Does Passive Blog Traffic Really Exist?

Table of Contents

[no_toc]Yes.

No.

I often teach bloggers how to drive passive blog traffic to their blogs. Everybody loves passive traffic. Imagine enjoying time offline as a steady flow of people visit your blog. See this freeing lifestyle. Feels good, right?

But this passive traffic flowed to you based on some blogging work you put into your gig.

Here is how I frame it: passive blog traffic flows to bloggers who actively help people from a generous, highly leveraged, detached energy.

Spinning a Top

Imagine spinning a top.

You give that sucker a big twist with maximum effort to get it going. Taking this step requires some work. Just like building your blog from the ground up. Put in work to get it going. Putting in work is a very active, engaged endeavor involving you spending many hours in front of a laptop.

After you give the top a big twist and release it, passive spinning begins without your effort. You watch. You are a passive observer. Maybe you can walk away for a few moments. The top continues to spin passively but your initial work put the top into motion. Just like passive blog traffic. Based on your initial, generous effort, you walk away from the laptop to enjoy life offline while your blog traffic grows. Or you publish a post and observe 5 instant retweets from a passive energy. You did not tell 5 people to retweet the post but it still occurred.

Until you retire from blogging, you need to tap the top every once in a while to keep it spinning. This involves creating and connecting generously from a persistent, patient energy. Passive blog traffic becomes zero blog traffic if you stop blogging for 3 months, 2 years or 5 years, based on your stage of blogging growth. I could stop blogging for 3 months and still get traffic to my blog. This appears to be awesome passive traffic but me blogging 40,000 hours over 10 years set the table.

Blog traffic can be passive for months after quitting blogging outright, but only after you have been super active for a long time.

Leverage

The best way to drive passive traffic is to leverage. This ensures that every single one of your blogging efforts has a passive element to it.

Example; I can write and publish 10 posts today to my blog. I would see some passive traffic from my efforts because being prolific plants some seeds in the blogosphere.

But if I wrote 1 post for my blog and 9 for various other blogs I would leverage intelligently. Imagine submitting 9 guest posts to respected bloggers in my niche? I am tapping into audiences other than my readership. Plus my blogging buddies promote the posts as they see fit. Meanwhile, I am cruising around offline, as I see huge waves of passive traffic find my blog through the 9 guest posts I placed today.

I was very active in writing 9 guest posts and submitting to rocking bloggers but the passive traffic on the backend more than made up for the active effort. Leveraging played a huge part in this process.

Bloggers tend to think small. Publish a post to your blog. Allow the post to do what it does. Observe slow organic growth. Thinking small means no leveraging.

Think big. Visualize how you can reach huge amounts of people through a single action. Now multiply that single action 5 to 10 times daily to reach a massive group of people. Go offline after fellow bloggers publish your guest posts and hundreds to thousands of people will visit your blog through those guest posts as you enjoy watching Netflix, take your family out to dinner or fly to an exotic location.

Passive Blog Traffic Exists for Generous Leveraging Bloggers

Tap into sweet, passive blog traffic by busting your tail and thinking how you can reach the maximum number of people through each act. Then get super generous in helping people through these leveraging channels.

I still do not know of a better leveraging tactic than persistent, prolific guest posting.

Do what works for you though.

Put in the time, be generous, be persistent and patient to see a steadily increasing flow of passive traffic find your blog.