Over the past few years, we’ve gone from writing our own articles to working with freelancers, then finally outsourcing to writing services. Working with writing services is what’s allowed us to finally scale and take our sites to the next level. While using a writing service for your content does have some drawbacks, the pros easily outweigh the cons (at least in my opinion). It’s simply the easiest way to get a lot of articles…

With the name of our brand being Passive Income Unlocked, you’d think I’d put more emphasis on the passive side of this business. In reality, it’s something we simply don’t think about too often because we’ve ingrained it into our approach. In a nutshell, there are pros and cons to making a site more passive. The biggest benefit of course is freeing up your time, which you can use for whatever you want (working on…

Everyone knows that your sidebar is prime real estate, right? And anything that you put in your sidebar is sure to attract endless, lucrative clicks? Well, not quite. Your blog’s sidebar isn’t something that should be completely ignored, but it’s also not as big of a deal as it likely was in the past. A big part of this is that people have gotten used to ignoring it, and another part is that more and…

When I first started down this blogging or niche site journey almost five years ago, I clearly remember how confusing everything seemed. Even with an IT background of over a decade at the time, things like WordPress and SEO were new concepts to me. Because of my all-in personality, I remember consuming every article and video I could find on the topic. Basically, I wanted to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing,…

One of the questions that I remember pondering for way too long when I started our first site was whether or not using your actual name mattered. Did you need to include your last name? Did you even need to use your real name at all? While these questions may seem pretty basic on the surface, when you’re starting your first site, you tend to want to get everything perfect (even though that’s very unlikely…

If you’ve been at this for a while, I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “the money is in the list.” While this holds true for many businesses, does it apply to all scenarios? Specifically, is building an email list worth it if you run a purely information site? Will you get the same type of return on that list that you would if your site was promoting products and services? While there are clearly plenty…

Thinking back to when I first got into blogging, some of the simplest concepts to me now seemed very confusing at the time. Things like themes, plugins, pages vs. posts., etc. One of those things that I remember really getting hung up on was tags. I had a hard time figuring out how they differed from categories, how to use them, and whether or not they even needed to be used at all. In this…

When I launched my first niche site back several years ago, the thought of scaling never even crossed my mind. I was completely happy publishing 1-2 posts per week, all by myself. Fast forward to a few short years ago, and scaling the business became the biggest challenge. Sure, we had a system that we knew would work, but how could we take that system and increase the output to hit bigger numbers faster? That’s…

Based on our own experiences and what I’ve heard from many other large online publishers, one of the biggest challenges to scaling is finding and retaining good writers. There are a couple of approaches to this. One is to hire freelancers, and the other is to use one or multiple content writing services. Most of the bigger online publishers that I know of prefer to use freelancers. They do this because you can find specialized…

There are certain things about blogging that I don’t particularly enjoy, and it’s safe to say that handling comments is one of them. Typically, people only take the time to comment when they have a strong opinion, and many times, you don’t want to hear it. That’s not to say there aren’t benefits to allowing comments on your blog. In fact, there are many that you should consider before deciding to disable them completely. In…