Self-Sustaining Web Sites – Passive Income with Minimal Maintenance

In a previous post I explained why I thought blogging was a time-sink and an awful way to make money online, and I said that my goal was to build 100% self-sustaining web sites that can run on their own without needed constant updates and maintenance. Well, that’s all good and well, but what exactly is a self-sustaining web site?

First, we have to look at what makes a visitor come back again and again to a site. Its one word. Value. If you offer something of value to a visitor – information, amusement or entertainment, a social atmosphere, or a useful tool – they will come back to your site time and time again.

In my time, I’ve built informational/content sites, game sites, blog sites, forum sites and e-commerce stores. I’ve had the least amount of success with e-commerce, and generally-speaking, I’m done with it – I don’t see myself ever fiddling with that again. Selling products online to me isn’t Passive Income – every sale is work you have to do. Work to get the product, wrap the product, ship the product, process payment, process returns, deal with defects and shipping problems, etc. Who needs the hassle? So for me, e-commerce sites are out.

Blog sites, like I mentioned earlier, aren’t that much better. Having to write 1-2 original posts a day is work, plain and simple, and its not Passive Income. (There is a work-around for this, however, but I’ll talk about this a little later).

Informational sites are great, but only if you have enough original and insightful content to completely corner the market on a specific niche. I’ve been able to do this only once with an informational site, and it wasn’t easy. In fact, the amount of hard work it took to get there more or less precludes me from every trying this again. So while I do currently make Passive Income from my informational site, if you consider the thousands of hours I spent over more than twelve years to compile all that information, it starts to look more and more like Active Income. And that’s a no-no.

Forum sites… now we’re getting somewhere. A forum is a community of people communicating with one another, whether you’re around or not. What could be more perfect? The site gains more and more original content each day, with every new post and every new member, and each visitor gets value out of the site not only from the content within but from the sense of community and partial-ownership that each forum member feels when participating in the conversation. To me, a successful forum is just like a snowball… keep the forum running fast and bug-free, make sure you’ve got a couple of hard-working and even-minded moderators manning it, and its essentially a set-it-and-forget-it cash machine.

But for me, the most successful sites I’ve even made have been game sites. Obviously, not everyone can do this – you need to be able to do at least medium to high-level programming in order to pull it off (or, you can hire someone to do it for you). But if you can put together a game site where players can register accounts and compete against other players for high scores, and if its well-designed and fun to play, you’re in the zone, mister. Competitive game sites are great for Passive Income because once you create the games, they’re essentially done – you don’t need to tweak them or update them, or really do anything. Folks will come and play, and those who register to compete will get their competitive juices flowing and return again and again to make sure their scores are on the Hall of Fame.

For me, forum/community sites and game sites have been the single biggest earners for me. Not only that, but they’re completely, 100% self-sustaining. All I need to do is keep an eye on the server and make sure things are running fast and smoothly for everyone. I’ll go for days, sometimes even weeks at a time without doing any significant work on a site – if you program them well, you’ll almost never have to.

And that’s the key. Because there are only so many hours in the day, you’ve got severe limitations on how much Active Income you can make in a lifetime. But if you’ve got multiple streams of Passive Income coming in every day, with minimal or no work on your part, there’s practically no limit on what you can pull in every month.

So before you start your next web site, ask yourself – is this going to be self-sustainable? And if not, how can you make it so?