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Seniors' quick guide to blogging for cash

If you're a senior citizen, you might be thinking that blogging is a young person's game. Of course, the typical stereotype of blogging involves some sort of millennial sipping coffee at Starbucks, typing out a blog post and checking all sorts of gadgets.

Well, you need to look past the stereotype to discover that a lot of older people who blog actually make money from their activities. The great thing about blogging is that it produces passive income. To get a clear understanding what passive income is, I want you to remember what it's like to work for a living.

Typically, you would have to show up at a physical location, punch the clock and sit your butt down for 8 hours. It doesn't matter whether you're pushing paper around or you're actually getting up to do physical things for work. Your time is locked in in particular space for 8 hours.

If you don't do that, you don't get paid. Welcome to the world of active income. It can simply be reduced to the simple formula of no work, no pay. It's like you're a chicken. If you don't scratch and peck on the ground, you don't eat.

It gets old quickly. Wouldn't it be great for you to work once, but earn money many times over from the stuff that you worked on a long time ago? This is called passive income. Of course there are many different variations of passive income. 

You can publish software, you can create an app, you can write a book or, if you want something lower impact and more in line with your experiences, you can blog for cash.

The secret to blogging success

It's very tempting to just jump into blogging. I mean, after all, how hard can it be? There are all sorts of free blogging tools like medium.com, wordpress.com and blogger.com. You don't have to spend money on a domain name, you don't have to spend dollars on a hosting account. It's absolutely free.

It is no surprise, however, that given the low barrier to entry, most bloggers fail. I don't say that to depress you. I definitely don't share that to discourage you. But this is a reality check. If you don't know what you're doing, don't start.

What follows is a quick guide on how to do it right. The reason why people fail at blogging is because they just blog about anything that they're interested in. On a personal level, this is fine. But the problem is your blog is not a personal diary.

You're trying to make money from your blog. You're trying to turn your time into dollars. If you want to do that, then you have to have a plan.

As the old saying goes, if you fail to plan, you are really planning to fail. Given the ridiculously high 90 percent failure rate of most blogs (whether they launched 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago), you really have to have a plan coming in. The good news is that your plan only needs to have 3 parts: niche selection, monetization plan, and content strategy. By thinking strategically and knowing these key planning elements ahead of time, you pave the way for your eventual success.
