How to Build Passive Income with Article Sites

(from writingforyourwealth.com)
I’m not a big fan of the term passive income, because outside of stock dividends and interest bearing accounts, I don’t think the term is particularly accurate. Real estate needs to be managed, books require marketing to sell, businesses need work to grow, and websites that are never updated lose traffic as they’re surpassed by sites that are regularly updated.

That said, I do know that Tim Ferris’s controversial “4-Hour Work Week” is possible, and one way to get there is with article sites. You can build sites that require very little ongoing work and can bring in respectable XXX and even X,XXX earnings per month.

I’m not talking about blogs, which come with the expectation of frequent updates, but simple article-based sites that may never have more than 50 or 100 pages.

About half of my income is from blogs, and half is from straight html sites that run Adsense and sometimes link to affiliate products. There aren’t any comments to moderate, communities to build, advertisers to deal with, or customers to placate. These article sites simply provide information, get traffic from the search engines, and make money from people clicking ads.

Once they’re built, I may only work on a site a few hours in a whole year (though if they show a lot of potential, I’ll probably attend them a couple times a month). I’ll add an article or two and maybe submit an article to ezinearticles in order to get some natural links. This small amount of work keeps them ranking in the search engines and bringing me in money, day after day, month after month. It’s not entirely passive income, but it’s a pretty good deal!

For those of you who may be interested in adding some article sites to your online empire, I’m going to do a little series that covers my strategies. As with building a blog, it takes time to start earning money (content needs to be built up, domains need to “age,” links need to be acquired, etc.), but once you have the initial site built, the time demand is very little for ongoing maintenance.

You can get started with 10 or 20 articles, so you could get a site up in a fairly short order, if you were so motivated. You may even want to start several, so that you can build one, and move on to the next and the next without obsessing over when that first one will make its first dollar.

Here’s a list of what this series will cover:

How to Build (mostly!) Passive Income with Article Sites Series

1 — Introduction (You’re Reading It!)
2 — Choosing a Profitable Niche and Scoping out the Competition
3 — A Keyword Rich Domain Name and Other on-Site SEO Considerations
4 — Using Keyword Research to Write Pinpoint Articles
5 — Link Building Techniques
6 — Adding Google Adsense
7 — Should You Consider Affiliate Programs?
8 — The Technical Side: Getting Your Article Site Online