Ever since sites like JohnChow.com and Problogger.net have come out everybody is giving their best shot at trying to make money through blogging. While blogging alone is pretty straightforward, a lack of an actual sound business plan won’t necessarily result in money rolling in.

The idea behind passive income is that you setup a system, eventually it should run by itself (or very little maintenance), and experience some sort of income. Many people look at blogging as a source of passive income because you are constantly creating new pages trough articles and people can visit it 24/7.

While blogging is a way to derive a passive income, unless you add some sort of twist to it, it won’t bring in the big bucks you crave.

Why Most People Fail Turning Blogging into a Passive Income

Lack of solid business plan – It is as simple as that. Probably the most used advice I have come across is to blog about something you are interested in and eventually the money will come through. Sorry, but that is completely wrong and a utter waste of your time.

I love to workout. While my goal is to build muscle, if I just keep working out without any actual plan, odds are that I will either over work a part of the body or take 10x longer to get bigger than had I created a plan.

Ways to Turn Blogging into a Passive Income

• Create a product/service
• Create membership content
• Create an affiliate blog

Create a product/service – While using fixed ads or other affiliate programs can definitely bring in some sort of revenue, a less risky and higher return of investment will come from any services or products you have created. Take a look at some of the popular blogs in your niche. You are more than likely going to see some ebook, training package, or other type of service/product that users must pay for.

Besides just making money from these products, if a user trusted you enough to buy your product, then they will probably all become more dedicated to your blog.

Create membership content - Slightly harder than creating a product/service because with a membership program you are required to constantly update content. A good way around this is to perhaps make some of your blog articles only available to members or create some type of premium message board.

Create an affiliate blog - Most people think about blogs as personal thoughts. For example, what you may think of the stock market, why a particular television show was terrible, and so on. While this is not always a bad thing today, unless you have massive traffic, it may not lead to the best income.

An affiliate blog allows you to review certain items and then have some type of affiliate links sprinkled somewhere around. A good example here would be a golf club blog. Each blog posting should be a review of a certain club or even a “how to.” Obviously if your reviews are enticing and even gain some good search traffic, then you should be able to capture the money of these users. With the use of cleverly placed affiliate links, you can act like the products you are selling are from your site.

Bottom Line: Before you go throwing a blog up and hoping to make some passive income, remember that a sound plan needs to be setup before anything can really become passive. Unless you are getting million of page views a day, blogging alone won’t get the passive income your desire.