Last updated on January 5th, 2020 at 09:05 am
If you’ve started your blog and are wondering how to make money blogging – here’s the non-delusional story of how I made my first thousand bucks blogging last year and how you can do it too. Most probably faster.
It took me around 3 months to make my first $1000 from this blog after I signed with an ad network. At that point I was getting consistent traffic to my blog for about 10 months. And I had started my blog over 2 years ago.
See, to me the focus of my blog was never to earn money quickly. It was to learn as much as I can, grow consistently and possibly turn this blog into something that can support me for years to come from anywhere in the world. Something that can create more opportunities for me.
And that’s what I did.
I’m not perfect.
Guess who’s not working on building her email list AT ALL? Me.
Guess, who hasn’t figured out Affiliate Marketing? Well, me.
Guess who’s been lazy to finally create her own product and offer it online. I’m not even gonna say it.
And yet. Being the idiot that I might seem to be – I still managed to make money blogging during the last 8 months. What does this mean?
Oh, yes. It means you can do it too, even if you don’t do everything right.
The #1 Blogging Tip (For Beginners and Beyond)
The number one blogging tip that I can give you, if you want to turn your blog into a business and make money blogging is to be consistent.
Not being original, not being super smart, pretty or great. Not even being good (in the beginning)…all you need is to be there.
To show up and not care whether everyone likes your stuff or not. Whether everyone approves of you being there.
Remember: nobody has a degree in blogging. Allow yourself to make mistakes and make sure to learn from them, because they’ll help you grow faster. If you don’t dare to make mistakes you might not even start.
Okay. Ready? Now let’s focus on the the four steps you should take to make your first $1000 blogging quicker.
If you’re sick of putting things off and actually do want to start your blog – make sure to follow my step-by-step guide for bloggers. It teaches you how to : 1) choose THE RIGHT blog topic, 2) launch & design your WordPress blog using a cheap blog hosting 3) grow your blog traffic fast & for free and 4) start making money with that blog.
How To Make Your First $1000 Blogging
Step 1: Choose a topic you know in and out and are willing to learn more about.
To be successful in any way as a blogger all you have to do is be willing to help others.
And remember the consistency thing? Well, you need to help them consistently.
Nobody’s going to come to your blog to just kill time and read your opinion about how you think you should be doing something you have no idea about.
Your content needs to be helpful, so you need to know more about it. Don’t become one of these:
- a life coach who doesn’t have a job or a boyfriend teaching people how to find their passion and love of their life
- new blogger who teaches you how to blog
- a guy who’s never done yoga teaching you how to do yoga
I understand you need to fake it until you make it, but you won’t feel good pretending to be an expert on something you know nothing about. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. You’re not going to be able to stay consistent and you won’t help anyone.
Find a niche that you’re so passionate (hate that expression, but it’s true) and could spend hours researching it. Something that you would actually want to know more about even if nobody would pay you for it. Be the real you.
For me that’s food and healthy lifestyle. I can spend HOURS on pubmed researching. And I can spend days thinking about food and recipes. So, both of these are topics I can write about most days of the week. This helps me stay consistent.
So choose a topic you love, change things up every now and then, to keep it interesting. Don’t worry if you can’t be too specific about your niche – you don’t need to be!
Step 2: Start your blog and start creating content right away.
After you decide what you’ll blog about, you need to start your blog. To start a blog that can grow faster and make you money, definitely go self-hosted! Choose a reliable, but cheap hosting provider that will keep your site safe, fast and running. For me that’s Siteground and I can’t recommend them enough.
They have great support, money back guarantee and their uptime is unbelievable – well, for my site it was 100% for the last year, which is so rare to find, believe me.
If you’d like to sign up with Siteground, make sure to use this link to get 60% off.
Writing those articles
Without content you can’t expect to make any money. Start with 10-15 articles on your site, so that when people come to your blog they see a few more articles to keep them there. To get to know you.
Now, open your eyes and ears, cause this is important: create content strategically.
By that I mean, to always keep in mind that you’ll want to make money with this content (or at least some of it) one way or another – it could be affiliate marketing, selling your own products or displaying ads when you have enough traffic.
Create content that is honest, authentic and people want and need to see, they’ll notice your links – you don’t need to put them everywhere. If you need some help and ideas with writing your first blog posts – check out this post.
I always try to find balance by creating content that I know is helpful, without turning every post into a big infomercial. I would add an affiliate link whenever I feel is relevant or have a special offer for my readers, but I don’t want it to take over my blog.
| RELATED: 5 types of posts to drive more traffic to your blog
Step 3: Start promoting your content on Pinterest
Pinterest is in my opinion the easiest free way to promote your blog and has the highest rewards (read traffic). With just one viral pin I went from almost 0 to 19.000 page views in one month. All thanks to Pinterest.
To make money, any kind of money blogging, you need people to see that content.
What you need to do is create a pin or multiple pins for each of your posts and promote those pins on Pinterest. And the key here is, again, STAY consistent.
I used to do this by pinning my pins to my own boards and to the group boards I was a part of manually every single day. It took FOREVER. I would pin to the group board, then repin from each group board to my relevant boards. It was wild, but it was worth it. I’m talking an hour a day minimum.
So last year, as this had really taken over my life, I started using Tailwind to schedule my pins. It is simple and it works perfectly for me. Since then I haven’t been spending hours/day pinning and filling out spreadsheets, and my traffic doubled! You can get a free Tailwind trial here.
Getting traffic is a huge step for a new blog. To me it was something I had never imagined would happen – it felt so unreal and so rewarding. And once you start getting some traffic you can also start monetizing your blog.
Step 4: Monetize.
Now that you have traffic, there are so many options.
To put ads (well, the ones that pay more) on your site you’ll need a certain amount of traffic (30.000 sessions), but this is the only way to monetize your blog that requires a certain amount of traffic. However this is very, very passive income.
You can make way more money with way less traffic by diversifying your income. You can try a mix of these:
- Affiliate marketing (recommending products you like and getting a commission for it)
- Selling your own products
- Offering your services
If you have a good niche and a good strategy (not just linking every word to a product), you can make good money from affiliate marketing even with small traffic.
A Note On Affiliate Marketing
If you want to join some affiliate marketing programs, google brands you like with the keyword affiliate program.
They’ll usually have a form and ask you to join an affiliate network to be able to work with them.
You can also first apply and join the most popular affiliate networks:
- shareasale
- Awin
- Commission Junction
- Click Bank
- Flex Offers
What will happen here is you’ll need to fill out a form to join each affiliate network. Inside that network you’ll start looking for merchants and to apply to the affiliate programs of the brands you like.
Another option is to join the Amazon Affiliate Program, in which you can use create affiliate links to any item on Amazon, then use these links in your blog posts and get a commission when someone makes a purchase through your link.
Remember: This is a journey. And the roads are pretty overcrowded.
People will try to drag you off your path and tell you you need to listen and grow your blog using their tips after they’ve been blogging for 2 weeks. Don’t do that. Watch what people who’ve been there long enough and are successful do.
But more than that – FOCUS on you.
Learn, but don’t follow someone else’s path blindly, because you might end up somewhere you don’t want to be. OMG, where is this pep talk coming from today?
Make something you’re proud of, be consistent and don’t be afraid that others will see it, ok? Then the money will come.
