow the site is not great, so maybe we can agree that blogging creates almost passive income.

I imagine it depends on a lot of factors. One thing is for sure, that putting affilate advertising or contextual ppc ads on a blog won't make you enough cash to sustain life (atleast in the developed world).  I have never had an ambition to do it myself. But, from what I have observed, there are some proven ways to do it:

1. Sell your own targeted advertising directly to the companies that advertise (or their brokers) to niche audiences ala corante and weblogsinc.
2. Build trendy sites around cars, sex, etc that attract super-mega-traffic and once again, sell your own advertising in the style above ala gawker.
3. Hustle every opportunity to make money with your blog, by pretending to sell it on ebay, selling yourself on ebay, and commenting on more blog posts than you write - at about a 10:1 ratio - ala Jeremy Wright. 
4. Use your blog to get consulting and contract work and to build your own projects, ala Marc Canter, Gregory Narain and me.
5. Use your blog to [help] launch real world events ala corante.com truevoices seminars or follow how people leveraged blogs to make blogon popular and the host of other bottom up conferences like vloggercon, etc.

Comments

[Jason]

That's a funny one.... the truth is making money off blogs requires getting to 20k page views a day in a topic that advertisers care about.

Getting to 20k pages a day is HARD. Trust me, we have tens of millions of page views across our network and it take us 2-9 months to get a blog to this level (some like Engadget started at this level of course, but that was a different time... that was when there were not that many blogs).

At this point if you want to make a living from blogging you're looking at spending at least six to nine months losing (or not making) money before making a modest amount.

Blogs are best when you're using them to leverage an outside revenue stream like Corante is doing with events, or Boingboing does selling tons of books, etc.

[Patrick Callioni]

So far with my blog I have attracted no income and quite a few expenses, but it is fun.

[passive income]

I think the key to making 20k per day with blogs is getting readers to bookmark and return to your sites. Perhaps you can add a "bookmark me" link in your blog