here's what we made our first year blogging here's what
we made our second year blogging and here's what we made
our third year blogging.
safe to say learning how to make money blogging changed
Lauren and i's life forever but it's not just us we've been able to help people
like faith Hawks go from zero dollars in no blog to making over five thousand
dollars per month blogging and being able to quit her job to help people fight
with anxiety and depression students like Amir who made over thirty seven
hundred dollars her first three months blogging and now makes over ten thousand
dollars a month with her
legal blog.
and if you pay close attention to this articles and stay
tuned I'm going to show you exactly how they do it all for free right now yeah
soon yeah step number one start your blog the right way just like a home needs
a great foundation so does your blog we do this in three easy steps.
first we choose the right blog niche the first question
most people have when blogging is what the hell do I blog about most people end
up overthinking this process.
the mistake most people make is when they start out they
start trying to like sole search for their passion or go on some yoga Zen meditation
retreat to find enlightenment and find their purpose but the truth is this is
kind of the opposite of what you need to do because when finding your purpose
or finding your passion it happens through taking action and getting feedback
from the action that you're taking.
so I'd start your blog about something that you either
have experience in or something that you want to learn about Lauren and I
started our health and wellness blog that made over 10 grand a month before we
started create and go because we loved health and wellness she was a vegan I
was a personal trainer it was just part of our mo another way.
to think about this is what topic or subject do you bring
up all the time with your friends and family.
like the one that you bring up over Thanksgiving and
Christmas and
during the holidays no my god he's talking about dogs
again and different dog breeds and the different subsections of dog breeds.
I wish you'd shut up shut up shut up.
like that's a good topic for you to talk about on your
blog so choose a blog niche and a topic that you are either interested in
learning about are
something that you kind of already know about the next
step is to select your domain name.
so the domain is another word for URL and the URL of YouTube
is youtube.com.
again this is another place where most people spend a lot
of time overthinking our first vlog was avocado comm that name honestly is kind
of weird most people don't know how to spell avocado go ahead and try and then
it's with au unless your fam friends and family kind of forget it because it's
kind of easily forgettable.
it's four syllables but again that blog made over 15
grand per month it still makes us fifteen grand per month to this day almost
automatically on autopilot so your name really doesn't matter when it
comes to a business in blogging you'd be surprised by how
little names actually mean Samsung could be a local music
store.
Avis could be a place where you bought drones on the
internet and SpaceX could be a website dedicated solely to astronaut horn the
thing that defines these businesses is not their name per se it's what they do
so don't ever think it.
you don't have to come up with some perfectly clever name
to succeed as a blogger I promise finally you want to set up your blog with the
right hosting, in the right platform and by far the best place for you get started
is WordPress.
now I know there's some other options out there like
wicks and Squarespace but the problem with those is those websites are more
geared to stand alone stagnant websites.
So something like a personal portfolio or a resume
they're really not that great when it comes to getting continuous blog traffic
coming in over time to your blog and having continually updated posts they're
just not optimized for that what's gonna end up happening if you start with a
Squarespace our Wix is you're gonna end up going back to WordPress anyway.
so just start there.
I understand that WordPress has kind of a higher learning
curve for most people but trust me when I say this it is worth learning I also
have a link for those wanting to learn how to start a blog and make money the right
way.
it's a free 7-day e course it walks you through the
process of starting a blog from scratch the right way and building it and
designing it and doing all that stuff again the link will be in the description
whenever you're ready to take it step number two make your blog sexy through
blog design.
let's walk through some simple steps to make your blog
clean and beautiful first you want to choose a great blog theme choosing the
right blog theme is like choosing the right or wrong car at a used-car
dealership you choose the wrong car you're gonna spend hours and headaches on
the car breaking down and on maintenance on fixing everything it's gonna be a constant
hassle in your life versus if you choose the right car and you never have any
problems with it you're gonna feel great right now the best free themes out
there are flash blog ocean WP and Hestia while some of the best paid themes are
Divi and Genesis and don't forget to install the Elementor plug-in because it's
a great page builder that's a perfect drag and drop for a newbie.
wanting to get started and buildingtheir blog and making
it look the way that you want to oh yeah another important part about blog
design is optimizing it for mobile over 60 to 70 percent of visitors on the
Internet these days are visiting through their phones so some things might look
amazing on your desktop it might look really good there will actually look like
[ __ ] on a phone so always check your work and choose an easy to read font like
a laddo or an open sands or Roboto because ain't nobody got time to read that
cute but illegible font okay so now you've started your blog and got a design
like you want to let's move on to step three create the content people need.
it's time to answer the million-dollar question of what
should I write about well this is actually a rather simple answer if your goal
is to make money you need to create the content that other people are searching
for on the internet.
every day millions of people type in searches into Google
Pinterest YouTube when looking for videos and articles and blog posts trying to
solve their problems.
if you're able to serve that content to them the best and
get to the top of those search engines well it's very easy to make money online.
okay it's not super easy but it's a lot easier than you
think.
here's how you do this first you start doing keyword
research.
see there's all sorts of tools on the internet to se how
often people are typing in certain terms so we can see that people look for how
to make money blogging over one hundred thirty five thousand times per month and
that's exactly why I'm making this article.
start with a tool like keywords everywhere it's a
completely free Chrome extension that you can install and type in anywhere you
type into a search bar you will be able to see the volume of that search term
being looked at another great free tool that most people often under use is
Pinterest type in your topic into the search bar and hit enter after the page
loads if you look to the right you will see all sorts of additional suggestions
these are key words people are looking for as well and using this method will help
you come up with endless topics that you can cover on your blog or website
after using these tools for a while.
you can upgrade to more professional tools like SCM rush
and Google's keyword planner which will give you more accurate search data now
this doesn't mean you only have to post things that people are searching for there's
room to create your own sort of unique content when making money blogging.
you just need to follow the 80/20 rule 80% of the content
that you create should be that things that people are searching for and
problems that they're trying to solve and 20% should be where you flex on them
a little bit and tell them a little bit more about you and and blog about the
things that you want to write about ok so after your first 5 posts are written
it's time to move on to step number 5 and time to get traffic to your blog
there are lots of ways to get readers to your blog.
there's Pinterest Facebook Google SEO YouTube Instagram
guest blogging email drips forums snapchat and I'm sure a dozen more that I
haven't listed there.
the biggest tip that I can give you right off the bat is
to start with one
traffic source I know there are lots of entrepreneurs
like Gary Vaynerchuk telling you that you need to be everywhere and be on every
social media and be on every platform but the truth is is that's kind of a
one-man show what ends up happening with most people is when they try to be
everywhere they usually end up just sucking at everything that's why we tell
our followers to try to instead of sucking at everything master 1 are two of
these things are like red foreman said don't half-ass everything pull last one
thing keep up with a smart mouth and my foot will be nine-tenths of the way up
your ass.
so the next question you should probably have is how do I
find the perfect traffic source for my blog there are tons of different factors
to
consider here including competition type of platform
demographics of your target market and more.
so to make this simple here are my thoughts on the top 5 traffic
sources Facebook Facebook has the most users of really any social platform but
it also comes with the highest competition and Facebook has recently made
algorithmic changes that really doesn't feature blog posts.
anymore it's very few and far between that you'll read
blogs much where the content is geared towards memes and video content and
things that just aren't blog posts Facebook groups however are still going very
strong and it's actually a great place to meet like-minded bloggers but it
might not be the best source for driving traffic to your
website.
but that being said I wouldn't write it out because those
groups can be so valuable especially to beginners starting off we have a group called
the honest bloggers community as well so feel free to check it out in the description
to find these groups you can just type in your search term into Facebook search
bar and hit click groups and you'll see dozens and dozens of groups on almost
any topic again not the best way to drive traffic to your blog.
but a great way to interact with potential customers and
peers and people you look up to in your industry Instagram you'll find that
Instagram follows a similar trajectory as Facebook where it has a high amount
of users but it also has a high amount of competition and the thing is it is a
purely visual platform.
yeah you can write captions in the description but really
if you're not
creating dope images you're not gonna get anywhere on
Instagram so the niches you want to be in to succeed on Instagram are going to
be mainly visual things like travel health and fashion work really well because
they're visually stimulating unfortunately and something to keep in mind it's
kind of stupidly hard to get people off of Instagram and on to your email list
or on to your blog posts are over to your products people tend to stay inside
of the app and Instagram is designed it that way.
that being said we've had students like the college
nutritionist go to $10,000 per month and more running a successful Instagram so
it can be done Google.
Google is similar to Facebook and Instagram that it has
high competition but it comes with one big difference and that difference is
that it's a search platform so the people that type in how to make money
blogging for example will continue to type that in month after month after
month and you will get organic traffic coming in all the time.
this is very different than Instagram or Facebook where
things are more viral in nature and then they die off over time.
so Facebook and Instagram you kind of have this constant
need to roll out this new crazy mind-blowing content went on something like
Google you can optimize your posts and continue to be shown over and over and
over again sucking in thatorganic traffic but obviously because of this value
it's very hard to get at the top of search it can take a long time to do and just
be prepared that if this is the route that you want to go on you need to go in
for the long haul it might take you up to six months to get serious traffic to
your blog.
YouTube YouTube is akin tirely completely different
animal than the mall it is the highest barrier to entry by far because most
people do not want to get on camera and I understand why this barrier to entry provides
actually an easy way to connect with your audience build a following and drive them
back to your blog and make purchases with them but again comes with a high
barrier to entry because shooting
videos is difficult and very time-consuming.
so if you're extraordinarily good-looking rgeous or like
me and don't mind being on camera, YouTube might be a great option.
for you Pinterest last but not least our favorite traffic
source for bloggers is Pinterest Pinterest like YouTube and Google is also a
search engine so there's that opportunity for organic traffic but unlike Google
it doesn't take as long to get results.
we've had tons of people take our Pinterest traffic
avalanches course and go from zero views to over 20 thousand views a month on
their blogs because of its speed of results and the fact that you can get
organic traffic.
Pinterest does end up being our number one traffic source
for bloggers if you're in almost any niche I would definitely get Pinterest a
try alright so you built your blog you've designed it you start to get your
first readers your first visitors checking out the content that they want to
see.
Now it's trying to turn those readers into raving fans
step number five build a subscriber fan club I remember the look of contempt
lauren gave me when i told her that we were gonna need to collect emails because
she had always thought of in balls and the inbox is just some
terrible thing that she never wanted to do because all
she got was spam all the time.
but here's the truth about blogging is that most people
are never gonna buy your products until they've built up a certain level of
trust with you and the best place to build that trust is through an email list
we've tracked the data on clickmeter and we can clearly see that our email list
provides us much better purchase rates than just linking our products on our
blog an email list is one of the most valuable assets you have as a blogger and
setting it up is not as hard as you think.
the basic formula is that you first create a lead magnet
the is just a simple download for people to have a checklist or simple guide
will work you'll want to create a small but helpful download for people so that
they can give that you can give that to them in exchange for their email
address then you need to add these opt-ins to your blog with a email subscriber
service like a convertkit this is actually a very easy process to do this way
when people are scrolling through your posts they see the opportunity to put it
get your download and they put in their email address and receive the download and
finally what you'll want to do is create an automated email sequence.
this is just an automated sequence of emails that you
send after somebody get your download these are called often an indoctrination
campaign it's more like a get-to-know-you thing where you're kind of helping them
out with whatever problem that they're trying to solve at
the same time sort of explaining a little bit.
about more about you about what you're about about why
you created your blog again all design to build that trust and turn that
subscriber into a really true fan great now your blog is all set up it's
beautifully designed.
you're getting people in the door you're getting your
fruit and first few
subscribers.
now it's time to make that money chase that paper get
those dollar bills get that skrilla sorry what are your superpowers again I'm
rich okay.
step number six we're gonna learn the different types of
ways to make money.
and they're really five of them what we're gonna do now
is we're gonna go over an overview of these different ways and then we're gonna
walk you through which steps you should start with at kind of what phases of
your blogging journey the first way to make money is through ads now there are
a few different types the first thing you probably know about our display ads.
these are ads that are you're scrolling through content
and then you'll see an ad for something or like right before this YouTube video
I'm sure there was a display ad another term for this is pay-per-click because
when somebody clicks on it you get paid.
the second type of AD is something called sponsored content
this is when somebody like a big company pays you to write a review or
write something about their product the third type of ad
is a giveaway this is very similar to sponsor content but instead of the company
paying you they give you their product for free.
I'll get a second
way that you can make money through your blog is through affiliate marketing
affiliate marketing is where you earn money promoting another person's product
or service.
so let's say you write a post about your top 5 favorite
books on whatever you topic your blog is about.
what you can do is you can actually link those books in the
blog posts themself and link them to Amazon when somebody clicks and checks out
that book and says and says okay that looks awesome. I'm gonna buy it.
like the like the reviews you know four and a half stars
looks good to me when they buy that product then you will get a small commission
from Amazon and that is kind of affiliate marketing.
Now affiliate marketing is a huge category and you can
make a lot of money on it.
and I'll go over that in the next section but just so you
know it's when
you sell other people's products or services through
links on your blog
number three is when you sell your own digital products.
now this is how lauren and i make well over a hundred
thousand dollars per month blogging is that we sell our own digital products
and services there are a few different kinds first are ebooks.
these are electronic books like kindle downloads there
are printables and workbooks where people can purchase a printable that you've created
and print them out and use it for themselves. something like a journal or a
workbook.
before you make fun of that or think anything sarcastic
about it. I do know a blogger who makes over 200 grand per month selling
printables mind-blown online courses.
so online teachings and trainings that where you can
teach them via video and finally there are membership websites where people pay
a certain amount to get access to regularly updated content usually by yourself.
number four there are physical products we sell product probiotic
called gut 14 on our health and wellness blog now you'll find with physical products
they're actually a lot easier to sell because they're tangible good right
people can when they buy that product they get something tangible back.
but it's much more satisfying usually than a digital
product but also as well there's margins to be had so there are you have to
ship the product you have to create the product you have to manufacture the
product that's a that's a lot more steps than selling something like a digital
product.
but we'll get into that note in a minute number five is
services speaking engagements digital services dog-walking speaking engagements
for dog-walking coaching virtual assistants freelance writing and whatever
service people are dogs or whoever need you can sell it through your blog.
in fact it's a great way to do this because you're
already building massive trust with your audience okay those are the types of
ways to make money blogging.
now we're gonna get into the nitty-gritty of where you
should be starting step number seven start with ads and sponsored posts the
first thing that we see bloggers doing when they first start their website is
usually running around trying to throw up Google Adsense on their website to
make a quick buck.
the problem is that the reality of your ad earnings are
probably gonna fall pretty short of your expectations when we did this the
first time I remember we threw up these ads and we thought we're you're gonna
get a ton of we're ton of money coming in automatically per month because we
had a decent readership there you know one of these days could be tomorrow I'm
gonna be a millionaire and I think after a full month or a full week we had
only made two dollars and 93 cents that's not enough for even three Taco Bell
tacos so you can understand that that wasn't working mathematically for us as a
viable way to make a ton of money I thought I was gonna write off ads forever
but that was only until later on that now we make over three thousand to four
thousand dollars a month with ads here's how we're able to do this our blogs
get a lot of traffic like over three hundred thousand views a month and because
we get that amount of traffic we're able to partner with premium ad networks so
really specialize really awesome networks that can give us higher returns on
the ads and the clicks.
that we do get so here's a recommendation for newbies
like yourself ads are kind of a good place to start for newbies just because it
can be motivational or give you a little inspiration at the beginning but it is
not the primary way you need to be monetizing you can be focused on the bigger
picture here try to wait until you're getting a consistent amount of traffic so
you can partner with premium ad networks the one that we partner with is one called
AD thrive but there are a few others including media vine Mia net propellor ads
and I'm sure a few more this will net you a lot more money than just throwing
up Google Adsense and praying that somebody clicks sponsored posts sponsored
posts as explained before are where people are paying you to write an article
on your blog.
usually kind of reviewing their product or service these
articles often come in the form of print reviews and recommendations an example
is this post by my friend Alexis on the 7 ways your credit score affects your
future.
you can see it was sponsored by lexington law and she probably
got paid pretty well for this post.
there are many bloggers like Lexus that make in the
upwards of 10 grand a month doing sponsored posts so it is a viable way to make
money and make money pretty quickly sponsored posts might be perfect for you if
you love to write, can find good opportunities that fit your niche, want to
build relationship with other companies and brands in your niche and want a way
to diversify your blogging income sponsored posts might not be right for you if
you face a lot of time. constraints it can be very time consuming finding good
opportunities and filling out the required work and have your heart set on
passive income.
you're technically still trading hours for dollars here
so just something to keep in mind sponsored posts opportunities can be found on
websites like blog - Blagh meets brand laQuita and others my friend Alexis also
has a great course on making sense of sponsored posts which she has created with
her sister so go feel free to type that into Google and check it out if you like.
ok now I've got your feet wet a little bit started with
sponsored posts and ads now it's time to take things tothe next step with step
number 8
progress and master affiliate marketing there are risks
associated with every form of monetization method when it comes to blogging but
affiliate marketing is unique as it will teach you not only how to sell but it
will also prepare you for creating your own future products.
mastering affiliate marketing is usually kind of one of
the key steps to becoming a successful blogger you'll see that a lot of
successful bloggers first start on affiliate marketing start making money
affiliate marketing learn how to make money and then progress on to higher
margins with their own products and services just like in our example when we
talked about writing a blog post on the top 5 books and your recommended niche
you can start out by doing this exact process with Amazon Associates this is
the very small very easy way to start out in affiliate marketing and it
progresses and gets much more advanced later on how you do this with Amazon
Associates is easy and the reason I tell you to start out there is because
everybody uses Amazon.
It makes a makes a very simple way to get your first few
transactions and feeling good about blogging and and its potential right off
the get-go getting signed up isn't too hard just go type in Amazon Associates
to Google and you can join for free once you're approved you can recommend Amazon
product on your blog knitting blog sell Amazon knitting kits dog blog sell dog
treats got a parenting blog about raising teenagers sell a muzzle.
I'm I'm kidding I'm kidding don't muzzle your children
put them on a leash this creates an awesome form of passive income for most
bloggers we make over 500 dollars per month doing this once you sold a few affiliate
products and Amazon it's time to start leveling up
your affiliate marketing and thinking about going to big
affiliate networks and partnering with a bigger product so there's networks
like Clickbank, ShareASale, CJ, affiliate Rakuten and so many more these
networks are going to give you a much higher price Commission than something
like Amazon but keep in mind they're going to be much more difficult to sell
because they're not checking out using Amazon's platform you have to learn how
to build a lot of
trust with your readers and that's why I said at the
beginning you start an email list because that's the best place to start selling
higher priced affiliate courses and products and other things.
yeah okay now you've got some money rolling in a from
affiliate marketing starting to get down the sales process and learn about how
to sell through your blog and how to build trust with your readers you're
building a fan base building people who are interested in what you're doing.
it's time to move on to step number five and to create
your own products and services both physical and digital we started out by
promoting a yoga product through affiliate marketing.
we're making about five dollars per sale so even when we
were selling 10 products per day we're only making about 1,500 dollars per month
off this yoga product $1,500 a month is great and it's an amazing amount of money
but it is not a full-time income for a blogger so we kind of got this idea back
in the day Laura and I were like okay what if we the product that we were
selling was alright.
we're like I think we can make it better what if we tried
to make this product even better than the one that we're already selling and
sell it to her audience they know us and trust us and like us let's try selling
our own well not only did it sell really well but our audience loved it and thus
the yoga fat loss Bible was born the most important part of this process is
that five dollar sale that we were getting turned into a $37 sale for that
product we had just seven extra money with the
building of this product is the power of creating your
own products and services you control the margin so you control the prices you control
the sales page you control the entire system and the entire flow of selling
your own product that's why all the biggest bloggers you know all the ones that
are making the most money well they sell their own stuff this does not have to be
digital products either this can be physical products as well the key here is to
do something better than what is before you so you don't want to just go around
and and replace your affiliate links with your own crappy products and not a good
version of it only replace products that you can truly replace and
do it better the goal here is to make a better experience
for your audience.
If you make a worse experience for them the results are
not going to be what you want as well as there's always gonna be products that
are better suited as an affiliate product versus you creating your own.
and just something to keep in mind something like hosting
like I'm not gonna create a hosting company so I'm gonna partner with somebody
like Bluehost who is a hosting company where I can sell hosting packages also
as said before you can sell your services whether you're a public speaker
virtual assistant freelance writer you can sell all of these products and
services on your blog selling your own products is the only true way to scale
your blog and this is how you take something from a thousand dollars a month to
ten thousand dollars a month and do so passively do so without actively
constantly having to work and trade hours for dollars okay at this stage you've
come a long way.
started your blog you designed it well you created
awesome content you drove traffic to the blog you collected email subscribers
you've been monetizing in a variety of different ways and now you've got kind of
your blog set up you've made your own courses made your own products you've you've
found your audience found your voice found these things.
the next part is actually a very fun part of blogging and
a step number ten scale and optimize this is the really fun part because really
you've done a lot of the hard work now your job is to just scale what you do
and again this is what makes blogging such a different thing.
Than let's say going and working for somebody going and
working for somebody they're gonna pay you let's say 50 grand a month.
Wow fifty grand a month fifty grand a year to do customer
service right.
But when you're blogging and creating your own products
and services just a few tweaks here are there are getting a blog post to go
viral or are creating some new content immediately raises up your income and
this is kind of a two-part process I want to show you how it works really
quickly sales equals traffic times conversion rate and I want to show you how
your conversion rate on your sales page is 1%
so for every thousand visitors on your sales page you
make 10 sales now let's say you add a few testimonials to your sales page and include
a couple more and your email sales funnel that bumps your conversion rate to 2%
which means that you have just doubled your cells now a thousand visitors is
getting at 2 percent which is 20 sales so you've just doubled your income that's
crazy now let's say you start working on Google SEO as an additional traffic
sore and are able to get an extra thousand customers to your sales page that doubles
your sales page again because two thousand visitors times two percent equals
forty sales you've just quadrupled your income that is the big difference between
blogging and going out and making 50 grand a month working customer service it
is a giant leap because the amount of work you do ends up reflecting much
better on the actual income that you make the final piece on how to make money blogging
is to scale and to raise up those conversion rates.
and here's some of the main ways that you can do this you
can add in testimonials and prove your page speed make changes to your sales page
make changes to your sales funnel and a few other marketing changes but those
are the main ones this part of making money.
blogging is really fun because you can often see the
changes right in front of your eyes and it's very cool to watch and that ladies
and gentlemen is the 10 step process for how to make money blogging whoa we did
it oh man that is a long article.
all right let's summarize this and get the data here
point number one and we
start our blog the right way
number two we design our blog and make
it sexy number three we create the content people need
number four we get traffic to our blog by focusing on one
to two traffic sources
number five we build an email list to build up those
lists of raving fans turn those subscribers and those readers into raving fans
who actually love what we do
number six we learned the types of ways to monetize
number seven we monetize with ads and sponsored posts number
eight we master affiliate marketing
number nine we make our own products and services
and number ten we scale and optimize
last thing and I plead with you please if you found this
article helpful send me a what's up down there and the in section say something
speak up I want to hear your voice I want to hear how this helped you
I want to hear how I can improve these blog if you have
any questions please hit me down there we respond to every comment that we get
so
please hit us up we really appreciate it but please
consider becoming our next substitution our next step above our next subscriber
we'd really appreciate.
it guys thanks for checking out the article alright I'll
see you on the next one
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