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!