Today we are sharing a case study from Jake Posko, a blogger who has been able to earn over $20 000 passively from a single blog post. In this case study, we are going to analyze the approach he took to write this article and how it keeps making him money even after 5 years of publishing it.
However before Jake got his first guitar student, he built a website about guitars, mainly for adding legitimacy to his side-hustle at that time. Using his new website, Jake started writing blog posts within the guitar-lesson niche. He mainly wrote about popular questions that new guitar students have. Questions like:
- How much is a new guitar?
- How old do you have to be to play guitar?
- What’s the best beginner guitar?
- How long does it take to learn guitar?
The article he made on “How long does it take to learn guitar?” ended up becoming the money maker. The article started bringing in a steady flow of visitors and eventually ranked as the first hit on the google homepage whenever anyone searched for “how long to learn guitar?” or “how long to learn acoustic guitar?”.
Jake didn’t know that he was ranking this high at the time. In fact, he wasn’t too focused on generating traffic, as he wanted in-person students. The blog posts were mainly to legitimize the business.
The traffic remained fairly light, but consistent until late 2016 when he started posting more frequently and the traffic started to snowball. It peaked in January 2019 where the post was bringing in a little over 12 000 monthly views:
95% of this traffic was organic, with no ads and no paid backlinks. For the most part, everything was coming in from Google search.
It was until September 2016 and October 2016 when Jake started posting articles to his website almost every day. He was disciplined about this, and it resulted in him having a steady increase in traffic. Culminating in peak traffic around January 2019.
Even after adding lots of articles, the strange thing was that most of the traffic was still going to the “how long does it take…” post. Almost 65% of traffic consistently went to that page.
Affiliate Income and Money
It wasn’t until 2016 that Jake attempted to monetize the website with affiliate links. He used Amazon associates and JamPlay affiliate programs. Surprisingly, JamPlay performed way better than Amazon, and it turned into his main form of monetization.
JamPlay is an online music lesson (mostly guitar) service. It has a monthly fee whereby its members get access to live, pre-recorded, and other guitar-related material. Making money with JamPlay wasn’t difficult as Jake just signed up for the affiliate program, added a few links up on the site, and started making money immediately. It may sound insane and too good to be true, but that is what happened.
JamPlay pays him $40 as a commission for each sale.
Even with doing nothing on the site for the last 2-3 years, JamPlay still makes him money passively:
Key Points to Take Away from Jake
Jake made over $20 000 from this blog post. However, he admits that he could have made more money if he was to push harder by writing more similar articles and monetizing them with Amazon or selling his own guitar — lesson course.
Stay within a niche that you are knowledgeable about, or at the very least have solid opinions about. Make sure that it has the potential to be monetized with lessons, eCommerce, affiliate programs, and more.
Engage with everyone who comments below your blog post. Don’t expect the people who engage with you to be the customers — but by engaging, you do several things:
- You help someone directly.
- You establish social proof in the form of comments on your page.
- The page engagement helps with Google rankings.
- You build further authority on the subject you’re writing about.
Lastly, you shouldn’t take passive income as the immediate end goal, but you should make it an important part of your larger portfolio. This means that you should focus on building a portfolio first before so that you have a large pool of passive income sources at the end of the day.
