Is it possible to earn true passive income writing online?


Introduction

As you may have noticed, until yesterday I had not posted on this blog for several years.  What you may not have known - this apathy was not just unique to this blog and was in fact across all of my online money making activities.

I thought it would be interesting to see how my income has held up during this period of inactivity (about 3 years) as this would indicate whether the aim of passive income online is a realistic.  

Whilst I have used many forms of online income, the only one I track in Google Analytics was Hubpages, plus my personal blogs so these are what I will be reviewing.  

Hubpages



As can be seen from the graph above, over 3 years the amount of traffic to my Hubpages have fallen by about two thirds.  Other than "accepting" comments about a year ago I have not done anything at all on Hubpages.  During this time there have been several changes on Hubpages including rolling out "Featured hubs".  If a hub is not featured it will not appear in search engines - in total less than half of my published hubs are now featured.  Furthermore, using the hubpages system I can see that many of my hubs have broken links and the like, so this will impact further on both the internal Hubpages ranking and that in the search engines.  I must admit I am pleasantly surprised with the amount of traffic I continue to get to my hubs (many of which are 5 or 6 years old) and will certainly update my existing hubs to see if that results in a boost to traffic.  Overall, I have probably benefited from the majority of m hubs being on "everygreen" topics eg those which don't go out of fashion.  

A little extra money UK


A little extra money UK is this blog, as can be seen, over the last 2 years I have continued to get reasonable traffic to it despite not having made any changes.  This is surprising since many of my most popular posts are monthly earnings updates from years ago, although I have also had some traffic to my review pages.  If I get the chance I will increase my postings on this blog (time permitting) and I will hopefully see the traffic increase once again.

Renewable UK


When I was at university I also posted a few articles on a blog called Renewable UK.  As can be seen from the above chart, this has seen the largest decrease in traffic over the last 3 years.  However, this is to be expected as the majority of my postings were comment/opinion articles on the latest news in UK renewable energy so if I am honest I am amazed I continue to get any traffic.  Renewable UK would also probably have the fewest number of backlinks from other sites as when I used to comment on blogs etc I would use A Little Extra Money UK or my Hubpages profile.

Other sites

It appears I continued to get traffic and therefore earnings from Webanswers, Infobarrel and the other third party writing sites I use as shown in the sidebar to the right.  However, I do not track these in Analytics so I am unable to provide graphs for these.

Conclusions

From the above it is clear that it is possible to earn true passive income from both Hubpages and blogging, however, as would be expected over time the earnings will diminish.  I would guess with some small input the rates of decline would be much less than that shown above so that is what I will do!

Dooyoo Review - Is it really possible to make money just for writing reviews?

Dooyoo is a website where it is possible to earn just for posting reviews on a large range of products.  In this blog post, I will review the reviewers to hopefully advise you on whether you should also be looking at using Dooyoo.

Firstly what is Dooyoo?
As said already, it is a site where you can write reviews on almost any product and be rewarded for this.  Products to be reviewed are put into varioustop level categories, and then subdivided down further.  For example, Media > Books & Magazines > Travel Books.
The reviews can be seen by people who go directly to the site, but Dooyoo probably hope they will also get lots of views originating with the search engines.  Dooyoo make their money from adverts on site, and they also have links to companies like Amazon who are selling the reviewed products for which they earn a commission.
It is important products are in the correct category as each category is allocated a Level - in total there are 3 levels with Level 1 being those which are most attractive to advertisers and Level 3 being the least.

How do you earn?
As with many ways of making money online, Dooyoo has it's own particular "currency" namely Dooyoomiles.  The amount of Dooyoomiles earned for each review depends on which category it sits in - Level 1 reviews earn 600 Dooyoomiles, Level 2 pays 300 Dooyoomiles per review and Level 3 rewards 100 Dooyoomiles.  Furthermore, it is also possible to earn additional Dooyoomiles each time another member reads your review, these are at the rate of 20, 15 or 10 Dooyoumiles dependent on which "Level" the review is in.  Extra special reviews can also qualify for a "Crown", for these an extra 1500 Dooyoomiles are awarded.

How much is each Douyoumile worth?
For the UK site each Dooyoomile is in effect worth 0.1p as 1000 Doyoumiles are worth £1, there are other Dooyoo sites elsewhere worldwide and so these rates will vary.

How do you claim these earnings?
Payment is made through one of two methods, either a bank transfer direct into your bank account or through Amazon vouchers.  Occassionally I believe Dooyoo also runs bonus events whereby each Dooyoomile is worth slightly more in Amazon vouchers than it's normal cash value.  There is also the option of donating your Dooyoomiles to charity.

My review
Dooyoo is a good site to earn a small amount of money if you have spare time and an internet connection.  However, you are somewhat limited by the amounts that can be earned since you need to have actually used the item reviewed.  Whilst it may be possible to do a lot of reviews in the Level 3 categories (books, films, groceries etc), the highest earning reviews in Level 1 are for items which are rarely purchased.  Therefore, you will not become rich using Dooyoo, but I definitely recommend it if you have a few hours spare.

If you like my review of Dooyoo, why not check out my Dooyoo profile here.