Website Makes Me $500 a Month in Passive Income – It Only Took 5 Hours to Set It Up

In the course of the last 12 months, I invested five hours of my time and $3,600 to get my site up and running. Today, it brings in $500 a month in passive income, even after Google’s helpful content update. 

How did I start? 

Well, I really like passive income, and my guess is, you do too. Since I already run several sites, I made a decision to outsource one entirely to see if I could turn it right into a money-making machine on autopilot.

I used Ahrefs to search out a distinct segment. Should you’re interested, the method is as follows:

• Type a really broad, generic keyword into the search bar. Should you’re seeking to construct an affiliate site, then something like “best” is a very good alternative.
• Activate the “Filter explicit search results” option.
• Next, press “add filter” and choose “domain rating.” Leave the ‘from’ box empty and put a low number (around 10) within the ‘to’ box.
• Then add a “page traffic” filter and go for a reasonably high number, as much as 50,000.

You’ll now see an inventory of pages that receive greater than 50,000 sessions a month on sites with a website rating of lower than 10. While not all of those articles are ones you’d need to construct a site around, you’re sure to search out a number of gems that prove you may construct high-traffic sites without having to spend countless hours and dollars on link-building or Pinterest.

The following thing I did was pull an inventory of keywords. Since I discovered a very accessible area of interest, it didn’t take me greater than a few hours to compile an inventory of over 300 keywords. The duty was simplified because lots of these keywords were just different mixtures of numbers.

How did I grow this website? 

Setting it up was a breeze; it took me just half an hour. I already host several sites on BigScoots, so adding this one was just an add-on with none extra payment. I also had a premium GeneratePress theme and WP Rocket able to go, so there was no additional monetary investment needed.

For the content, I outsourced article writing to a content agency at $12 a bit. We’ve had a long-standing relationship, so I gave them full access to the positioning to handle all of the posting in accordance with my specific instructions—how you can interlink articles, what images to make use of, and so forth.

In the primary month, I posted 20 articles after which let the positioning sit idle to get out of Google’s sandbox. Come November, the positioning was finally free to play in the large leagues. We resumed posting, and as you may see from the screenshot below, it hit 50,000 pageviews in April and peaked at 100,000 pageviews in July.

I had a hunch that the positioning could be affected by one in every of Google’s updates, and sure enough, it got hit by the HCU update in September 2023. Traffic took a dip, going right down to around 1,500-2,000 pageviews a day. But guess what? That’s still enough to earn me $500 a month.

Are web sites still a viable option? 

Absolutely, they’re. The recent Google HCU update can have modified the landscape, nevertheless it’s just the newest in an extended line of shake-ups—consider how Panda and Penguin switched things up 10 years ago. The trick is to pivot your strategy to satisfy current trends.

Gone are the times of long-form content brimming with fluff, very similar to how lengthy YouTube videos aren’t any longer the trend. Today’s audience craves short, straight-to-the-point information, whether it’s in the shape of a video or an article. Adapt to this, and also you’re golden.

More: Learn how to Sell Videos Online to News for Money (I revamped $6,000)