Can A Blog Make Money on Auto-Pilot : 1 Month Experiment

True independence in life is achieved when you are earning money on auto-pilot.

Money is not everything, but it’s quintessential to get on with your day-to-day life activity. Six years back, when I started blogging, I never knew that blogging could be one such profession that can give financial independence.

On an average, I earn about $7000/month from my blogs, and this was the first time in the last 6 years, from 1st December 2014 to 28th December 2014 ( almost one month) that I was away from blogging and any online work.

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I was busy with some personal events, and I comprehended that this is a good time to evaluate if an idle blog could make money for me.

Most of the profession/business I know of requires your presence in one form or another.

In most of the jobs, you can take leave for a limited number of days but after that it’s always unpaid leave.

Full-time blogging is same as a business and one month of blogging vacation gave me enough data to evaluate blogging in the terms of making money on auto-pilot.

Do consider the fact that this blog  (ShoutMeLoud) is a six year old blog with a community of more than half a million users.

In this article, I will share about how much money I earned in December 2014 without any work and how it affected the blog traffic. I will also share my observations and learning in the appropriate section below.

Traffic effect on the blog after one month of inactivity:

I stopped working on ShoutMeLoud from 30th November, 2014, and I was getting decent traffic back then due to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. What I was really interested to see, how traffic will go down after the Cyber-Monday, as there will typically be no action ( including no comment moderation) on the blog.

Note: 83% of ShoutMeLoud content is evergreen content.

Here is the traffic chart from last month (1st December till the date):

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Here is the breakage on the Weekly Traffic:

• Week 1: 138,478 views
• Week 2: 133,035 views
• Week 3: 129,781 views
• Week 4: 123,322 views

As you can notice, traffic decreased over time but it was not as high as I expected. On 29th December, I published this post, and traffic again went back to normal.

The major reason for the change in traffic was the loss in social media and returning visitors traffic.

Overall, one thing that is clear now is that traffic drop will not be so high for an inactive blog with evergreen content.

Now, let’s look at the income report for December 2014.

Blog income report after one month of inactivity:

Unlike my other income report, here I’m reporting how much total sales, ad revenue I generated into my account in the month of December. The final figure may change, and I will get an exact report in the month of March 2015 (When I will be paid for all affiliate sales).

The majority of ShoutMeLoud revenue comes from Affiliate Sales , Direct advertisement and a chunk is from Google AdSense or other ad networks revenue. Here is what my December income looks like:

• Affiliate income: 5822.30
• ShareAsale: $109
• WP Social Pro : $15.72
• Webhosting affiliate Programs: $314
• Aweber affiliate program: $59.40
• TweetAdder Affiliate Program: $197
• Elegant Themes Affiliate Program: $19.50
• SwiftTheme Affiliate program: $46.01
• Direct ads: $1450
• Viglink: $20
• AdSense: $550

In Indian currency, that’s about five lack 43 thousand. I ignored a few other small affiliate transactions in the above report.

This month I missed out mostly on services such as Blog consultancy, WordPress SEO service, and a few more due to my inactivity. If I have to compare this income with other businesses, I’m satisfied with the income my blog generated without being active.

There is no denying that income will drop if I keep the blog inactive for a couple of months. Overall, taking one-month complete break hardly affected the blog revenue (October income report was $7788).

For me, this data is valuable as I feel it would encourage you and others to jump into blogging and take it as a serious career options.

• Must read: How I’m generating $174/month with only 16 hours of work

Do you have any blog that is also generating revenue on auto-pilot? Let me know your experience and insights on the same. If you enjoyed reading this case study, share it with others on FB, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

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