Proven steps to Make Money from Blogging for beginners usa 2022

Make Money from Blogging

So imagine getting your Bachelor’s degree and then telling your parents that your full-time profession is a blogger. What do you think their response would be? – Is that my iPad? Dad! Put that down! No! – Now in my defence, I didn’t start off as a blogger.

I actually started off as a financial advisor right out of college and that’s what I did for the majority of my career. And then one day, I read this article that talked about if you really wanna stand out as a financial advisor, you need to start a blog, but the only thing at that time was I didn’t even know what a blog was.

See, I thought having a blog was the same thing as having a Myspace account. You remember Myspace, right?  Never gonna give you up  Or it was broadcasting to the world how awesome your latest meal was. – Once it hits your lips, it’s so good! – And yet, despite the ignorance that I have about what blogging is and how it worked, I was still determined to start and get the best financial planner blog going.

And after I started my blog, goodfinancialcents.com, something funny happened. I started to network with other personal finance bloggers and these were individuals, these were of men and women that were doing it on the side while they were still working their full-time gigs and I learned you could actually make money from your blog.

And you have to remember, I’m still trying to figure out how the internet worked at this point. (banging) So I am pretty sceptical that you could actually make money from a blog, make money online. Like, they all feel like some sort of scam.

You’ll have the option of choosing from several of our completely unwarranted rip-offs, including internet speeds up to 200 times slower than Korea at twice the price, TV packages with over 500 channels, 90% of which you can’t view, and we guarantee a plethora of hidden fees. – And then something even crazier happened.

One of those personal finance bloggers that I connected with, we ended up talking on the phone and he’s actually a very good friend to this day. And in that phone discussion, he was very open, very candid, and he revealed how much he was making from his blog.

And this is a phone call, this is one of those memories in your life that you’ll never forget, that I will never forget because he revealed how much he was making. I remember exactly where I was because I was driving in my car and he shared that he was making between $30,000 to $40,000 from his blog.

How do I build a $10,000 blog?

Now, for many people, that is a good annual wage. I mean, to make 40 grand a year, I mean it’s not a lot, but from something that is on the internet, I was blown away, but that wasn’t how the story ended. Because he wasn’t making $30,000 to $40,000 a year from his blog, no, no, no.

He was making $30,000 to $40,000 a month. $30,000 to $40,000 a month from a website! – Oh my God! Wow! – And I remember when he told me and I heard those numbers because I was driving in my car and I almost ran off the road. I was blown away that you could make that much money from a blog.

So at this time, I’m already writing and I’m publishing and I’m editing and I am still cranking out content, but after this phone conversation, that’s where I started to do even more research on how to monetize a blog. So I started to familiarize myself with ads and AdSense and also affiliate marketing.

I also then learned how sales funnels work and digital products and that began an even more fun journey where I started to make some real money from my blog. And today, what I wanted to share were what are my top takeaways, what were some of the big lessons that I learned that could also help you make your first $1,000 a month from your blog.

Let’s find out what these are right now. What’s going on y’all? Welcome back to the channel Wealth Hacker Labs. I’m your gracious host Jeff Rose and this is the channel dedicated to teaching you new ways to grow wealth that is not taught to you in schools or by your parents.

But as a financial planner that is starting a blog to get new clients and that was the only reason that I started the blog to learn that I can start making money and not just a couple of hundred dollars on the side, no, to actually make thousands and thousands of dollars on the side.

S.E.O (search engine optimization)

Like, this is something that I was very, very interested to understand. So the first big takeaway that I learned and you also need to know is that S.E.O matters. And if you don’t know was S.E.O is, feel free to Google it, but all it stands for is search engine optimization.

If you’re not familiar with what S.E.O is and how it works, just think about going to Google and typing something in the search engine. So for example, if you wanna type in the cutest puppies ever, you might find something like this.  Who’re the cutest puppies? Who’re the cutest puppies?

And there are a lot of marketing experts right now that would argue that S.E.O doesn’t matter in this day and age because of all the different social media platforms that exist ’cause you got Facebook, you got Instagram, you got Snapchat, TikTok, all of the above. I feel like I’m forgetting one.

Oh, that’s right, YouTube, and if you haven’t subscribed yet, go ahead and take care of that and while you’re there, go ahead and smash that like button. Siri says I like it. – But S.E.O does matter and even though in the beginning I didn’t really understand how S.E.O worked or even how to implement it effectively, I did know was that if somebody went to Google, typed in my name, Jeff Rose, I wanted to be found.

‘Cause before I started the blog, if you went to Google and typed in my name, Jeff Rose, you didn’t find me. You found Jeff Rose the superintendent, Jeff Rose the golf shirt polo maker and also Jeff Rose, the actor. And I know that I’m a pretty good actor, but that isn’t me.

It all begins with you smashing the like button for the YouTube algorithm. – What’s going on guys? It’s Gram here. Be sure to smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. (bell rings) Now obviously, ranking for the cutest puppies ever wasn’t going to get me any new clients, so what I wanted to rank for was my name, Jeff Rose.

I finally achieved my goal of being discovered on Google, but then it hit me.  If somebody was wanting to hire a financial advisor and they didn’t know me, they’re not gonna be typing in Jeff Rose. So that began a process of attempting to rank for that keyword, which I finally did.

And even at the time of this recording, even though I am no longer a practising advisor, even though I no longer reside in the state of Illinois, if you go to Google right now and type in financial planner Illinois, you will find me. You’ll actually find me on more than one page.

I think it’s worth mentioning, especially if you are a new blogger and you don’t think you have what it takes to rank for anything, I was in this forum with other personal finance bloggers and I was sharing how my goal was to rank for financial planner Illinois.

Well, I was then contacted directly by this S.E.O expert. You notice the air quotes, right? And this S.E.O expert was so kind to pass on his wisdom, letting me know that I would never rank for this keyword because it was just too competitive because of all the investment firms in the state of Illinois, especially up in Chicago, it was just too competitive.

Did I mention that I love when somebody tells me that I can’t do something? Like, come on and bring it. – Bring ’em all on! – As I previously shared, not only do I rank for that keyword, and I still rank for that keyword, but I was actually able to rank for that keyword in less than 90 days. Thank you S.E.O expert. – Suck on it, Trebek. Suck it long and suck it hard.

After I was ranking for financial planner Illinois, I started to ask myself, what other keywords or phrases would potential clients go to Google to search for? So I started writing articles about 401K rollovers, how much to save for your kids’ college education, how to invest for $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, and of course the obvious, why In-N-Out Burger is the greatest burger ever.

Come on now, if you don’t love In-N-Out Burger, then you might as well unsubscribe now because we can’t be friends. Sorry. And that was my content strategy going forward, thinking about those keywords that prospective clients would search for, or I would go and answer questions that existing clients already have.

So it was never an issue or running out of content ideas. The issue was not having enough time to write enough blog posts for all the content ideas that I had. So the second thing that I learned and you’ll learn too, and this one is a hard one to accept, but no one cares. – Don’t care. Don’t care.

Nobody cares that you started a blog. – Still don’t care. – Nobody cares that you wrote a brand new blog post that took you two weeks to write.  What’d you say? I just wanna know what you said. – I don’t care! – By the way, if it takes you two weeks to write a blog post, then you might think about doing something else.

I shared this in a previous video where I make the case that starting a blog is better and more worthwhile than getting your MBA, but just because you build it doesn’t mean that they will come. –  If you build it, he will come. – I remember getting so excited after I would get done hitting publish on this blog post that I put so much time and energy in ’cause it was so clever and so well-written only to find out that nobody read it.

Crickets. So I figured out to get people to care, to get people to take notice of what I was doing on my site, I had to start guest writing for other blogs. I was reaching out to these other personal finance bloggers that I connected in in these forums and online and started writing articles, started writing blog posts for their audiences and that’s when I finally started to have new eyeballs, new readers coming to my blog and checking out what was going on.

And that’s when I started to rank for even more keywords, more search terms in Google. And then I started to get even more traffic and when you have traffic, when you have new eyeballs, new readers coming to your site, that is when you can start making money.

Google AdSense

Now, in the beginning, once again, I didn’t even know how to do S.E.O, so I definitely didn’t know how to make money blogging. Now, the easiest thing to do for most new bloggers is to add Google AdSense to your site. If you’re not familiar with Google AdSense, I promise you, you have seen Google ads any time you do a search.

When you are searching for those cute adorable puppies.  Who’re the cutest puppies? – At the top of your search, you’re going to see advertisements. Those are companies that are paying to be placed whenever you are typing something into Google, the reason that many new bloggers start off with Google AdSense is because it’s so easy.

Once you sign up for your free account, you log in, you copy the code that Google provides and you paste that into your website or blog. And based on the content of your site, Google will scan your site, see what you’re writing about, what you’re blogging about and then they will assign the proper advertisers to be placed on your site.

You don’t even have to find the advertisers. Google will scan your website, they will scan the text to see what are you writing about, what are you blogging about and then they will match up the advertisers that want to get in front of your audience.

Now the thing with Google AdSense, since it is so easy to use, don’t expect to make a lot of money overnight. It’s going to take time. It took several months where I was finally making $10 to $20, $40 a month. I finally was issued my first check and it was a whopping $152.91.

And while yes, that $152 was money in the bank, it definitely didn’t break the bank, but over time as I kept writing, kept publishing new content, that Google AdSense revenue started to grow and it went from $152 on up to a couple of hundred dollars and then $500 and $1,000.

Affiliate marketing

Then eventually, I was able to make almost $5,000 in one month. And after Google AdSense, I learned more about affiliate marketing and I began promoting affiliates that I used, that I trusted and I felt comfortable recommending to my audience.

One of the first affiliates that I partnered with was Scottrade. Now, Scottrade does not exist today, but at the time, they were one of the premier online investment firms. In the beginning, I wasn’t comfortable recommending Scottrade just because I didn’t have any experience with them.

Yes, they had outstanding reviews and excellent customer service, but if I’m going to recommend something to somebody else, I want to have some experience with them. So the next logical step was to open an account with Scottrade to see with my own eyes how it worked, how was their customer service, what was it like to open an account with them and invest for the first time.

And that’s when it got fun because I got a phone call from the closest Scottrade location. It was their branch manager and I was explaining to them how I was actually a financial planner, but I had a financial planning blog and wanted to write about Scottrade and I don’t think they really understood what was going on, but I got to see firsthand what was it like to be a Scottrade client.

And that was the same process that I did with other affiliates. I would open accounts with them to see what was it like. So I opened accounts with LendingClub, TradeKing, Fundraise, Prosper, there were so many different companies that I experienced firsthand so that I could write from my personal experience what was it like.

So when we added affiliates to the already existing Google AdSense revenue that was still bringing in money, we went from making that $5,000 a month to now we’re making $10,000, $20,000, started making that $40,000 a month that my friend was making on his site.

It’s important to mention one of the main reasons why my blog was making so much with Google AdSense and why we were able to make that $10,000 to $20,000 and more with affiliate marketing is because of the niche that my site is in.

Being in the personal finance space where we’re talking about investing and savings accounts, you’ve got your Wall Street firms, you’ve got your big banks and these companies are willing to pay a lot of money in advertising dollars. So does that mean that you have to write about money to make money blogging? And the answer is you don’t.

If you want to write about cute stinking puppies, then you go ahead and do that, but just know if you do that, you’re not going to make as much money as another site in the personal finance or investing niche. The other big lesson that I learned, and was a strategy that really, really helped catapult my blog into the crazy traffic numbers that I was getting.

For a relatively new blog, I went from zero views in a month to get over 100,000 unique visitors to my site. And once again, I didn’t know what I was doing S.E.O wise, so the fact that I was able to do that is pretty outstanding and one of the main ways I did that, I refer to as the crystal ball method. – Hold my hand, hold my hand. – What do you see? – Hold my hand. – I see something now.

Yes, I do. – Now I wish I could say that this was a strategy that I executed with concise precision, but the truth is I just got kind of lucky. Since I was a financial planner and in the financial services industry, going back in 2010, I knew that there was an event getting ready to happen that was going to be a big deal.

See, prior to 2010, you couldn’t execute what is called a Roth IRA conversion if you made too much money, but in 2010, the IRS was going to do away with this income restriction so that anybody and everybody, didn’t matter how much you made, you could execute the Roth IRA conversion.

And I had a suspicion because I had my secret crystal ball underneath my desk. No, I didn’t. But I thought, you know what, this is something that people are going to want to know about come 2010.

So I actually wrote the article talking about the Roth IRA conversion at the beginning of 2009, so by the time January of 2010 came along, when you went to Google and typed in Roth IRA conversion, you didn’t find Fidelity, you didn’t find Vanguard, you didn’t find Investopedia at the top of the search engines.

Oh no. You found Jeff Rose of Good Financial Cents. Can I get a holla or what? Now I remember logging into my Google Analytics account and seeing all the traffic that was coming in. And guess what else came in? Bigger AdSense checks.

The only way that you can really execute this strategy and do it well is that you have to be immersed in whatever niche or topic that you are blogging about. These opportunities don’t come around a lot, but if you can take advantage and be one of the first to publish on this topic, then you, yes you, can even outrank some of the biggest competitors in your space.

Other examples of the crystal ball method, especially in my space, in the investing space, is publishing any content that has to do with a big IPO that is coming up. For example, I remember writing about the Facebook IPO and the Twitter IPO.

Any big IPO, if you can publish any information on that a few months before it actually happens and then you go back and update that content as more news, more information comes out, then you also have a chance to take advantage of that crystal ball method.

All right, the last big takeaway, and this may be hard for many of you, especially if you suffer from Imposter Syndrome. – You’re not an imposter. You just have Imposter Syndrome. It happens all the time. – But whenever you are producing content, you have to think of yourself as the authority or as the expert.

And I’m sure many of you are thinking that, yeah Jeff, that’s easy for you to say because you were a financial planner, so it was easy for you to be an expert in your space, and I get it, that makes complete sense, but you have to realize in the online space that being an expert doesn’t mean that you went to school, that you got an MBA, that you have a certification in whatever you are writing about.

Topic Idea Generation

Being an expert just means that you are one or two steps ahead of somebody else that is looking for information on whatever topic that you are blogging about. Another way to become an authority or the authority on your site is by offering different types of media that people can download or consume your content.

I mentioned earlier that whenever we added affiliates and started incorporating affiliate marketing into the site how we saw our monthly revenues increase exponentially. What I didn’t mention was one of the main reasons we were able to be so effective with that is that we just didn’t offer blog content on different affiliates.

So going back to that Scottrade example. Yes, we had a blog post that talked about the pros and cons of investing and opening an account with Scottrade, but I also had YouTube videos where I showed behind the scenes, what it looked like to open an account with Scottrade, how to invest with Scottrade, how my Scottrade portfolio performed over a period of time.

Later on, we introduced the Good Financial Cents podcast where guess what? I was talking about investing with Scottrade and the other affiliates that we offered on the site. ‘Cause here’s the thing, Google really didn’t care that I was a financial planner talking about Scottrade.

What they did care about was offering different types of content, YouTube videos, which conveniently enough is also owned by Google.

Because I know several personal finance bloggers that have sold their sites for millions of dollars, or those that still own their sites are making several hundred thousand dollars a month and the only reason is that whatever topic that they are writing about, any topic that they are covering, they have become the expert, the authority because they have written and addressed every single question, every single concern that somebody may have.

And that really is the missing link of going from making a couple of thousand dollars a month to making a ton of money. But the cool thing is that you don’t have to become the expert overnight. It can take time and that’s what I love about blogging.

So at this point in time, you’re probably wondering, Jeff, can I really, really do this? Is this a possibility? Let me tell you, it is if you have some patience, if you have some determination. And just to help you out, just to give you a jumpstart, I created this free email challenge called the Make $1K Challenge and you can go to make1kchallenge.com.

I’ll have a link in the description that you can go check it out. With this challenge, we will show you step by step how to get your blog set up and publish your first blog post and also, how to make your first, you guessed it, $1,000. And once again, this is a free challenge.

The link is in the description or you can go to make1kchallenge.com. All right y’all, I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope that you at least have some interest, some excitement about blogging. I’ll tell you what, it is something that has literally changed my life, it has rocked my world. I love it so much and I hope you do too.

Let’s face it, getting traffic to your blog is harder than ever, in fact, I’ve recently teamed up with BuzzSumo to analyze 912 million blog posts. And we found that the vast majority of blog posts that are published, get zero links or social shares. When I launched my first blog way back in 2009, things worked completely different.

Back then, getting links and social shares was relatively easy. You could publish a 500-word blog post and call it a day. 490 words, 499 words, 500 words, done ski. Flash forward to today and things are completely different. According to WordPress, 2.3 million blog posts come out on their platform every day.

So for your content to stand out and get shared today, it needs to be amazing. Lucky for you, that’s exactly what I’m gonna show you how to do in this video, step-by-step. Starting with Step Number One, find a proven blog post topic. It’s no secret that your blog post topic is huge.

Here’s exactly how to find blog post topics that actually work. First head over to Udemy. Udemy is a blog post topic goldmine, here’s why. Udemy doesn’t just show you content that people are interested in, instead, you see content that people are actually paying for.

You can search for courses by category or by keyword. Either way, you’ll find content that people are actually paying to access. For example, let’s say you run a blog about graphic design. Wellhead over to the Design Category in Udemy, and scroll down to their best-selling courses and within five seconds you have a list of proven topics.

Very cool. The next place to look for proven topic ideas is Amazon. To use it, just search on Amazon with the keyword that describes what you’re blog is all about. Then look for a book on that topic with lots of ratings, this shows you that people actually bought the book.

Finally, click look inside, to see the table of contents and just like with Udemy, you get a list of topics presented to you on a silver platter. Last up we have conference agenda. First head over to a conference website in your niche, go to the agenda or schedule page, and you’ll see topics that people are paying to learn more about.

This leads us to Step Number Two. Write your headline. Now that you have a proven topic, it’s time to write your blog post headline. You might have seen the stat before that 80 per cent of people read your headline, but only 20 per cent click over to the actual post. Is that stat true? Who knows, but I do know that your headline is super important.

With that, here’s exactly how to write blog post headlines that stand out and get clicks. First, start your headline off with proven phrases. BuzzSumo recently analyzed about 100 million headlines. So what did they find? That headlines that start with these 20 words and phrases, get the most shares on social media.

For example, when I published this post on my blog, I made sure to start my headline off with one of those phrases. Obviously, you don’t need to start every single headline off with one of those phrases, but when it makes sense try and use them. Second, make sure that your title uses brackets or parentheses.

A study by Outbrain found that adding brackets to headlines can improve click-through rate by up to 38 per cent. And this study confirms what I’ve seen in the real world. In fact, six of my top ten all-time, most popular blog posts have brackets or parentheses in the title. Finally, you wanna use long headlines.

That study of 900 million blog posts that I mentioned earlier, found that posts with long headlines got 76 per cent more shares compared to posts that used short headlines. With that, it’s time for Step Number Three, write an attention-grabbing introduction. Topic, check. Headline, check.

Now it’s time to write an introduction that grabs your readers attention right off the bat, how? The PPT Formula. This formula is killing it for me right now. By the way, the PPT stands for Preview, proof, transition. Here’s a breakdown of the formula.

Now I’m gonna break down each part of this formula and show you how it works with real-life examples. First up, you have the preview. This part couldn’t be any more simple. Just let your reader know exactly what to expect. That way when someone lands on one of your blog posts, they know that they’re in the right place.

Here’s an example. Next, it’s time for the proof. Here’s where you show people that you know what you’re talking about. Now what if you don’t know what you’re talking about, well you’ve got bigger problems than blog post introductions but that’s another story.

Now you can show proof with personal results, years of experience, number of clients, credentials or certifications, or anything that shows that someone should listen to your advice. Here’s an example. Last up we have the transition. Cap your intro off with a transition, a transition that pushes your reader to keep reading.

For example, you can see that of used the phrase, “Let’s dive right in,” at the end of this intro, simple. Moving right along to Step Number Four, Write an awesome post. Is there a formula for writing blog posts that people will link to and share? No, if there was, everyone would use it.

That said, there are proven strategies that you can use to make your content ten times better. For example, one technique that’s working really well for me right now is using lots of section subheaders. Sub-headers are great because they break your content up into easy to read chunks, which is super important if you publish a lot of long-form content as I do.

For example, this post for my blog is super long. In fact, that post is 4,300 words, so I broke up the content into little chunks, using dozens of subheaders. I also recommend using lots of visuals in every post that you publish. Now when I’m talking about visuals and talking about things like screenshots, charts, pictures, infographics, basically don’t be afraid to use a ton of different visuals and just lots of visuals in general in every post.

For example, this post for my blog has 95 visuals. Next, use a font that’s between 16 and 20 pixels, if you’ve ever read anything at medium.com, you’ve probably noticed that their articles are super easy to read. How do they do it? Well besides a clean layout, they use 21 point font.

And if you’re using anything less than 16, you probably missing out on a lot of readers. That’s why we use 18 point font here at Backlinko. Finally, when it makes sense, publish content that’s at least three thousand words. Our BuzzSumo Industry study found a clear correlation between long-form content and social shares.

In fact, our data showed that long-form content got an average of 77 per cent more social shares, compared to traditional short blog posts. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that you need to pad your blog posts with a bunch of fluff or filler. But if it does make sense to publish a long-form blog post or guide, go for it.

So now that your post is in the books, it’s time for the next step, Step Number Five, to write your conclusion. Here’s the deal. Most people use throw away conclusions like this. But professional bloggers know that your conclusion is super important. Especially if you wanna get lots of comments on your blog.

Well, I’ve recently developed a three-step process for writing awesome conclusions. It’s called the TAC Process. Here’s how it looks. First, start your conclusion off with a transition. This sentence lets people know that the meat of your blog post is over and it’s time to sum things up. Here’s an example. Next, it’s time for the ask.

Here’s where you ask your reader a very specific question. In other words, you don’t wanna ask something vague like what do you think? Instead, give your reader an insanely simple question that’s easier to answer. For example, in this conclusion, you can see that I asked people something that will take like two seconds to answer.

And you wanna end your conclusion with a CTA. Your CTA can be whatever you want your reader to do next. You can ask your readers to leave comments, share on social media, sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your YouTube channel, the exact call to action that you use is totally up to you.

But the important thing to keep in mind here is that you got someone to read your blog post all the way to the end. This means they really enjoyed your content and they’re ready for the next step. And as long as you give them that next step in your conclusion, you’re good.

We do a conclusion in the books, let’s head over to Step Number Six, optimize your post for SEO. Obviously, there’s a lot more to SEO than I can cover in a short video. In fact, I have an entire blog and YouTube channel about SEO. That said, SEO is super important for your blog posts long-term success.

So I do wanna quickly cover three simple techniques that you can use to optimize your blog posts for SEO. Because the truth is, traffic to most peoples blog posts look like this, a huge spike on day one, then it flattens out to pretty much zero.

But when you optimize your post the right way, you still get that spike, but your post still brings in consistent traffic month after month. For example, I first published this post over five years ago. Now I’ve updated it a few times since then, but it’s basically the same post.

And because that post is optimized for SEO, it still brings in over 12,000 visitors per month from Google. So the first on-page SEO technique is to include your target keyword in your introduction. Google and other search engines put more weight on words and phrases that show up at the top of your page.

So you wanna make sure to use your keyword once in your blog post intro like this. Next use short URL’s. When it comes to Google Rankings there’s no doubt about it, short URL’s work best. In fact, Google themselves actually recommend that you use short descriptive URL’s.

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That’s because short URL’s make it easy for Google to understand the topic of your page. Plus people use your URL to figure out which result they should click on. This is why lots of industry studies have found that short URL’s get clicked on more than long URL’s. Finally, add internal links to your post.

Now internal linking doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, when it comes to internal links, I like to keep things simple. Whenever I publish a new post, I add two to five internal links to some of my older posts. Now you could also go back to older posts and link to the new post that you just published.

For example, when I published this post about keyword research, I linked that to related content on my site that I already published. And added a handful of internal links from older posts to my new guide. And before we end this video, I have a quick bonus step for you, promote your post.

I know this video is designed to show you how to write a blog post, but here’s the deal. Most blog posts, even good ones fail because they’re not promoted enough. And no, sharing your content on Twitter and Facebook doesn’t really count as a promotion. To get your content seen today, you need to do a lot more than just share on social media.

In fact, I usually spend about 20 per cent of my time writing content and 80 per cent of my time promoting that content, that’s how important content promotion is. With that, here are three quick content promotion strategies that you can try. Our first strategy is the content announcement newsletter.

When it comes to content promotion, email crushes social media. And it’s not even that close. For example, I published this post on my blog a few months ago. And like I do for all new posts, I sent out a Tweet. I also sent out this simple, plain text announcement newsletter to my email subscribers.

And when it was all said and done, the newsletter got nearly 13 times more clicks than my tweet. To be clear, I do have more email subscribers than Twitter followers. But still, there’s no denying that email is way more powerful when it comes to promoting content compared to social media. Next, we have Facebook retargeting.

It’s no secret that Facebook’s organic reach is pretty much zero right now. Fortunately, you can still get your Facebook followers to see your posts, without paying a fortune. The secret is to boost your posts, but only boost to people that have visited your site. In other words, retargeting.

For example, I paid about 50 cents per click on this boosted Facebook post, which is dirt cheap considering that I’m in the competitive, expensive B2B niche. Finally, we have Email Outreach. If you don’t have an email list yet, Outreach is probably the best way to promote your content. That’s the good news.

The bad news is you can’t just send the same spammy email to 100 people and expect it to work. In fact, I get generic emails like this all the time, you probably do too, and I delete them within two seconds. But I don’t automatically delete every Outreach email that I get.

If someone takes the time to send me a personalized message, I’ll usually at least check out their post. And if the post is something that I think the Backlinko community would enjoy, I’ll share it. So, there you have it. My Seven Step Process for writing a blog post.

How I made nearly $15,000 last month doing Blogging

I’m sharing four real-life examples of how bloggers make money including how I made nearly $15,000 last month. I’ll not only reveal how four bloggers make six-figure incomes but four tips you can use to make money even on a small blog. We’re talking how much you can make blogging today on Let’s Talk Money! Beat debt.

Make money. Make your money work for you. Creating the financial future you deserve. Let’s Talk Money. I want to send a special shout out to everyone in the community, thank you for taking a little of your time to be here today. If you’re not part of the community yet, just click that little red subscribe button.

It’s free and you’ll never miss an episode. I’ve helped 97 people start a blog. That’s just the ones I’ve helped directly through a special discount I negotiated with Blue Host and not counting the hundred thousand plus that watch the videos or read my blog each month.

And if there’s one question I get most from these new bloggers, it’s How Much Money Can You Make with a Small Blog? You see, so many bloggers get started after seeing monthly income reports from huge, established bloggers…and then live that ultimate frustration every small blogger faces.

The despair of spending hours a week writing a blog post that nobody will read and the frustration from not making as much as they thought. I was there in 2013 when I started my blogs and I’ve seen hundreds of bloggers fight through it.

So I want to help get you started, just like all those others I’ve helped, by sharing four real-life examples of how bloggers are making money and then four tips to make money on even a small blog. We’ll start with those four blogger income examples but stick around because I’ll be revealing four ways to make money blogging on any size website.

Kayla Sloan started her website in 2014 and but didn’t switch to full-time blogging until late 2015. She gets just 7,000 page views a month but is a great example of how bloggers can still make money on a small site. Kayla started freelance writing and then started teaching others how to write online and make money.

This is one of the most common ‘career paths’ I see with bloggers and it’s similar to how I started. Kayla now makes over $11,000 a month and focuses mostly on her own students now instead of writing. Freelance writing pays off immediately and as long as you have a decent command of the English language, you can easily make $30 an hour and more.

You do this while your own blog grows and eventually you’re making so much from your own site that you don’t have to freelance anymore. The message here, get started with a blog and use some of the income sources I’ll reveal later. Some will provide an immediate payout while others take longer to build but mean more money.

Lena of the site What Mommy Does gets a mountain of traffic with over 350,000 views a month but I wanted to highlight it here because I think her strategy works even for small blogs. Lena reports four income sources; affiliate marketing, advertising, sponsored posts and an ebook and she consistently makes around ten grand a month from it.

This is a pretty typical blogger income report and the core income sources you’ll use to make money. Your first check will probably come from ads on the site but make a plan from day one to get those sponsored posts and affiliate payouts. Now Lena didn’t start with this huge blog. She had less than 20,000 visitors in January 2015 but built it to a legit online business.

Like any business, blogging is a long-game and the ones that put in the time are the ones that build their income into that six-figure payday. Two more examples of how much bloggers make and then those four tips to make money but I want to get your feedback.

How much do you want to make each month, whether it’s from a blog or other online business? How much do you want to make and what are some of the ideas in the video that will help you do that? So this one is just as much about your feedback as it is to get you thinking, how can this work for me, how can I apply this to reach that income goal? Scroll down and let me know in the comments.

Carrie Smith Nicholson of Careful Cents has a fairly small blog but she’s managed to turn it into a legit work from home business. Carrie makes a good chunk of her blogging income from digital product sales which are things like a downloadable planner or printables that can be anything from a one-page checklist to a mini-ebook.

Now, this is three months but she didn’t include her freelancing income here so adding that means she made just over $6,700 a month for the quarter. Look at the individual income sources though. What I like here is that you see no one income source is usually going to make a blogger rich.

Carrie made about four grand a month freelancing and a grand a month on digital products, but none of these were huge by themselves. Few bloggers make enough from just one income source to focus on just the one. Put five or six of these sources together though and you’ve got a solid income.

I started tracking my blogging income in April 2015 and made an earth-shattering $60 that month. By the end of the year, I was making around two grand a month and have grown the business to six figures since. In nearly five years, I’ve made over $281,500 on blogs and YouTube and I grow my income every year.

In the eight months through August, I’ve averaged $10,948 a month from six sources, a 54% increase from last year and hit a record of $14,813 last month. This is of four blogs I still own, all within the personal finance space and this YouTube channel…so yeah, I stay pretty busy but make good money doing it.

I regularly make money through six income sources including books, Amazon affiliates, courses, ads here on YouTube, affiliate marketing and sponsorships and those of you in the community will notice something here. The income from any single source can vary a lot from month to month.

I was making a couple thousand each month earlier this year on courses during my launches and when I was really promoting them but that dried up last month. I was still able to reach a new record though on total income because a few of these other sources really stepped up.

That’s a big lesson here in blogging, you need to go after several of the income sources we’ll talk about next to balance out your income from month to month. Now I want to share four tips that will make you more money even on a small blog. Four rules will work to make you money starting today.

First is you can’t wait for traffic to start making money. I die a little every time I hear someone say they’re waiting to grow their blog before they worry about making money. If you have one person reading your blog or watching your YouTube channel, YOU CAN MAKE MONEY! Have a product plan from day one, whether that means which ebooks you want to produce or maybe some quick printables you can sell through the blog.

Start thinking about the digital products you can sell. Rule #2 here is to learn the different ways bloggers use to make money and build as many of those as possible. In each of the blogger income examples, you saw all the reasons for using multiple income sources.

From smoothing out your monthly income to just making more money; you need to be balancing as many income sources as possible. They say the average millionaire is collecting an income off seven different sources and it’s no different for bloggers. Next here is to blend affiliate marketing and self-publishing into your content strategy.

This means every week or month, whenever you sit down to think about what you might write about on your blog, include affiliates and self-publishing in the mix. For affiliates, this means finding the ones that work to really help your readers, then planning on doing a review post or a comparison article each month.

This is going to build up a library of content that will start getting traffic from Google every single month and start making you passive income even if you stop posting. For self-publishing income, building the income source into your content strategy means deciding on a book you want to publish.

Then you outline the chapters and write one a week to post on the blog. This makes it so you get something posted on the blog but also get the book finished without having to spend twice the time. Our fourth rule for making money is going to be more indirect but will come out over the long run.

Create a plan to increase your blog traffic with search engine optimization or SEO. Now I know I just showed you that you can make money on a small blog but the truth will always be that bigger blogs make more money. You’ll make more money from almost every source including sponsors, affiliates and your own products.

I’m going to teach you how to start a blog of your own. Learning how to start a blog really does have the potential to change your life. Some people start a blog as a hobby. It’s something fun to do outside of work. Well, others start a blog as a side hustle to bring in a little extra income. And for some, blogging has turned into a full-time business, one so profitable, that they’re able to actually quit their job, travel the world, and live life on their own terms.

All just because they started. The great thing about blogging is that it is a low cost and zero risk way to open the doors to opportunities that weren’t there before. So in today’s video, I’m going to be walking you through how to start a blog of your own with WordPress, with a step by step tutorial.

And I’ll also be sharing five blogging tips and advice, so be sure to stay to the end of this video. I’ll be showing you how to start a blog with HostGator. HostGator is a website hosting company, and they are great for new bloggers in terms of performance and costs.

And they have the infrastructure to accommodate your blog as it grows, which is really important. You can check out our link to HostGator in the description box down below. And the great news is that we have special pricing with HostGator. And with our link, you’ll get the best possible pricing. So be sure to check it out.

If you came into this video, hesitant on actually starting a blog, let me tell you why other people blog. People have very unique reasons for wanting to start a blog. Some are compassionate in nature. Perhaps they want to educate others on a rare form of a disease, they or a family member are struggling with.

Others are more informative where they wanna chronicle a weight loss journey and inspire others to do the same. And some blogs are entertaining like a fashion blog. No matter your reason for wanting to start, with the right strategies, your blog can connect you to millions of people, get your ideas out into the world and can make you more money than you ever could make at your nine to five.

If you don’t think it can happen to you think again, just a few years ago, my friends, Jeff and Ben started the DollarSprout blog with absolutely no experience. They had no idea how to actually start a blog and didn’t know what to even write about.

But since then they now both run the DollarSprout blog full-time and DollarSprout makes over $1 million a year. There are a lot of other bloggers out there who make over $100,000 a month, like Michelle from Making Sense of Cents, which is another personal finance blog.

She took her a little hobby as a side hustle blog, and now makes over a million dollars a year. Melyssa Griffin runs a blog to help others grow their businesses. And she’s shared how she makes over $100,000 a month as well. Bobby from Millennial Money Man has a blog where he shares about money and side hustles and makes over six figures a month from his blog as well.

Now it takes a lot of work to reach the status of these six-figure monthly bloggers, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. It’s definitely feasible to start making a few hundred, or even a few thousand dollars per month within just a few months of starting.

So how do bloggers make money? The cool thing about blogging is that there is a near-limitless number of ways to make money. You can use display ads, doing sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, selling courses, eBooks, or training, consulting, or providing another service like coaching or mentoring.

To get your blog started, you want to decide on a niche and a name. You wanna pick a niche that is specific enough but also allows you to be able to talk about different subjects in relation to that niche. The DollarSprout blog is in the finance niche and contains topics ranging from side hustles, budgeting, investing, and more.

Other niches that people blog about are things like fashion, travel or even parenting. It’s good to have one general niche to focus on so that your readers know that you’re the expert in that niche. Like it would kind of be strange if your blog is about car modifications, fashion, and also money. So it’s best to pick one overall niche for your blog,

then choose a name. It’s great to choose a blog name that helps you explain what your niche is, like when you go to DollarSprout, you expect to learn about money. And when you go to Millennial Money Man, you expect to learn about money tips for millennials. So choose a name that helps you reflect your overall niche.

Now let’s get into that tutorial to show you how to set up a blog or website. Don’t forget to use the link to HostGator located down in the description box to get the lowest pricing available and follow along with this tutorial. So I’ve clicked on DollarSprout’s link for HostGator.

And as you can see, there’s a Hatchling Plan, a Baby Plan and a Business Plan. And each one comes with different things. So obviously pick the plan that’s going to be best for you and the things that you’re looking for in starting a blog or a website.

But for the purpose of this video, I’m just going to go with a Hatchling Plan and hit Buy Now! Next, we get to search for a domain. So we get to choose a domain name. So I’m just going to come up with a domain here. Let’s see, budgeting is fun. And there you go. This domain is available. So this is going to be my free domain, which is great.

We’ll scroll down here. I’m not going to add on domain privacy protection for the purpose of just this video. But if that’s something that you wanna do, then you can go ahead and click that button. And now you are going to select your plan, which we decided on the Hatchling Plan and then also the billing cycle.

So as you can see, if you sign up for a 24-month or a 36-month plan, that’s obviously going to give you the best discount. A 36-month plan is going to be only $2.75 a month. So the more months you choose, the less it’s going to cost each month.

But for the purpose of this video, I’m just going to do one month to show you how to walk through it all. And then you’re going to set up a username and a pin. And the next section just has you entering personal and billing information. And then section four, as you add on additional services if you want them.

So you can read through all of the different options that they have and decide if you want to add any of these to your purchase. But again, for the purposes of this video, I’m just going to go pretty basic, just to walk you through it. But there are many options for you to choose from if you wanna add any of these.

And then there’s a section for the coupon code, which has already been entered in for you because you followed the DollarSprout link. Another thing about HostGator is that you get a 45-day money-back guarantee. So they had this also shown up when you’re reviewing your order details.

And then scroll down and you can see here, all of this special pricing that we have. So the amount due is going to be 12.34. You wanna click the box thing that you have read and agreed to the terms of service. Obviously, if you wanna read the terms of service, go ahead and read it. And now we will hit checkout.

And then you get to this next screen when HostGator’s doing all the work for you and preparing to set up your account. Now that our account is all set up, we are going to build our site with WordPress. WordPress is the volume framework that so many other websites use, and so we definitely we’ll wanna get started with WordPress.

There are so many ways that you can customize it and build your website, and also tons of things that you can choose from. So we’re going to click, Get Started with setting up WordPress. And here we are just going to click the button Install now. So we’re going to choose the version that we want to install.

So I’m going to choose the most recent version. And then here it shows my website, budgetingisfun.com, then we’ll choose the site name. So I’m gonna say budgeting is fun. In the description, a budgeting blog. Then you can set up your admin, username and password here, and an admin email.

Next, you can select the language. And then you can also select if there are any additional plugins that you wanna have installed. Next, there are advanced options, but I’m just going to go ahead and leave that alone and then select a theme. There are tons of different themes available.

And so you can kind of view them and see which one is going to represent your style and your branding for your blog. All of these themes that they have here are free, but there are some additional paid for themes that you can view if you want.

But there are tons of free themes that you can look through and you can just click on Demo to be able to see what the entire website will look like with this theme. So this one, okay, I’m liking it. I think that it looks good. So I am going to go ahead and choose this theme. I’ll just hit select, and then just hit the Install button at the bottom.

Now, this is going to take a little bit of time to get everything up and running for the website. And then we get this lovely message showing that the software was installed successfully. So we’re ready to go. So once you’ve set up WordPress, now you can go and start creating blog posts and also edit your site with WordPress.

So you can open up a new tab and type in your domain and then slash admin. And then this takes you to WordPress. And then you can just enter in that username and password that you selected, and then walk into your account. So I wanted to show you how you can make a couple of customization of your theme.

So how you do that is you go into appearance and then go to themes. And here it shows the website theme that we selected when we were downloading WordPress, but there are also some other ones that are available, we can choose from if we want. But you can then click this button that just says customize.

So let’s say you wanna change the tagline of your website. You can go over here to site identity, and then you can show the site title and also the tagline. So we can say a budgeting blog, we can change that and say because budgeting should be fun. And then hit Publish. And as you can see, it shows here, because budgeting should be fun.

So here on the banner, it shows a hospital that you can trust. This has just been the theming that I copied over. So to change that, I can go to Header Banner and then go to Banner Content, and then you can update the title and the subtitle and everything that you’re looking for here. So here we can just say, budgeting is easy if I spell it right.

Help, budgeting is easy. And there we have it updated on our website. And then just hit the Publish button to make sure that you save it. So if we exit out of this, it takes us back to our WordPress editor, and then you can get started on creating blog posts. So you can go up to this little pin versus posts, click that, and then you can click Add New.

This little popup will show you how you can create a blog post, so you can walk through that to get some guidance if you need it. And then you can just start typing away on your very first blog post. So “Why I Think Budgeting is Fun” is my title. And then here, we’re going to start a blog and I’m just going to start typing away for my first blog post.

And when your blog post is complete, you can make sure you save it, which is very important. And then you can even preview. So here’s what my blog post looks like on my website. And then when you are ready, you can hit that Publish button and have your first blog post published and ready for the world to see.

Now that you have your blog set up, here are five blogging tips and advice as you get started. Tip number one, create a logo. This will add some sort of professionalism to your website, and add an element of branding. You can use a website like Canva to design a logo or other graphics for your blog.

Canva is a free website with tools for you to create your own graphics. They have templates, or you can just start from scratch. Or if you don’t have an eye for design and want a more professional logo, check out Fiverr. On Fiverr, you can hire a graphic designer to make you a one-time logo. And it’s also pretty affordable.

Tip number two, get on social media. Using social media is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Whether that’s from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, or more. There are many different social media platforms to choose from. And that can probably seem pretty overwhelming.

My advice is to choose one or two platforms that you can really master and build up a couple of platforms before moving to another. By using social media, you can build up followers and then share links to your blog when the post goes live. Tip number three, use Yoast SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization.

SEO is important to have your post show up and be seen in results when people search for a certain topic on a search engine like Google. Yoast SEO is a plugin for your blog that will help you with keyword optimization and post-writing to make sure your posts have the best possibility of getting found in search.

There is a paid version of Yoast SEO, but if you’re on a budget, there’s a free version as well. Tip number four, sign up for some affiliate programs. With affiliate marketing, you receive a commission if someone uses your blanket to make a purchase or sign up for something.

There are many different affiliate marketing programs out there, but one of the easiest and best is with Amazon. You can visit Amazon’s website and sign up for its affiliate program. From there, you can get your special affiliate link for anything on Amazon’s website.

And when you share that link in a blog post you’ll get paid if someone uses it to make a purchase. Writing a post on Christmas gifts for your kids, link those items through Amazon’s affiliate program. Tip number five, search YouTube for website help.

Obviously, you’re watching this video as a tutorial to set up a blog, but if you are getting going and are wondering how to set up something else on your website, I mean, you can always pay a website designer to make changes for you, but that can be expensive. Or you can learn for free with other YouTube tutorials. So now you know how to start a blog of your own. step-up and roll out.