[kohanz]

A blog I wrote about 5 years ago on obtaining your licensing as a professional engineer includes affiliate links to a site that sells packages that help with the application process. It's a very niche area but earned me about $5k in 2018 and is what I consider passive income at this point (haven't contributed to the blog in years). That amount was about double 2017, so I'm interested to see how much growth is left.

[enjoyitasus]

Sounds pretty cool and very passive. Do you mind sharing how long it took you build that audience, community and content to reach critical mass?

[kohanz]

Wrote the blog about 5 years ago, to a non-existent audience. The blog writing was simply to motivate myself to complete the application, which is an arduous process and, for me, was optional career-wise. At first I did things like create a Twitter account, follow people, tweet it out, etc, but that didn't work at all. I basically had negligible traffic for the first year at least. Then Google organically started picking it up because I had written useful content in an underserved niche - one of the things that got me writing the blog was searching for free help in the first place and not finding anything. Even after a couple of years, I was earning maybe $15/month in AdSense. Then the affiliate site reached out to me out of the blue, we tried some tests, and they failed miserably (no one converted). Months later he came back to me with an actual affiliate program, we tried it and it slow started to work and has scaled up to what I described above.

So to summarize, by far most of my time was spent writing the blog posts and watching my non-existent analytics. Nothing I actively did to market the site (and I did very little) worked. It was a project that didn't intend to make money, that ended up making money.