If you’ve read the introductory post for this blog, which was written not too long ago, you know that I recently quit my old blog in order to focus on creating a passive income and blogging about it here. Much to my surprise, that blog is still creating some income! I will explain, but first let me give you a little background.
I started my RamblingFever Money blog as a result of finding the Yakezie network. Yakezie is an entire community of personal finance bloggers and they had a challenge. I was intrigued, so I started a personal finance blog and joined the challenge. People probably wonder why or how I came up with RamblingFever Money as the name of the blog. Honestly, that is the result of me being cheap and not wanting to spend money. RamblingFever.com was the one and only domain that I owned. I actually bought it as part of a way to attempt to promote a multi-level marketing business (pyramid scheme) that I tried. I failed at that, so I had this domain that I wasn’t really doing anything with. I started kind of a personal blog with it not long before I found Yakezie. After I found Yakezie, I simply created a sub-domain for it which made my address for RamblingFever Money look like this – http://money.ramblingfever.com.
Making Money With a Blog
Within Yakezie’s forums, I learned that a lot of people make money with their blogs and some of them make really good money. I was bound and determined to do the same. From what I understood, private advertisers were supposed to start flooding my inbox with offers after my Alexa ranking dropped below 200,000. Having a page rank of 2 or higher is also helpful. My page rank only got to (and is still at) 1. A page rank of 1 is definitely better than a big fat zero.
I got my Alexa ranking all the way down to around 181,000 – then for about two months it hovered in the 180’s. It wasn’t really going up or down anymore. The calls were not coming in for private advertising. I even hired Crystal from Budgeting in The Fun Stuff to handle my advertising for me. She has turned her advertising expertise into a full time business and has a huge list of contacts. I thought for sure this would help me get at least some small deals. I got only one deal for a $125 sponsored post, which after Crystal’s 25% commission, netted me $93.75.
Side note: I highly recommend Crystal’s service if you are looking for help with advertising on your site. I would not have even gotten that one deal if it had not been for her. Her 25% commission is a small price to pay. Think of it this way – 75% of some money for you is better than 100% of no money! Go to Crystal’s blog and click the Crystal for Hire tab on the top of the page if you are interested.
Passive Income from an Inactive Blog
I grew impatient with the lack of income and quit that blog at just the wrong time. I was just on the verge of making some decent income. I know I was. But I grew tired of doing all the things you need to do to keep a good amount of traffic flowing to a blog like that. Time is my worst enemy when it comes to my internet activities and I was maxed out as it was. I figured that I had taken that blog as far as I could. The End.
So, I was sitting in my camper on vacation a couple of weeks ago. I checked my e-mail via my phone one morning and was completely shocked to get an e-mail from Crystal asking me if I would like to accept a $100 sponsored post! I had intended to e-mail her and let her know that I quit that blog and to take me off her list, but I never got around to that. So I was elated with the offer to put up a post on my old blog for $100 ($75 after commission). All I had to do when I got home from vacation was copy & paste the post, find and add a picture and then hit publish. Okay, so it wasn’t truly passive income, but it only took me about 10 minutes. To add to this pleasant surprise, later that week the contact for this sponsored post wanted to add another link to the post for another $50! Sweet! Talk about easy money. So my net for this one deal is $112.50 – for a post on a blog that isn’t even active!
In my e-mail conversations with Crystal last week, I inquired with her whether or not deals like this might keep coming my way. I asked her if it would be beneficial for me to somewhat keep that blog alive. She said that since I do have at least a page rank (even though it’s only a 1), that some of the cheaper deals (like this $100 one) might still come my way. We decided that it wouldn’t hurt for me to put up a good post every 2 to 4 weeks to keep the blog alive. Crystal added my blog to her list of sites that are willing to accept the cheaper deals.
So there we have it. RamblingFever Money is not completely dead. I will try to put up a good money post every couple of weeks. This should cause my Alexa rank not to skyrocket and might even eventually get me to a page rank of 2. However, I will not be doing all of the blog networking things like I used to with that blog. That is the stuff that took too much time.
And that is the dumb way that I created passive income with my old blog. Remember that there are several dumb ways to create passive income online, but only one site that is blogging about it! Dumb Passive Income… dot com.
-Matt
Matthew Allen
And here I thought you were a newbie like me. You’re a grizzled veteran of the online economy!
Haha! I’m hardly a veteran Mike, with 2 deals under my belt that I had to pay a commission to get. I do have a decent understanding though of how the blogosphere economy operates. I just didn’t master it and take full advantage before I quit to try this venture. I am absolutely a newbie to the niche site scene.
RFM is back from the dead!
Good to hear I’ll be… um… hearing your rambles again 1-2x a month.
Yeah PK… It’s hard to turn down such easy money. Plus it’s a lot of fun writing on personal finance topics. Just try to ignore the spammy looking posts that might show up there once in awhile. When they let me write them, I try to make them look as original as possible.
That’s pretty great! I would have thought for sure that the old blog would never have received anything else again, but it just goes to show you that keeping it around was worth it. BTW – I also work with Crystal and was also part of that $150 deal. Not bad for the amount of effort it took 🙂
You are right about the amount of effort, but the quality of the post reflected that amount of effort. If I still cared about that blog the way I used to, I definitely would have done some editing to that post. Thanks for the comment!