Nothing is better than passive success. The goal of any website is to become more or less self-sufficient, with a profit attached. To earn such profits, you need traffic. Growing traffic can be hard work, but you can take some of that work and set it aside, by putting parts of your management and traffic generation on auto pilot. Establish a system, set a foundation and let everything grow for you.

1. Table of Contents hide

   Lots of Evergreen Content

   Write Detailed Tutorials

   Comment Everywhere

   Earn a Social Media Presence

   Maintain a High Google Ranking

   Lots of Evergreen Content

Everything that comes after this point is going to be based in some way or another on having a good site with a lot of content. If your site is new, congratulations! You’re in an excellent position to start off running. You can create a ton of content and have it prepared for launch, or schedule it for weeks or months in the future, using a content calendar.

You’re going to want to have a mix of both evergreen content and timely content. Timely content is what trends, what goes viral, and what attracts large volumes of new users to your site. Evergreen content is what keeps them around and keeps them coming back.

Think about it; how many people, today, want to know what the pre-release hype for the iPhone 3 was? Articles written about it aren’t going to retain their value. However, an article about repairing a software glitch in the iPhone 3 might still have some use, as plenty of people still use older Apple devices.

Build a solid base of evergreen content and you’ll earn people who come back time and again for the resources you provide.

2. Write Detailed Tutorials

If you’re trying to come up with something evergreen, tutorials and instructions are amazing. You have so much leverage, so much power from a good tutorial, it’s hard to be supplanted. A site with a great tutorial can only be usurped by an even better, more relevant tutorial. With this in mind, you need to make the best possible tutorial you can.

What makes a good tutorial? First of all, it needs to be simple and well-written. The quality of your instructions is important. For one thing, people might encounter issues with images or video. They might be stuck on a mobile device and only able to view your text. Make sure your tutorial can be used, start to finish, simply through text descriptions.

Second, you need images. Recipes, crafting instructions, computer repair, it can all use screenshots. Images illustrate your points, and you can use Photoshop to edit them to include references made in your text, for clarity.

Third, you might consider a video version of your tutorial. In general, unless you’re trying specifically for a video theme, don’t create video tutorials with no backing text and image support. A video is a great supplement; it’s less potent as a stand-alone tutorial.

3. Comment Everywhere

Once you have the strong foundation of your site, it’s time to bring it to the masses. Become a fixture of the community. Identify the blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Google+ accounts of all of your big-name industry influencers. Spend time getting to know their accounts, their audiences, their content and their sites.

Armed with this knowledge, begin commenting. Your purpose with these comments is not to gain backlinks, though those may come as time goes on. Your purpose is to establish yourself as part of the community and as an authority. If you ask a question, make sure it’s an intelligent question, not something that can be solved with a quick Google search. If you’re leaving an informative comment, make sure it stems from correct information or personal experience.

When you have something tangible to add to a discussion, one trick you can use is to create a blog post in response to the post you’re commenting on, then link that post in your comment. This works as a link to your site, and it’s relevant to the blog post you’re commenting on in the first place. Even better, the blog owner might pick up your link and add it to their blog for a more high profile display.

4. Earn a Social Media Presence

With commenting, I mention following several social profiles, which you can use to comment. You should also be building your own social media presence. You can start small, if you like; just a Facebook and a Twitter is all you really need. Other profiles are worth expanding into once you have the leverage to gain a quick audience.

On social media, you’re going to want to post frequently, post at the right times, share plenty of content and share content that isn’t yours. One good scheme for a 1-week schedule is the 10-4-1 rule. Consider this: if you post 15 times in a week:

• 10 posts should be curated content from other industry sources. This content should be high quality and serve either as amusement, information or research into your audience. The idea is to become a social media resource for all things in your industry, not just your own site.
• 4 posts should be yours, with a minimum of sales speak. Instead, you’re sharing interesting tidbits about your business, you’re sharing blog posts, you’re asking questions and you’re digging deeper into engagement with your audience.
• 1 post, and 1 post only, will be your deep sales pitch. This scheme limits the number of times a user will see your sales language, and will this make it seem more important and will keep you from being filtered by Facebook’s algorithms.

This rule can extend to other social profiles as well. Replace “posts” with “tweets” and you have a good scheme for Twitter, though you might go through fifteen posts in 2-3 days.

5. Maintain a High Google Ranking

SEO is your friend for passive traffic income. Most everyone today finds sites through Google; some people use Google as an address bar and gateway to everything they do. Being the top dog in search results is essential.

You can dig as deeply into SEO as you want, but the basics are:

• Use keywords properly; not too much, not too little, and avoid overlapping keywords on high-profile content.
• Make sure your site uses all the right meta information, including unique titles, descriptions and robots directives.
• Proper coding is a must; never block the search bots, don’t obfuscate parts of your site through code, etc.
• Canonicalize or remove duplicate content.

Maintaining a high Google rank isn’t exactly a trick, per se, nor is it really a passive source of traffic, but the returns can be so high that it seems effortless when done properly.

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