A year and a half ago, I started up this thing called a blog. It was so foreign to me and I had absolutely no experience running a blog. I didn’t even really know the magnitude of what people could make blogging. I just wanted to help people, specifically, helping moms be able to stay home with their kids and quit the 9 to 5.
For me, it wasn’t about money, it was about changing lives, showing women they have a choice. It just so happens that I make great money doing what I love. If you want to get your message out and change the world, keep reading…
***I now make $140k-ish/month! See my current income reports here.
As the sole provider of my family, I can understand the extreme diligence that men and women alike, put forth trying to make money from home. It seems like something that only dreams are made of…not something real and tangible. But, the truth is, that you CAN make money from home (I’ve been doing that for over 17 years) and one of the best ways to make money from home, in my opinion, is blogging.
Yes, it’s a lot of hard work. No, it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, but yes, it IS real. For years, I lived on $18,000/year. Now I make more than half of a year’s income in ONE MONTH. How? Blogging!
If you want to know if blogging is right for you, you’ll want to check out my post, 47 Reasons to Start a Blog (yes, everyone’s doing it; they just don’t talk about it).
Decided you want to start a blog?
Great! The next step is making some hard decisions. Here’s a complete guide that will walk you through all those decisions, cutting many, many months off your prep time.
Ready to sign up? Starting a blog is super easy and literally takes less than 5 minutes to do. Click here to get the best deal available online when you take that step, along with a full tutorial and video to help you get started. Please note: this low offer is the absolute lowest pricing they offer online. I wish it were this cheap when I started MY blog!
Right now, you can get hosting as low at $2.95! They have you pay upfront and yes, you absolutely WANT to do that, so you don’t lose your domain name forever. It’s yours and no one can take it from you for as long as you purchase it in advance (I have 9 years on SarahTitus.com!)
The pricing is as follows:
- $2.95 for 36 months –> $106.20 (so cheap seriously! I pay that for ONE month on my blog now because my blog is so big; I’m jealous. LOL)
- $3.95 for 24 months –> $94.80 (great deal!)
- $4.95 for 12 months –> $59.40 (but I wouldn’t recommend this one because I see no point in starting up a blog if you’re just going to do it for a year and these prices next year WILL GO UP! Better to pay less now all at once).
Remember that you MUST click HERE in order to get this special deal and I’m not just saying that. Do your homework. The deal is only available through my link!
Done signing up? Awesome! Here’s my income report (the nuts and bolts and numbers of someone making $10,000/month blogging). And after you’re done seeing how it’s all done, you’ll want to snatch up a bag of tricks to implement on your own blog right away.
Be sure to design a logo for your blog. Rather than hiring a designer, here’s a logo kit that you can purchase very inexpensively and make yourself. Since it comes with PNG files, you can easily create something in Picmonkey to use!
Still haven’t a clue what you’ll write about? Not to worry. Click here to read the post, What To Do When You Run Out of Content Ideas for Your Blog. After reading that, you’ll never run out of great ideas again!
Another trick to knowing what to write about can be found here. On HubSpot, you enter in 3 nouns (any words you want) and it helps you come up with a really cool title, right, because a headline is the very first thing potential readers will see. It’s important to make a good one!
Don’t forget to write all your blogging ideas down! You’ll need to make a schedule, called an editorial calendar, to be consistent in your writing. Just try to do 2-3 posts a week to start, then add more posts as you can. You can get the 2017 free printable calendars here.
After you get that taken care of, you’ll need an entire blogging planner. I couldn’t find one that met all my needs, so I created my own! This blogging binder has over 180+ pages and is simply (but beautifully) designed, so as not to suck up all your printer ink!
What’s a blog without pictures. You’ll need some pretty and fun photos for your blog. You can get 50+ styled stock photos by clicking here.
Next, you’ll want to research your competitors.
A couple sites to look up your competition are Alexa.com and SimilarWeb.com. Both give you different data and have different features. They will tell you things like how much traffic a site gets, where it’s coming from, where the traffic is going, are the readers male/female, how popular is the site and so on. To get a semi-accurate traffic count (nothing is 100% accurate like that, but it gives you a good idea: on SimilarWeb, multiply the visits by the page views).
Still want more recommendations? Which plug ins to install, which books are worth spending money on, where DO YOU get pictures anyway? Check out my blogging recommendations page, where I spill all that and much more.
Want sponsors to sponsor your site and throw money at you? You’ll need a low Alexa score. The lower the better. Don’t worry. I’ve got you covered there too! The very popular, Boost Your Alexa Score section is available within the Honest Bloggers Academy Course, which you can find here! No tricks that will get you in trouble with Google. This is all 100% safe and sound advice.
After you get to 50,000 pageviews on your site, you’ll want to begin putting ads up (not before that time or you’ll lose trust with your readers!)
These are my favorite ad networks:
- Google AdSense – Find the two ads that do best on your site and keep them. Delete the ones that don’t do as well. There’s no point in showing an ad that doesn’t make you GOOD money!
- Media.net – What I love about Media.net is that you can put the ads where you want them. I like to put them in some of my more popular posts. You can customize the ad colors any way you want and Media.net will automatically A/B split test them to get you maximum results.
Afraid to start a blog? Check out my post, How to Easily Start a Blog With No Fear.
There you have it. That should get you from just starting out to well on your way to making a fantastic income blogging!
