Darren from ProBlogger has written a long and informative post regarding the passive and active aspects of blogging income. I found his insights to be interesting and his authority on the subject can hardly be questioned. In his article, he attempts (and succeeds) in defining how blogging can be a passive source of income as well as an active one.

In a nut shell, passive income comes from your archives of previously posted articles and the ads that you’ve set to automatically appear on them. Over time, these articles will accumulate to a large number if you are a regular and consistent blogger. If you’ve also done your SEO homework, the pages will be well indexed, too. Search engine traffic will bring you readers to these pages and inevitably, some will click on your ads.

The active part of blogging income obviously comes from that hard work your doing late at night or early in the morning, or maybe even on your lunch break at work or school. I attempt to get up at 5am (yes, I said ‘attempt’) every day to work on my blogging and writing and keeping up with the online world. I use some of that time to compose posts like this one and also to interact with my readers through the comments left on FreshBlogger.

Needless to say, this can be hard work. First of all, it takes time to put together ideas to write about, sort of the pre-writing stage. This may involve surfing, talking, emailing, etc. Whatever the source, it does take effort to find and focus on a topic for your article. Even if you’re only pointing to other bloggers’ content, it still takes some work to make your own take on it unique and interesting and worth reading.

Writing the actual post can be easy or it can be hard. I sometimes find it to be very difficult to get a post written the way I want. It could be because I’m not properly focused on what I’m doing because of other concerns or perhaps I haven’t thought out my topic enough. Other times, it’s very easy for me to knock out a couple hundred or even a thousand words on some given topic.

After the writing is done, there is still more work to be done that makes blogging an active source of income. Layout, design, regular maintenance of comments as well as patches and upgrades, and, of course, decisions on advertising all have to have time devoted to them. These parts of blogging are subjective, though. If you’re not interested in blogging for money or building your readership, you may not put as much time into these things as other bloggers. If you do, you are certainly aware of how much time this all takes.

I’m sure there are a number of other tasks that could be added to this article. I haven’t yet mentioned the time it takes to go out build connections with other bloggers, like discovering new blogs and leaving comments. This is another important part of building your blog. Blogging is definitely an active way of generating income, but, yes, the passive income from old posts is still there and is a great way of being paid back for all that hard work.