There are two ways to build a profitable blog: You spend years hoping that one day you’ll finally get enough traffic to make money with ads and sponsored posts….or you join thousands of modern bloggers making money right from the get go.
I remember back in the day when blogging was basically a journal for creatives. You were either a graphic designer that had a penchant for pouring your heart out; a fashionista that needed the space to vomit all of your style ideas; Or you were a celebrity blogger. This was back during a time when the only financial rewards accessible to bloggers were ads. So you put all of your heart into growing your blog traffic, hoping it translated into increased revenue, and if you were lucky, you could make enough money to leave your job.
The problem with this is that you had to get millions of page views per month in order to make a significant amount of cash–which mean’t that only a few people were able to grow a large enough audience that could be monetized. Many bloggers were left as hobbyists.
Nowadays anyone can make money with their blog; and your blog traffic and follower count no longer determine how much you get paid. For example, there is a travel blogger I know that is on course to make $1 million this year with just a little over 70k Instagram followers. I also know fashion, food, lifestyle, health, dating, career and entrepreneur bloggers with 5,000 – 30,000 Instagram followers that are making even more than that.
And, Myself? I’ve maintained 1500 Instagram followers and 4000 – 9,000 page views per month and have made over six-figures with my blog by using it as a stepping stone to grow an empire.
You see — blogging has evolved. Your audience doesn’t want just pictures. They want your story. And they want to use your tips and tricks to transform their own lives. Bloggers are the new Entrepreneurs. They get paid because they help people–even when they don’t realize it.
The modern blogger doesn’t wait for ads or brand partnerships.
She is fully able to take control of her income and command how much money she wants when she wants it. And this same power and privilege can open up for you once you drop the outdated approach of nilly willing it with your blog, and start blogging with clear intention.
Instead of looking at your blog as just a way to get your ideas out there, look at it as a way to create a business. What if instead of just building an audience to send them to someone else’s business where you get pennies compared to what the brand will make from your influence–why not send your people to your own products and services and take home the whole tamale?
I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t work with brands. Brand Partnerships are great — my talent management company House of Arnat wouldn’t exist without them. What I am saying is that a blog is a great way to grow an audience and funnel them into your own business. And by doing this, you can actually make enough money to leave your job, even when your audience is small.
In today’s post, I am fully exploring and giving you the step by step process on how to launch a blog that makes money.
1. You need a niche.
Every one hates this word — I get it. Most people think it’s the bane of their creativity but niche doesn’t mean you have to stop talking about all the things you love. A niche is simply a specific audience that you specialize in talking to. Here is a really easy example:
If you write travel blogs that are all about how women can travel the world for cheap, then your niche focuses on women that are interested in budget travel. And within that you can cover everything budget travel which can include budget hotels, budget restaurants, budget clothes, budget excursions, budget travel skincare, budget travel beauty etc.
With just this specific niche example there is an abundance of content one could talk about, you would never run out of ideas. A niche gives you more freedom and creative ideas because you’re not overwhelmed by all of the possibilities and various things to create. Furthermore, because you’re able to double down on your speciality, it helps you distinguish yourself from everyone else out there and it positions you as the go-to boss bitch in your field.
2. You need to know how you help people.
Let’s say you’re a travel blogger that blogs about how you find international flights for $150, you still need to know one thing. What value do you provide your audience outside of sharing with them your cool travel story? In essence, how are you changing THEIR life?
- Are you making their once implausible dreams of traveling the world actually seem financially possible?
- Are you a relationship blogger showing women how to find the love of their life after years of dating losers?
- Maybe you’re a health blogger helping people heal pain through mindful eating?
How do you help your audience?
3. Getting crystal clear on how you will monetize your blog.
If you want to make money with your blog right now, it’s important that you are crystal clear with how you want to actually make money with it.
When I launched my first “girlboss blog” back in 2013, I had no clue what I was doing or what the end goal was. I knew I wanted to have a successful platform but I had no idea of how I was going to get there. I just posted anything that came to mind, and pinned it on Pinterest. My traffic grew thanks to my Pinterest strategy but I still wasn’t making any money. I had no clue what I was doing although I was creating a ton of content.
It wasn’t until I sat down and thought about how I wanted to make money did I actually make money. The decision I made was to use my entrepreneur blog as a stepping stone to grow an audience and turn a small portion of them into clients for my coaching business. I would create blog posts around helping women build their online empire and offer coaching and courses to them in areas that they needed help with the most. Within six months I was on course to make $60,000.
The reason why this happened so quickly is because once I had written down how I wanted to make money and what my income streams were (coaching and courses), I then was able to create a blog post strategy that drove ambitious women into my programs. I never would’ve done this had I nilly willied it and only blogged for the purposes of having a journal. I never would’ve done this had I ONLY been creating posts for affiliate or sponporship purposes.
This is really where a blog business plan kicks in and knowing every single stream of income that you could make with your blog.
Let’s walk through all of the ways you can make money with your blog (and how to make money right away!):
Here are the many ways:
- Ads
- Sponsored Blog Posts
- Affiliate Links
- Low End Digital Products (Lightroom Presets, PDF’s, Guides)
- High End Digital Products ($300 – $3,000 Courses)
- Coaching (3,000 – $5,000).
Ads are something that you pretty much need a TONNN of page views to be worth your while. Plus. they’re so intrusive it’s not really worth adding them unless your goal is to create the next TMZ or Buzzfeed.
Sponsored Blog Posts are great and you can typically start getting brands interested with as little as 10,000 page views per month. The problem is, you’ll be lucky if you can consistently pull in more than $1000 a month with these numbers UNLESS you’re in a niche that isn’t saturated.
Affiliate Links are something every small creator can take advantage of. Basically you sign up to become an affiliate for a brand you love, and when you share and link product from said brand on your site, if someone goes and buys the product, you get paid. With just a simple Pinterest strategy you could make money from the get go bringing just $500 – $1200 a month pretty easily.
There are two ways to do affiliates: low end and high end. Low end is what we see most lifestyle bloggers do. They recommend a dress in a blog post, and get a small fee from the store for that recommendation. When you’re a small blogger, the easiest top-tier platform to join is Amazon Affiliates because many of the other top-tier platforms like Reward Style won’t let you in until you’ve got some real traction going. The other way is to become an affiliate partner for a high-end product like a course. For example, the Amazing Selling Machine is a course about selling products on Amazon, it costs $4997 and offers affiliates 40% – 50% of affiliate sales meaning if you refer just ONE person, you make $2500!
The above examples are the most common ways that bloggers seek to make money with their blog.
But I truly find the best way to make money with your blog is to think of it as one branch of your empire, and use it as a foundation to launch a business.
Now let’s talk about the best way to make money with your blog that brings in significant cash right away.
If you’re wondering what that is — it’s selling your own products. If you’re a food blogger, you could launch your own cookbook or cooking course. If you’re all about fitness, you could launch your own online fitness coaching program. The possibilities are limitless when you have a niche and grow that audience.
Here are some examples of products and programs you could launch:
- Membership Site
- Courses
- Lightroom Presets
- Coaching Programs
- Product Line
- Services (ex. graphic design, interior design, photography. coding, etc)
- Guides, Books, Etc
While any of the above are great ways to make money, my favorite method is courses, coaching and services. Reason being is that there is very little cost to get started like it would be if you wanted to launch your own product line and need to account for costs such as inventory, warehouse, shipping etc. Lower end products also require you to sell more in volume to make a significant income.
Unlike low end, Digital offers like courses, coaching and services can be priced anywhere between $300-$10,000 which means that you could sell two $5,000 1:1 spots into your fitness coaching program each month and make $10,000 consistently. At the end of the day there is no wrong or right way to build an online business when it comes to deciding whether or not you want to sell physical or digital products. It all comes down to just deciding HOW you want to make money.
This goes back to point #2 where I mentioned that it is important to have a blog business plan. It’s important to have a clear vision on the kind of life you want so you can build a business that effectively supports that. Anything else won’t have everlasting effects on your life.
With a business plan, you can make any of the above income streams work. A clear strategy just allows you to meet your income goals faster.
4. Create A Content Strategy That Makes You $$$!
A huge reason why a lot of bloggers don’t make money is because they don’t “sell enough”. For example, if you want to make money full-time with affiliate links, you have to create new blog posts on a regular basis that includes affiliate links. You can’t just create one blog post and expect to make moola.
This is the same for when you have your own product. You have to specifically create content to sell your own products too. This is where a lot of Influencers and Entrepreneurs struggle the most. They’re content rich but have no strategy in place and so they’re broke.
This is why intentional blogging matters. What is the end goal of this piece of content? It’s fine to create content just for the purposes of inspiring others and sharing your story, but if you want to make money, you have to also think about that kind of content too.
5. Build a cash container.
A cash container or better yet a cash community is the secret to creating consistent income every single month. Once you have narrowed down what product or programs you want to sell, and have a content strategy and message that attracts client’s and customer’s, it’s time to create this cash container.
The truth is only a small portion of your audience will actually buy from you. But if you want to be able to predict your income every single month, it’s important to know WHO these people are. The best way to do that is to create a cash container which is a community consisting of a small segment of your audience that is most likely to buy from you.
Here is a simple example of the most common cash container — an email list: Forever 21 constantly collects emails from potential customers and existing customers and stores their personal information in an email list so that they can email these customers new arrivals and sales every single day. Upon doing this, Forever 21 makes money every time they send out an email. This is their cash container.
You need to create this same channel in your own business regardless if you’re selling physical or digital products. You need some sort of cash container filled with potential and existing clients and customers that you can sell to over and over again.
While most cash containers are Email lists and Facebook Groups, they can also be a Podcast, YouTube Channel, Instagram account etc.
6. You need traffic, boo!
If you do not have a strategy in place that brings droves of new eyeballs onto your blog, how can you EVER expect to make money with affiliate links or any product you want to sell period?
Pinterest is a great way to get thousands of people in your niche per month to your website on auto-pilot and pretty much for free. Not only is Pinterest great for growing your blog readership, but it’s also great for filling up your email cash container.
If you’re curious to learn more about how to use Pinterest to grow your blog traffic, you should check out our Pinterest course where we’ve helped our students get over 100,000 page views per month on their blog.
7. Patience
At the end of the day, building your empire takes time. Maybe you don’t make $100,000 your first year of launching your blog, but that doesn’t mean year 1 you cant make $30,000, year 2 you make 50,000 and by year 5 you’re at 1 million.
