Can You Make a Large Passive Income From Running a Website?

The best way to make passive income is to sell a digital product. This simply requires that you make or find a digital product to sell, build a ‘sales page’ from which to promote said product and then use advertising or marketing strategies in order to drive more visitors to that sales page.

This is a very ‘hands off’ method of earning an income that will generate money while you’re sleeping – and you don’t even need to worry about delivering a product!

But the problem is that this is limited in scope. Eventually, you are likely to exhaust the market for your product and find that the cost of advertising starts to outweigh the profit from your sales.

You aren’t delivering any value to the end user, you aren’t building a relationship and at the end of the day, this is a technique that won’t last forever.

And that’s why a lot of people are interested in making money from a website. That way, they can build their own brand, build a big audience and then sell products that they’re really interested in and proud of.

But is it possible? Can you really generate the same kind of passive income from a website? How long will it take? Let’s find out…

The Challenge

There are a number of challenges that make it harder to make a passive income from a website right from the offset.

For starters, you will immediately find that the money you make from adverts such as Google Ads is not truly comparable to the money you can make from a digital product. Ads will typically pay out a few cents per click and most of your visitors are not going to click them often. This is especially true these days with so many people running ‘ad blockers’ and the like.

The other problem is that it can take a long time and a lot of work to gain a big audience on a website. You’re going to be competing with the rest of the web and many of the creators you’re going up against will have gigantic advertising budgets.

The Strategy

But as with most things, the secret is to work ‘smart, not hard’.

That means picking the right niche to begin with. By selecting the right niche to enter into, you will be able to avoid going up against huge competition (as you might do if your niche were something broad like ‘fitness’ for example) while at the same time ensuring there is enough of a demand for what you’re selling.

Choose a niche that has clear products to sell to a specific audience and one that will allow you to avoid the hugest competition.

The next strategy is to recognize that you need enough content to climb the ranks of Google and that this content needs to be high quality. This is where it can be hard to keep your model ‘passive’ but the solutions are either to hire someone who will create the content for you, or to spend a while writing lots of content so that you can post it gradually over time.
