Passive Income Streams are more of a trend with online bloggers but the question is – Are Passive Income Streams Really Passive?
Let us first understand Passive Income
As per Wiki Passive Income is
An income received on a regular basis, with little effort required to maintain it.
So if you are being paid for something on a regular basis with no continuous effort on your part may be termed as passive income. It makes people belief that blogging is passive source of online income.
Is Blogging and Affiliate Commission A Passive Income?
Blogs can be a good source of affiliate commissions and my resource page is one such page that generates lots of Affiliate commissions for IMTips. On top of that I hardly need to work on maintaining that page on my blog and income generated from that page can be classified as passive income.
The Reality is…
The Resource page generates lot of affiliate commission not because it generates lot of direct traffic from search engines or otherwise but because it gets lot of traffic from my articles. I link to the resource page wherever I think it will be useful for my readers and so if anybody reading those article visits resource page and buy any product that I recommend, then it will generate affiliate commission for me. So the traffic from other articles that I write and refer over time redirects user to resource page that generates traffic and affiliate commission.
If I don’t write posts, I will not generate any affiliate commission and so the income from my resource page cannot be classified as completely passive. I need to write articles that generate traffic to my blog and then that traffic can be redirected to the resource page.
Let me also share that there is second category of people who bookmark my resource page as a way to pay me back for all the help and support that I give them. Again these affiliate commissions are generated because of continuous effort from my end to help my readers.
My conclusion is that affiliate earnings from a blog is not completely passive, at least not for me.
Is SEO Traffic with Adsense Income Passive?
You write a good content that ranks well in Google and it generates traffic from search terms and you get paid for traffic on your article as long as it remains high in search engine.
Apparently it looks like income is passive because you don’t need to be working on the article but it is not passive income yet again. Webmasters have to continuously work on keeping the site live and generate links (internal as well as external links) to high ranked content to remain on top for an elongated period of time. On top of that there are Google algorithm changes (Panda and Penguin) that they need to keep themselves updated with. Needless to say that webmasters have to deal with lot of spam in comments for content generating high traffic.
Once all of the above things are taken care off there is even more for webmasters to handle. As you have gained ranking for some terms in Google, you may also need to work on getting more related content such that users don’t bounce away too much from your site for variations of keywords they search in Google.
My conclusion is that Income from a site is also not completely passive and though you are not working on the same article over time, you are working on your site with related article and content to keep that traffic flowing and growing.
Is Sale of Information Product A Passive Income?
Creating a product or subscription that you can sale can make people think that income is passive because you create the product once and you don’t work on product creation again and again.
It may sound passive income but you may still need to work on giving your customers after sales support as well as managing and enhancing your product over time.
So is there any existence of Passive Income Streams Online?
What Others Say…
What other bloggers have to say about passive income?
Ramit Sethi of IWillTeachYouToBeRich is one of the few bloggers whom I have started following in July 2012 and in his post 7 lies we tell ourselves about money he writes
I hate to say it but most of us don’t need to focus on passive income, we need to focus on improving our active income — our jobs. How? By becoming more skilled…
And again in his post Why Most People Fail at Making Online Products (And How You Can Win)
The vast majority of people who try to create online products fail — like 99%+. This is the elephant graveyard where the dream of passive income goes to die.
Apart from Ramit Sethi there are other like Daniel Priestley writes – “Passive Income” – Will only lead to Disappointment or Michael Ellsberg in his article on Forbes – The Top 4 Reasons Why ‘Passive Income’ Is A Dangerous Fantasy
Do you still believe in online passive income streams? Share your thoughts in comments below.