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Blogging is a great way to build your residual income. You know how to roughly get started, but how do you make more money?
I’ve been blogging for more than a decade now. I started at the end of 2010, just as Google Panda came in. I quickly unlearned the initial keyword stuffing skills that bloggers had taught me and looked at what Google actually wanted. While everyone else complained and tried to look for the quick fixes, I focused on the long game.
It is possible to build your residual income when blogging. A good few thousand dollars per month is purely from residual income. I literally mean that these are posts that I wrote years ago and do nothing to them. I don’t even promote them. They just make me money based on the way they were from years earlier.
How have I done it? How do I keep building that passive income? I share the top five tips that I’ve followed from the very beginning that will still work for the years to come.
Use SEO to your advantage (but in the right way)
SEO is extremely important. If you haven’t already heard about it, you need to get on it right away. Anyone who is writing online should make SEO (that’s search engine optimization) their No. 1 priority.
SEO makes it easier for people to find your content on the web. You’ll need to do some research into the keyword terms and phrases people are searching for within your niche, and then you’ll need to make sure you work those phrases into your content properly.
There was once a time people would just stuff the keywords into content as much as possible. They’d even write the keywords in white on a white background so people won’t see it but the search engine spiders would see them. This isn’t the way to do things! Make your content read naturally and easily.
Make sure you research SEO. I highly recommend Debbie Gartner’s SEO products. They’ll help you get set up quickly so you can make the most of SEO. This has been my best friend for 10 years, and it will continue to be my best friend.
MORE: 3 things to do after joining a revenue share site
Be consistent to build your residual income
You need to be consistent. While residual income should keep making you money without touching it, you still need to keep your content fresh. You want to build your resident income, right?
Even though I have content that continually makes me money each month, I still write regularly. I add to that content, putting up more posts that will make me some residual content. This is how I’ve gone from residual income making me $20 per month to making me $2000 per month.
You don’t have to add a lot of content. I do one big post each month to make the residual income. The rest of my content is short-term. I like having a mixture of content, especially considering a lot of my work is within the entertainment niche.
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Write content that people want to know
You need to look at the type of content people are searching for. If they’re not looking for your content, it doesn’t matter how well it’s written or how good the SEO is. People aren’t going to click on it!
Something I do is look at Google Trends. I want to see what people are searching for, especially when it comes to TV shows and movies. I’ll also take a look at the type of questions that pop up when I search something for myself. You’ll see a table with questions and you can click to pull up a featured web page. The aim is to become one of those featured web pages, but just using the questions is a start.
Those questions are there because people are searching for them. Use them to your advantage.
Set up automatic social sharing
Okay, so I don’t do any manual promotion of some of my evergreen articles. If I did, I might get a little more money but I want passive income. My articles are still shared, but not manually.
I’ve set articles up with Missinglettr ($). This is a great way to pull out bites from articles and then have those bites and the link to your articles pushed out online. You just spend the time to initially set up the campaigns, which takes just a few minutes per article. I set time each week to do this for a few posts each week.
You can choose how long the campaign is. You can also choose how aggressive your campaign is. I love Missinglettr for this as I can set up short campaigns for the shorter-term articles and have the longer ones for my evergreen content.
Repurpose your content in the future
You can make the most of your content by repurposing it. You don’t have to come up with fresh content all the time to build your residual income.
That blog post you’ve just written can be turned into a YouTube video. Or you can turn it into an Instagram post or a Facebook story. You can make an Infographic or other form of online content. Maybe a podcast?
You can do it all. You use the same information, maybe with an update here and there, and create content in all its forms. This is important for accessibility and capturing all your audience possibilities. Some people are going to listen to podcasts rather than read a blog post because they can listen while they commute, while others will need to read because they are deaf.
Because the initial work and research are already done, you can count this as residual income. You’ve done a little extra work by turning your posts into another form of content, but that’s the easiest part of the whole thing.
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How will you build your residual income? What do you need help with when it comes to blogging? Share your thoughts in the comments below.