Self Sustaining Blogs

Wouldn't it be nice if your blog ran itself? No, I'm not talking about "splogs", I'm talking about letting your members run the show, and just sitting back and watching the ad money roll/trickle in. I have one blog like this, and wanted to throw the idea out there this morning to see what you guys think, and if we can improve upon the model.

If you've read anything I've written on blogs for more than a few days you'll guess that this particular blog is running on Drupal. The concept is very simple, it's actually a forum, but presented in blog format/style.

My wife and I set this up a year or two ago, and now it just keeps on chugging out content, with all of those lovely long-tail keyword rich title's that true user generated content provides, and although it doesn't make bank with Adsense, it does well enough for me to count it a success, and is only gettign better over time.

HOW TO

This is how it works, from start to finish.

• Create at least 200 pages of content - we wrote FAQ's on a variety of related topics
• Do a small amount of link hunting, nothing much, just a few sensible directory listings and send out a bunch of emails to sites in your niche that might link to you.
• Enable one forum. Call it the "Q & A" and promote it on every page -- you'll find those few readers that use it will quickly define what seperate forums you should enable further down the road.
• Promote the best questions to the homepage, just like a regular blog
• Watch the adsense trickle in, don't expect miracles, but DO enjoy a passive income stream :)

It does take some maintaining of course. You certainly need to keep spam free, and talk to your most active members. But all in all, if you're happy to be in it for the long haul, it's a nice little income stream that requires virtually no work after that initial content writing.

Thoughts?