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Paid Memberships

Do you have some premium content on your blog that you can’t find elsewhere on the web? Then you might want to consider making a portion of your site a paid membership. Having a paid membership section is an excellent way to generate passive income blogging.

Problogger is an excellent example of a blog which has a paid membership portion. Member’s can subscribe on a monthly or yearly subscription and pay you for your premium content. Generally, once this is set up, the subscription renewals become a residual income. When the time comes for a subscription to renew, you will earn that extra cash. While you do have to keep up with the premium content, that content should be readily available to you, as you can draw on your particularized knowledge of your specific niche.

There are a few examples of others who make passive income blogging. As luck would have it, Chris Guthrie just posted a great tutorial about how to set up a paid membership site (ultimate guide) on his blog Make Money on The Internet. It’s a definite must read if you are considering going this route.

Affiliate programs that generate residual income.

Perhaps you don’t feel comfortable setting up a membership program on your own site. Or your niche is competitive enough that you feel that people can get the information that they want without subscribing to a premium content section on your site. You can still generate passive income blogging by seeking out affiliate programs that generate residual income. While manyaffiliate programs are one time purchase, there are a number of them that have a monthly subscription fee that will pay commission each time a referred member renews their subscription or makes a new purchase. The Pingler or the Free E-book affiliate programs would be a examples of programs where you continue to receive commission for subsequent purchases or subscription renewals.

Tiered affiliate programs.

Slightly different from programs that generate residual income, these are programs that allow you to get a portion of affiliate commission from your referred affiliates. While the programs may all be one time purchases, if you have a number of affiliates assisting you in selling the product, you can still earn income without having to make a sale yourself. The very definition of passive income. You may want to explore the Free Traffic System or Socialoomph which are good examples of subscription as well as a tiered affiliate style programs that can help your blog generate passive income.

Promoting old content on your blog.

Many people forget that you can generate passive income blogging with your own blog. When you write a post that generates traffic or clickthroughs to affiliate links, you’ve put in the work to generate passive income for yourself. But that post quickly goes to your archive and the income stream from that one post may trickle down. But you can easily revive that post simply by promoting it. It’s much less work to promote and old post than it took to create the content itself. Plugins such as tweet old posts will tweet out your old content on a schedule. Every once in a while you can go through your blog and stumble or amplify an old post and get some readers coming back to your blog to read those posts. Another great plugin is old post promoter which essentially strips the date and re-publishes your old posts. All of these methods can help you keep your old content alive for ages to come.

Publish an ebook.

Publishing an ebook has many advantages. You can promote yourself and generate traffic back to your blog to generate passive income. You can also sell the ebook itself and generate income from the sales. Of course, you’ll need to have plenty of premium content in your ebook to generate sales. However, this is not as difficult as it seems. Many bloggers will use their old posts as a base and add to that to compile it all into an ebook. You can either give it away as a promotional method to generate traffic or even charge a small fee for the download. The beauty of an ebook is that once it is published it is online virtually forever. You put in the effort to write it once, but it continues to sell for years to come. You can purchase a publishing package withFree e-books for a one time fee of $19.97, less than the price of lunch for two, and they will market the book for you to their customers for years to come.

These are just five methods that you can use to generate passive income with your blog. While you will still need to put in some amount of work, the idea is that these passive income blogging methods will help you free up some of your time and effort to work on your other endeavors.