Every morning I have a habit of sipping on some dark roast coffee while watching the performance of the stock market. Nothing tickles my nose better than the divine aroma of brewing a fresh pot of coffee in the morning and there is no better combination than sipping on a cup of that heavenly coffee while researching blue chip dividend paying stocks and analyzing the stock markets performance on the New York Stock Exchange. As I was getting caught up in the latest political and financial chatter I was thinking about what I should blog about next. Well passive income of course!

There are numerous passive income ideas to help get you on the path towards financial freedom. There are some entrepreneurs and work at home enthusiasts who prefer to mow lawns full time, run errands for the elderly, or even swing trade stocks on the stock market. And while those gigs can provide a nice passive income stream and being a successful day trader can become quite addicting one of my personal favorite ways to earn passive income is blogging for a living from the comfort of my very own home. Blogging full time for a living is a fun and exciting way to earn passive income. If I can do it then you can do it too. If you’ve always wanted to blog full time and don’t know where to start, then below are three tips to help jump start your blogging career.

• Outsource content writers
• Install a premium theme
• Hire a professional SEO company

Outsource content writers

• Shop around to get the best deal.
  • Working from home and earning passive income means you have no boss. You are the boss. So why should you do all the heavy lifting? Out sourcing content writers can be an excellent boost in providing your blog with quality content that your visitors want to read. However you don’t want to just hire any content writer off the street so to say. You’ll want to shop around to get the best deal. I know the goal is to get a passive income stream going; however, sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Which is why you should be methodical in who you hire to provide your blog with trending content. Hiring industry veterans is a good place to start. These high profile content writers have worked for the online world’s top notch media and entertainment platforms providing those high traffic sites with quality content around trending topics that people want to read. Hiring industry veterans means your own site will benefit from their professional content coverage.
  • You have to also consider how much you are willing to pay for a specific type of content. Do you want to pay someone with less writing experience less amount of money for a lot of lower quality articles or would you rather pay someone who has more writing experience more amount of money to write fewer but higher quality articles? Are you willing to display articles on your site that are loaded with grammatical errors and unsightly formatting mistakes just so you can spend the least amount of money on the most amount of content? Or will you go the extra mile and spend that extra money to make your site stand out from all the rest? Is your blog just another blog loaded with irrelevant content or is your blog unique enough to attract a high amount of traffic?
  • If you choose to outsource content writers you may notice that some of their prices fluctuate during key dates of the year. Media and entertainment venues in particular tend to cause a rise in prices that content writers are willing to accept from online blogs to provide your site with catchy articles relating to trending topics. You may find that video game conferences such as E3 and Comic Con, college graduations, and big media and entertainment reveals such as movies, video games, and mobile apps may dramatically influence how much content writers are willing to be paid. The holidays in particular including Black Friday and Cyber Monday tend to cause a spike in content prices especially for product reviews. So if you are looking to spend the least amount of money to kick start content on your blog don’t be surprised if you end up paying more than you expected if you out source content writers during major media and entertainment events.
• Benefits of outsourcing content writers.
  • There are many benefits when choosing to outsource content writers to provide content on your blog. Even though you are spending money up front, out sourcing content writers is a worth while time saving investment to help boost the content on your blog. Hiring content writers allows you to focus more on the web mastering side of things including social media promotion, site updates, and monetization. If you find the correct content writers that suit your standards of professionalism, you will have the peace of mind knowing that you are paying your content writers for quality content and not some grade school level writing assignment. One of the major benefits of out sourcing top notch content writers is that your blog gets content while you sleep. By out sourcing content writers you can sleep well at night knowing that you have a team of professionals around the world constantly providing your site with high quality content.
• Timing is everything.
  • You need to be proactive in your search for the best of the best of content writers. There are two main types of content writers you should keep in mind. Freelancers and Contractors. Many of the new content writers on the internet are freelancers. Meaning that they are not tied to or contracted by any single website or company. They are free to come and go as they please. If they want to stop working for you they can and will. Freelancers are usually cheaper; however, their prices tend to fluctuate quite often. Contractors on the other hand are the top tier of content providers. Contractors only work for a select few businesses at any given time and provide high quality content on the site they are contracted to work for. Contractors are usually more expensive; however, their prices tend to be quite uniform with each other regardless of the type of trending topics their content covers.
  • Seeking out quality talent should be one of your highest priorities when choosing to outsource content writers. If you are not proactive enough in your talent search you may miss out on the chance to hire top notch content creators. If you don’t know whether or not you should stick with only freelancers or only contractors, consider hiring the best of both worlds for your blog. Freelancers can be a relatively inexpensive way to help jump start your blog with an abundance of decently written content while contractors generally cost more to provide your blog with fewer yet higher quality articles covering trendy topics related to your blog’s niche.
• One thing to keep in mind.
  • If the majority of your content comes through outsourcing content writers you may run into a dilemma if all of a sudden your content writers are offered a higher paying job at another company. Don’t think that you are the only one who wants to hire all of the best content writers for the least amount of money. There are many others who are thinking just like you and want to hire the content writers who you want to hire. And usually the highest bidder is the winner in almost every area in life. You just shouldn’t necessarily rely solely on content writers to provide you blog with high quality content. It is your blog afterall so you should be typing away along with your content writers. If you don’t think you are fluent enough in writing professional written articles remember practice makes perfection. You could also consider attending a writing seminar on how to properly research, write, and format professional grade articles covering trendy topics. If there are no writing seminars in your area you could also take online writing courses. Many colleges and universities offer online courses you just have to take the time to research how much you are willing to pay for them to teach you how to write professionally. And if you are thinking why you should have to spend money to attend a writing class to help you write blog articles more effectively then consider this… Would you rather continue working for someone else the rest of your life?

Install a premium theme

• Your blog must look good.
  • Eye appeal is everything when a visitor initially stumbles upon your site. A pretty blog makes for a comfortable browsing experience for both first time and recurring visitors. Attaching thumbnails or featured images to your blog articles can speak volumes about the article they are attached to. And speaking of pictures, even in the blogging world a picture is worth a thousand words. The content found in each blog article should be summed up by a single image. You shouldn’t just attach any thumbnail to an article though. If your article is about trading penny stocks for example you may want to consider attaching a thumbnail with an image of a graph and some pennies. Having a picture thumbnail to match what your article is about can help the visitor make a quick and informed decision on whether or not they want to spend their time reading that particular article.
  • You want to make sure your blog matches or exceeds the retina ready standards. You don’t want to have a blog all pixelated allowing your visitors to literally count the pixels composing of your blog; however, you don’t want to overwhelm your visitors with all the colors of the rainbow and then some. Consider choosing high density complimentary colors. Remember not to go overboard when choosing the amount of colors you want on your site. Stick with two or three complementary colors for your entire site and nothing more. If you need additional colors for whatever reason, simply use various shades of the two or three colors you are already using.
  • Have a dark mode for your theme. Many premium themes have a dark version to choose from in the admin panel. Introducing a dark mode version of your theme allows easy readability for visitor’s in a low light environment including late night readers such as college students, truckers, and people who work the evening shift at their job. The dark mode version of your theme should be toggleable from the user’s own dashboard or from a menu bar on the screen. You may want to think about whether you want visitor’s of your blog to be able to toggle the dark mode version of your theme with out having to register and log into their profile on your blog or if they are allowed to toggle between the light version and dark version of your theme without having to register and log into your site.
• Utilize AI technologies.
  • Many premium themes include widgets with some sort of recommended articles following immediately after the article that the visitor was just reading. The recommended article widget should be tailored in a way to recommend articles based on your visitor’s on site and off site browsing history.
  • Not all premium themes include an AI assistant to help with your site’s visitor’s needs; however, now that we are in a world of machine learning technologies and on demand IoT (Internet of Things) having some sort of AI assistant on your blog can be extremely beneficial to new traffic. An AI assistant can assist your blog’s readers with any questions they may have sort of like an on demand chat menu for Q&A’s and faqs along with any support queries if you are a hosting provider for domains registrars and cloud servers.
  • A premium theme that includes it’s very own smart Ad management system can put you one step ahead of your competition when you are wanting to earn more than blogs in your similar niche. You shouldn’t just purchase and install any premium theme that includes an Ad management system; however, you want to be smart in choosing a premium them that includes a smart Ad management system coded with intelligent AI that is able to learn overtime. For example one feature that a smart Ad management system should have is the ability to show personalized ad serving based on your visitor’s on site and off site browsing history.
• Ad management system.
  • The great thing about purchasing a premium theme is that the theme will usually come bundled with a high quality smart ad management system that learns over time. Many developers want to offer their customers everything they need and to help avoid their customers from seeking products elsewhere. And since the intelligent ad management system comes built in, there should be little to no theme conflicts since you are not using a third party ad plugin with the hopes of compatibility.
  • A built in ad management system means that it comes supported by your theme’s developers right out of the box. Meaning you won’t have to purchase a “premium plan” or purchase a premium version of a third party ad plugin just so you can receive support from the developers.
  • Having a built in ad management system in your premium theme means that it is constantly updated when your theme is updated. So you won’t have to worry about having an outdated ad management system running brand new ads. And since your ad management system is constantly updated by the developers means that it is compatible with the newest WordPress version and latest WordPress coding practices.

Hire a professional SEO company

• Advertising.
  • Social media promotion is one of the premier methods in driving organic traffic to your blog. A lot of people now a days rely on social media to provide them with current news rather than the typical news outlet. Which means nearly effortless promotion of your blog’s content. When ever you publish blog posts you could manually link that particular blog post to a social media page; however, having an automatic method to do just that gives you more time to write more content or advertise on an additional platform. For instance, if the SEO company doesn’t provide a way for your blog’s content to be automatically published to a social media platform of your choice then you may want to download and install a third party WordPress plugin which automatically publishes your published content to a linked Facebook page or YouTube account.
  • Hiring a professional SEO company can help increase traffic to your blog. Both bots and organic traffic are required to help jump start your blogging career. If you regularly publish content covering trendy topics bots will crawl your blog and archive your blog’s content so your articles can be displayed in search engine results from. When humans type in keywords into a search engine text box on their computer or mobile device they search for results related to their search criteria from the meta content displayed that the bots crawled and archived from hopefully your blog and not someone else’s.
  • If an SEO company offers anything it should be to improve your blog’s page rank in Google’s search results. Google’s search algorithm is one of the best and you shouldn’t take their search results for granted. A page rank of one is better than a page rank of two. You may think your blog’s content is unique and it very well could be; however, there are a lot of blogs out there on the internet that are competing for the same page rank as you are. Constantly publishing high quality content related to trendy topics can help boost your blog’s page rank past your competitors.
• Analytics.
  • Meta descriptions – Meta descriptions are the texts you see in search results related to the keywords that you typed into a search engine. A premium theme should allow you to customize the meta description for both your actual blog and per each blog article upon publication. A professional SEO company will fine tune your meta descriptions for a higher page rank in search results related to a person’s search criteria.
  • Text length – Just because a blog article has thousands of words in it does not necessarily mean the content within the blog article is of high quality. And visa versa, just because a blog article has only a few hundred words in it does not necessarily mean the content within the blog article is of lesser quality. What works for me is that I enjoy posting one massive blog article containing thousands of words in it about once per month followed by one or two smaller blog articles containing only a few hundred words in them in between the massive blog articles. My massive blog articles are more like research papers while my short length blog articles are more like quick thoughts or tidbits about a topic. A professional SEO company will help you in determining through various SEO experiments how long each of your blog articles should be and how often you should be publishing blog articles in order to boost your site rank.
  • Site map – Including a site map on your blog enables web bots to crawl and archive your content and links more effectively. If you don’t know how to properly create a site map then a WordPress plugin or an SEO company will be the route to go. Installing a professional grade WordPress SEO plugin should allow you to create a site map with ease while an SEO company may use their own plugin to create a site map or may even create a site map without a plugin. You would have to contact an SEO company for details on if and how they create site maps for WordPress powered blogs.
  • Keywords versus keyphrases – Keywords are individual words that describe what your blog article and blog in general are about. Having one to three keywords is ideal and no more than three to five keywords at the most. A blog or blog article with more than five keywords may lead search engines and their bots in assuming that your blog is just another generic blog covering too many topics rather than focusing on a single topic. Keyphrases on the other hand are more or less a sentence of keywords that describe your blog or blog article. A keyphrase should describe what your blog’s content is about and shouldn’t contain more than five keywords. A keyphrase should be unique for each blog article; however, your keyphrases should still be inline with your blog’s overall niche. Keyphrases should be repeated only a few times in each blog article. Repeating a keyphrase that is more than necessary to get your point across in your blog article could have a negative impact on your site ranking and could be a turn off for your visitors. An SEO company will help you to pin point which keywords to use and how often to use them both individually and in keyphrases in your blog’s content.
  • SEO Plugins. Recommended or very own plugins – There are many WordPress SEO plugins to use that don’t require much SEO experience from yourself. You may not be able to find an SEO plugin in the WordPress database that matches your SEO criteria. In which case collaborating with an SEO company will help in determining the best plugin for your blog. An SEO company may recommend key WordPress SEO plugins or may even have created their own. An SEO company may even create a plugin specifically for your blog; however, they might charge you a fee and a license agreement to use their plugin. Agreeing to some sort of license agreement or contract for purchasing and using an SEO plugin from an SEO company might not be a bad idea and could be a sign of professionalism from both sides.
• Monetization.
  • Ad types. Text. Image. Text and image. Contextual links. – Aside from affiliate links the most common way to earn passive income while blogging is by placing ads on your pages. There are four main ad types that many ad publishers and advertisers use and they are;
    • Text
    • Image
    • Text and Image
    • Contextual links
  • When choosing which ad type that you want to display on your page will depend on various factors such as the highest bid offered during an ad space auction, the location of the ad placement, and the duration in which the ad will appear in that spot on that page. Each of the four common ad types are used for a variety of ads and each has their own separate benefits.
    • Text ads are ads that have no images and are usually the cheapest for advertisers to purchase; however, they are also one of the lowest income generators among ad types.
    • Image ads come in a similar format as the text ad types do; however, image ads contain media rich advertisements in the form of images and video. Image ads cost more for advertisers to purchase; however, they usually generate the highest return in online advertisement revenue for ad publishers such as full time bloggers.
    • Contextual links are usually nothing more than just a single word or only a few words that are nothing more but links to an off site website. Similarly to text ads, contextual links are some of the cheapest advertisements that companies can purchase while at the same time provide the least amount of ad revenue for online bloggers.
  • Running various experiments with multiple ad types can help you in choosing which ad type is best for a particular page. Sometimes it’s best to stick with a single ad type on a page and other times you might generate higher ad revenue by utilizing multiple ad types on a page. Either way, running various experiments or consulting an SEO company can help you choose the ad types that work best for your site.
  • Ad sizes. Responsive. – After you choose which ad type that you want to display on a page on your blog, you will want to determine which ad size that you want for that particular ad type. Some of the more popular ad sizes include the;
    • 300×250 medium rectangle
    • 336×280 large rectangle
    • 468×60 banner
    • 728×90 leaderboard
    • 160×600 narrow skyscraper
    • 300×600 wide skyscraper
    • 320×100 mobile ad size.
  • The 300×250 and 336×280 ad sizes are usually found in or around the actual content of a blog article. The 468×60 and 728×90 ad sizes are popular for various header or footer ad placements. The 160×600 and 300×600 ad sizes are typically found in side bars either on the left or right side of the blog’s content area. And the 320×100 ad size is usually ideal for mobile ad types; however, the 300×250 ad size is becoming increasingly more popular among mobile ad publishers as well.
  • You may also want to consider using responsive ad sizes which conform to the device the ad is being displayed on. Not all users browse the web on desktops anymore. The increasingly popularity of mobile device such as tablets and smartphones are used just as much if not more to browse the internet. Running the correct ad type in a responsive ad size may generate a higher online revenue. And remember to keep in mind that just because the ad size is bigger doesn’t necessarily mean the ad type will generate a higher revenue. Running experiments and consulting with an SEO company will help you in determining the correct ad size for a particular ad type on a particular device.
  • Ad placement. Locations. Embedded within content. Header. After content. Footer. – Certain ad locations may generate higher revenue than other ad locations. For instance a 336×280 large rectangle ad may generate higher revenue the closer it’s ad placement is to the actual content of the blog article versus placing the ad in the header or footer of a blog article. On the other hand a 728×90 leaderboard may generate higher revenue if it is placed immediately before or immediately after the content of a blog article versus placing the ad somewhere inside of the content or in a side bar. You should always be running various experiments to help you choose the best location for a particular ad placement of an ad.
  • Implement mobile first approach. Collaborate with your theme’s developers. – A good SEO company should collaborate with your theme’s developers when working to improve your blogs SEO performance and advertisement revenue generation. Since the vast majority of online shoppers, college students, and online tutorial seekers utilize some type of mobile device in their quest for online information, implementing a mobile first approach when designing your blog’s theme may help the traffic to your blog generate higher ad revenue.
  • Think of it this way, when was the last time you were in a break room at work and your fellow employees were browsing online news from a desktop computer? How many of them were doing the same thing on their smartphone? By implementing a mobile first approach in your site’s design you are catering to a wider audience than just those who use a desktop computer.