Thank you for sharing your blogging experience! Your dedication to your blog is super admirable. And you’re right, the work seems to never end, and it IS hard, competitive work. There are always new social media algorithms to stay on top of, planning months in advance for things like the holidays, researching, etc. I think that while blogging isn’t ALL passive, it certainly is a bit. After all, passive income is income generated from work you’ve already done, right? So all the posts you’ve already put out there, and the traffic you get to these posts that generates ad revenue, is definitely passive income. When I had my baby in January, I took about 3 weeks off from almost everything in my blog, and my ad/affiliate income didn’t drop a cent. It was like a paid maternity leave (which is rare these days!). A few weeks ago, my family had a horrible virus and I had to take a couple weeks off, and same thing. So I love the flexibility that blogging provides in that you can choose to work 16 hours a day or 3 hours a day or however much you want, and for me, I love that it’s forgiving in that I still get paid regardless of the hours I put into it (to an extent). Of course, I’m not advocating for completely abandoning a blog! But if it weren’t for the passive income side of my blogging income, I wouldn’t be able to work from home while also taking care of my baby, or tend to emergencies as they come up, etc., and for that I’m very thankful :-)

Let me tell you that blogging has nothing to do with ‘passive income’, not even remotely. I hear a lot from internet marketing ‘gurus’ showing ways to set up it and forget it sites that earn thousands in so called passive income every month. Blogging is not that. I have a 3 year old food blog that provides me with a modest income of 3-4K every month but it requires a lot of work to maintain. A LOT. I spend about 16 hours a day, every day – researching ideas, creating and testing recipes, cooking, taking pictures, writing up recipes, making videos. The competition is intense and its getting worse by the day. If I don’t post for a week I see my traffic drop. It’s a grind. It’s a hard job. It requires dedication and hard work. There is no other way, and there is nothing ‘passive’ about it.