483: A Lazy Way To Make $200/Day In Passive Income – Family First Friday

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What’s up everyone, you are listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, where I teach you how to make money online by exploring different tools, strategies, and understand how to leverage human psychology to grow your sales. Welcome to a special segment of the show called Family First Fridays, where I’m going solo to give you my thoughts on how to make money without sacrificing your lifestyle. Now if you haven’t picked up my book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and get over $690 in free bonuses.

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Now in a prior episode that I published on how I make $5,800 per day in passive income, I got a lot of questions specifically about how I make money advertising on my blog. So today I’m going to teach you exactly how I make between 200 to $350 per day in passive income by literally doing nothing. Now I just want to say upfront, I went through the first 13 years of blogging without displaying any ads on my site.

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And I was really torn about whether to do it at all because the viewer experience is not as good. But both my friends Spencer Hawes and Mike Jackness started doing it with their blogs and they reported no degradation in time on site, bounce rate and other metrics. So I said, what the heck? Let’s just give this a go. Now in order to make money selling advertising on your website, obviously you first need a website. So I’m not gonna go into the specifics on how to launch your own WordPress blog.

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but I have put together a video in the show notes that you can watch later that will walk you through how to set up your website for only $3 in under five minutes. Putting up your own WordPress blog is not rocket science and it literally requires zero technical knowledge. And because WordPress is so easy to use, it literally powers over 25 % of the entire web. So I’m gonna start this episode by diving straight into how to make money by selling advertising because that’s what most of you have been asking me about in your email questions.

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But if you want to learn my exact strategies for creating content and generating traffic, I’m going to cover it at the end of this episode. So assuming you have a blog and a readership, the easiest way to make money advertising is by signing up with an ad network. An ad network is a platform that matches advertisers with publishers, and basically they collect ad inventory from various publishers and bundle it all together to sell it to advertisers. And by offering this service, they take a cut of the ad revenue.

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Now, why would you want to give an ad network a cut of your earnings? It’s because otherwise you would have to reach out to individual companies and then broker these ad deals yourself, which is a ton of work and generally not worth your time. And incidentally, this is what I do whenever I need to get a podcast sponsorship. I’m doing all my negotiations, but I do get to keep all the money. Now, as of this recording right now, there are five main ad networks that are popular among bloggers. And I’m going to start with the best ones first.

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which do require traffic minimums to join, followed by the ones that anyone can join. Now the first, and one of the best ad networks in the world is called AdThrive. AdThrive is a premium ad network that only takes on blogs that generate a minimum of 100K page views a month. Now a page view is defined as a number of pages that get loaded on your site per month, and it’s completely independent of the number of visitors that you receive. For example, in theory,

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you could have one person visit your page 100,000 times, and that would technically qualify. But ad networks do look at your analytics reports and make sure that that’s not happening. Now, the next premium ad network is called Mediavine. Mediavine is the one that I personally use for my blog, and I’ll explain later on in this episode why that’s the case. But Mediavine requires a 50K page view per month minimum to join. And then going further down this list, we have Izuik and Monumetric.

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which each carry a 10K minimum page view per month requirement. And at the very bottom, we have Google AdSense, which is Google’s own ad network, which has no requirements to join whatsoever. Now, even though AdSense is at the very bottom of my list, there’s nothing wrong with using it. After all, if you don’t qualify for some of the more premium networks, then you can make a couple of hundred extra dollars per month by doing nothing with AdSense. Now, once again, there are zero requirements to join AdSense.

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So you may as well do it from the start. Now to make the highest amount of money selling advertising, you either have to sell your own ads or join the best ad networks, which in this case is AdThrive and Mediavine. Now obviously using an ad network is not free. The company needs to get paid out somehow, and here are some specifics regarding AdThrive and Mediavine. Now with AdThrive, they take a 25 % cut of all the proceeds and their average CPM is about $15.

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This CPM number is how much you get paid per 1,000 impressions of an ad. So if your blog gets 10,000 views per month with a CPM of 15, you make 150 bucks. Now the main advantage of AdThrive is that the CPMs are high and they pay you out very quickly within a month. Likewise, Mediavine also takes a 25 % cut and their average CPM is also around 15 bucks. But their approval process is much longer and they only pay you out after 65 days

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which is literally double what AdThrive offers. So why did I choose Mediavine over AdThrive? Well, it’s because Mediavine offers much better site speed. And typically, one of the big negatives of adding advertisements to your website is that it’s going to slow down your blog. But Mediavine has specifically optimized their ads to not affect your site speed at all. And because I care about how fast my website loads, going with Mediavine was a no-brainer despite its disadvantages compared to AdThrive.

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And even though both Mediavine and AdThrive advertise CPMs in the $15 range, in reality, you could get paid out much more. So for example, if your blog is in the business or the finance space like mine is, you can easily get CPMs in the $60 range or even more than that. The amount you get paid also depends on where your traffic is coming from. In general, any English speaking country is going to get paid out more than a non-English speaking country.

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Now I know it sucks for all the foreign language websites out there, but that’s just the way it works. The amount you are paid also depends on two other factors. The viewability. Viewability measures whether the viewer actually sees the ad. In order for an ad to be watchable, it must be placed in a highly visible area, such as directly within your content. Another visible location to place your ad is at the bottom of your screen on mobile. So basically in order to earn top dollar for your ads,

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you’re going to have to sacrifice some amount of readability for your blog. And then finally, there’s the fill rate. The fill rate is the percentage of ad impressions that actually deliver a paying ad. And premium ad networks typically have higher fill rates than the lesser ad networks because they have plenty of ad inventory to make sure that you are paid for every page view on your site. Now, some of you guys listening might be thinking to yourself, won’t ads negatively affect the user experience for your visitors? And the answer is yes and no.

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And it really depends on your audience. The best way to tell if ads are driving people away is to look at your stats. And when I looked at the analytics from my site, the ads did not affect my time on site or my bounce rate whatsoever. So basically, I’m getting an extra 6,000 to almost $10,000 a month with my blog for doing nothing, and it’s not affecting the usability of my site. All right, so let’s switch gears and talk about how to generate traffic for your blog.

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Even though this money is 100 % passive for me today, it take me a while to reach this point. So first off, when it comes to actually putting out written content, you definitely don’t need to be an experienced writer. There’s a bunch of niches out there for you to explore, whether it’s travel, fitness, personal finance, or basically anything that you’re passionate about. And if you don’t enjoy writing, you can easily hire writers on the ProBlogger job board at the rate of about five to 10 cents per word. Now,

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the writing is actually not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out exactly what to write about in order to rank in Google search, and this is otherwise known as search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is the practice of enhancing your website so that it’s more discoverable by the search engines. And when you optimize your site for SEO, you’re making it easier for Google to understand, index, and present your content in relevant searches. Now, if you want to replicate what I’ve done with my blog over at mywifequitterjob.com,

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you have to use a keyword tool. And the two that I recommend right now are Ahrefs or Ubersuggest. And you only need one of these. And the reason why I’m presenting two options here is because Ahrefs is pretty expensive at $99 a month, whereas Ubersuggest is free for up to three searches per day. Now Ahrefs is by far the better tool, but Ubersuggest is better than just flying blind. Now the secret to ranking in search is to optimize your posts

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so that it answers the exact questions that people are searching for on Google. And in order to do that, you have to know what people are searching for in the first place. So for example, I rank number one for the term, is DHgate safe? DHgate is a place where people can find wholesale suppliers for their online store. And if I didn’t use a tool like Ahrefs, I might have haphazardly written about DHgate, how to use it, and maybe other things about the tool. But Ahrefs specifically told me,

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that people were searching for the exact query, is DHgate safe? And as a result, I wrote a blog post where the title was exactly answering the question. Now, Google always wants to return the best answer to any question, and because my entire blog post answers that exact query, I’m able to rank for that term. And as you can see, there’s no way you could possibly know what people are searching for unless you use a keyword tool. And in general, when starting a popular blog,

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it pays to focus on a very narrow topic. Google tends to rank websites that it feels are the foremost experts in a particular niche. So for example, back when I was younger, I was really into building high-end PCs and overclocking them. And I remember this one website that specialized in only reviewing the best heat sinks. A heat sink is what draws the heat away from the CPU. All this website talked about was heat sinks on the entire website. And as a result, that website ranked in the top five

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for practically every heat sink related keyword term. And then once you have a bunch of posts that describe every aspect of a very specific topic, you’re to want to organize that content in such a way that a reader finds your site and then stays on it forever. Remember, the more pages that a visitor views on your site, the more you’re going to get paid. And the amount of time they say on your website matters as well. So here’s what I do. I put together special category pages.

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where someone can find more information about related topics. Now you can just take a look at my blog. You’ll notice that I have it sectioned out into various subsections. And if you read one post, it always leads to another one. So for example, I have subsections on how to get started, how to find products to sell, how to find the best e-commerce platform, how to advertise, how to generate traffic. Basically when someone lands on my site, it’s like a black hole of information and they stay on it for a long time. It’s kind of like what TikTok does. They draw you in with the video.

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and you end up scrolling for hours. This is what you need to do with your blog. Here are some other things that I do on every post to keep people on my site longer. Every post has a breadcrumb at the top that leads viewers to other pieces of content in the same category. Below the content, I have a list of related posts as well. And within almost every blog post, I embed YouTube videos and podcasts to keep people on my site for as long as possible.

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And the collection of all these strategies allows me to make top dollar for every visitor on my site. And from there, the ad network does the rest and I make money on autopilot. Now that you know how I make passive income with advertising, make sure you check out my other episode to learn about my seven other passive income streams. And you can find that link in the show notes below.