How to Build a Passive Income Funnel Using SEO

As a small business owner, you’ve probably dreamed of having a business that produces passive income. You know, a steady stream of income that comes in month after month without you constantly launching, promoting, or chasing new clients. The good news? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help you build a passive income funnel that runs in the background, bringing in leads and sales. Learn how to make money with SEO using a passive income funnel for your business. 

Let’s dig into how SEO fuels your passive income funnel so you can start setting one up for your business and make money with SEO traffic. 

What Is a Passive Income Funnel? How can you Make Money with SEO with one?

A passive income funnel is a funnel you set up once, and it works on autopilot for you for years to come. You get traffic into your funnel (SEO helps with this), they request your opt-in and join your email list, and you sell to them via email or promotions. You make money with SEO traffic because you create great content that's helpful to your audience and optimize it for discoverability on Google or other search engines. 

Here’s how a Passive Income Funnel Works, and you Make Money with SEO

• Get people to your website – You create content your ideal customer is searching for and then optimize it so it’s easy for them to find it via Google or other search engines. Your website or blog content shows up more often in Google’s search results, and people find you when they search for information. You can also use SEO to help people find your podcast (podcast SEO differs from Google SEO, but both are super powerful). To learn more about podcast SEO, check out this blog post next.

• Grow Your Email List – Now that you’ve got traffic to your website, you want to get those people on your email list. You’ll need to create a freebie or opt-in that aligns with your products or services and provides value to your ideal customer. You will want to share that opt-in or freebie on your website, blog, social media, and podcast so people can find it easily and get signed up. I recommend creating a freebies tab on your website rather than using a tool like Linktree, so you bring people to your website immediately rather than sending it to a 3rd party site. Make it an easy-to-remember and type the URL. Mine is EtchedMarketing.com/freebies. You can check it out here if you’re curious about how I set it up. 

Listen to episode 120 of the Simple SEO Podcast or read this blog post on how to use SEO to help grow your email list.

• Nurture Your Email List - Now that your website and blog are getting more traffic and your email list is growing, the last step of the passive income funnel is to nurture your email list. I recommend setting up a welcome sequence where you email your new leads daily for 7-10 days. These emails are designed to help them with their immediate issue, establish you as someone who can help them with their questions, and offer resources. I offer a mix of blog posts, podcast episodes, and tips, and even invite them to a webinar that’s the next step in their journey at the end of that welcome sequence. About 80% of my students sign up for a course during the first 7 days they’re on my email list. 

• Sell to your email list - Once your new email subscriber is through the initial welcome sequence, you want to continue to email them and stay in touch. I recommend a weekly email to your entire email list (customers and leads). I also recommend you share a promotion or launch once a quarter to continue to nurture them and make sales over time. You don’t want to push sales at your list constantly, or you’ll exhaust them, and they’ll unsubscribe. It’s important to find a good balance. 

When you use an SEO-based content strategy like I teach in Simple SEO Content, you can create content that you know your audience is searching for, and then you optimize it so that it can be found. You’re no longer wasting time creating content no one is interested in or using SEO keywords your website or blog won’t be able to rank for. This way, you’re able to be very strategic in your approach to your website content, and that generates the right traffic. We’re not looking to get thousands of people to our websites to say we can – we’re looking to get the right people. 

This allows your website to become a passive income funnel that SEO fuels. You show up more often on Google, and people find you. They visit your website, join your email list, and become customers. And you make money with SEO thanks to your funnel. 

Why SEO Is the Key to Passive Income?

SEO ensures your content gets in front of the right people at the right time. Instead of posting and hoping someone finds you, SEO helps you create strategic content that ranks in search engines—so your ideal customers discover you when they search for solutions.

Here’s how SEO Fuels your Funnel and you Make Money

• SEO Keyword Research: By starting with SEO keyword research, you can make sure you choose content topics people are interested in and searching for. Then, you can choose the best SEO keyword for that topic. You will save time by ensuring an audience for the blog posts or podcast episodes you create and that your website or podcast can rank for the keywords. You can use SEO for both your website/blog and your podcast! Your SEO keywords will probably be different because the search engines are different.   

• Create Optimized Content: Write great blog posts, podcast show notes pages, or record great podcast episodes that help your ideal customer. Then, you want to optimize that content so it’s easy for Google (or the podcast apps) to understand what it’s about so it gets shown to more people. Google SEO and podcast SEO are different, so you’ll want to learn to do both if you have both a website and a podcast and want to use SEO to help your passive income funnel. Get the Google SEO Guide here and the Podcast SEO Guide here.

• Grow your Email List: Guide visitors to join your email list and become potential buyers by using opt-ins and freebies that are helpful to them. If you’re unsure what to create for your audience, I have a blog post on how to use SEO tools to help you develop opt-in ideas. I like to create opt-ins that I know people are searching for, and I recommend you do the same. Get my free beginner's guide to email list building here and get started today.

When you create content that your audience is looking for and optimize for discoverability using SEO keywords, your website or podcast can rank for you to get more traffic to your content. This is how you build a sustainable passive income funnel that drives traffic for years. 

How does SEO help your Content Strategy? 

I have a lot of students who join Simple SEO Content because something isn’t working quite right in their business. They’re not getting much traffic to their websites and writing new blog posts each week, but no one is seeing them. One student recently told me she’d been blogging consistently, but nothing was happening; it felt like it wasn’t working until she took the course with me and learned to use SEO and keyword research as the foundation for her blogging. Once she switched her approach and got more strategic, she could start creating blog posts that she knew her audience was looking for and very quickly started getting more traffic than she had in the past. The new traffic allowed her to grow her email list and generate more leads for her coaching practice. 

Are you Ready to Build a Passive Income Funnel for your Business? 

If you want to create a passive income system using SEO, Simple SEO Content is your next step. This course walks you through how to do it step-by-step. Learn how to find SEO keywords your website can rank for, how to determine what content to create for your customers, how to optimize that content for discoverability on Google, and more.

If you also have a podcast and want to learn how to make it SEO-friendly so it can grow, add Simple Podcast SEO.

Let’s start working on an SEO-driven passive income funnel for your business.