This is a guest blog by the Poor Swiss, who is a personal finance blogger residing in Switzerland. He shares his personal journey to financial freedom with thousands of readers and helps others to learn about all sorts of information regarding saving, investing, and more. In this article, he shares with us his personal view on earning passive income through blogging. Having had his own blog for three years, he is revealing the truth behind his blogging success.

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All over the internet, people are recommending blogging as a great way to generate passive income. Blogging is an interesting hobby, can be a great side hustle, and can even be turned into a business. Is it passive income?

After more than three years of blogging, I would argue that blogging is all but passive income. Indeed, it requires time and effort, which goes against the concept of passive income.

In this article, I want to delve into passive income and the relationship with blogging, which is often recommended as one of the best passive income sources.

Passive Income

By definition, passive income is some form of income that requires little to no effort.

Passive Income can still require some initial money investment but should not require time or effort past this. One good example of passive income would be investing in dividend stocks or bonds. You pay a certain amount, and then you get money, quarter after quarter, without doing anything.

Blogging

Blogging is simply writing on a blog. These days, the notion of blogs has changed quite a lot, and it is often difficult to distinguish between a blog and a website. What matters is that we are talking about a content website, not an e-commerce website, for instance.

So what does a blogger do? Here are the main tasks a blogger do:

1. Write content. Content is the main task of a blog. You have to provide content that will be helpful to your readers.

2. Promote Content. Writing good content is not great if nobody reads it. So bloggers spend time promoting their content. Such promotion can be direct, social media, or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to directly let Google show its content.

3. Interact with readers. Most bloggers use comments and email to interact with their readers. Doing that can take a significant amount of time, depending on how many channels are open.

4. Monetize the blog. If the blog is monetized, the blogger must manage the income sources and search for potential new opportunities.

5. Manage the blog itself. There are also some technical aspects to blogging, securing the blog, ensuring it runs, etc.

Depending on the blogger, some tasks can take more or less time. Some bloggers do more promotion, while some bloggers spend most of their time on content.

So, how much time does that take? It depends entirely on the blogger and his ambitions. It can range from a few hours a week to a full-time job. And it is one case where putting more time into the blog is necessary to make it work.

We can take my case as an example. I have been running my blog, The Poor Swiss, for a little more than three years. It is only a hobby blog, and I have a full-time job. To give you an idea, the blog is getting about 100’000 page views per month. These days, I spend about 20 hours per week on the blog, on average.

So, as you can see, it can take a lot of time to run a blog. And it can take a lot of time for a blog to reach a strong point.

Is blogging passive income?

By now, you probably have realized where I am going with this. For me, blogging is not passive income!

Running a blog takes a lot of effort. It needs you to invest time, and it will take a while to get to a point where you could get a significant income. The definition of passive income was that it should require little to no effort. For me, blogging fails this definition.

What about deferred income?

Many people claim that blogging is passive income because once you finish an article, it can generate revenue for a long-time. In some measure, this is true. Several of my articles still do well a long time after I wrote them.

However, I would argue that this is not passive income but deferred income. You have worked a lot on getting this article ready. So, deferred income would be something you put a lot of work into, and then you can reap the benefits for a while.

But is it even true? Not really. When you are blogging, it is not enough to write good pieces of content. You need to keep this content updated. Some content can be fresh for a long time, but you need to update most articles over time. And sometimes, a good piece of content can fall in rankings as other websites write about the subject. If you do not update your content, it will likely lose visibility on Google.

And not only, but you need to keep working on your blog. If you suddenly stop everything on your blog, it is unlikely to maintain its visibility and audience.

Does that make blogging bad?

No! But, blogging takes effort. And a lot of people are starting a blog based on the promise of passive income. And many of them end up giving up early on because they soon realize that it takes much more time than they realized and that it is all but passive for them.

I still like blogging, and I still think that it is a good side hustle. But it takes time and effort. I do not want people to start blogging based on the wrong promises of passive income.

So, why do people recommend blogging as passive income? For money! Most people who recommend blogging as passive income earn money through affiliate marketing when new bloggers are using their recommended services. So, they get more money when more bloggers are starting. And it is much sexier to advertise blogging as a simple passive income source rather than as an income source that takes a lot of time and effort.

Conclusion

As a blogger, I argue that blogging is not passive income. It takes a lot of time and effort. And a blog will not start generating revenue in a few months.

That does not mean blogging is bad! After three years, I still enjoy blogging. And so far, I do not plan to stop. But you should not start a blog because you think that you will get passive income quickly (or even income, for that matter). If you create a blog, you need to be motivated to work for it and be prepared to do it for a while.

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Interested in hearing about his story on the journey to financial independence? Listen to the Fast Track Podcast episode with the Poor Swiss.

Related articles:

How to Create Side Hustles

Blogging and Passive Income

How To Earn Passive Income With Your Internet Hotspot At Home