Hey friends! My name is Anastasia and you can find my blog at anastasiablogger.com.
I’ve been a full-time blogger since 2018 and I’ve learned a few things about what
actually can help you make money with your blog.
This will not be a video full of advice you’ve seen everywhere, like follow your passion,
or just go ahead and start it. In fact, many of my tips might sound controversial but as
I promised, I will talk about stuff that worked for me and in general, this is my approach
on this channel. I don’t talk about things I don’t know about. And when I talk about
something, I don’t like to give you general advice, I speak from my experience and it’s
totally up to you to follow any of my tips or ignore them and do things your own way.
Now buckle up and let’s get started!
1. First thing that lots of people will tell you to do is niche down and then niche down
from there even more.
Well, my friend, this advice is a bad one. But it’s not the only way to create a profitable
website. Lots and lots of big-name bloggers and online magazines that started as blogs,
don’t have a specific niche. But they get a ton of traffic from many sources. From Pinterest
because Pinterest doesn’t really-really care that much about how narrowly niched your
website is. From Google because they have a strong domain authority and their articles
in all kinds of different niches just rank high.
2. Keep your day job for at least one more year
This might sound weird from a full-time blogger who is here to inspire you on the way to changing
your lifestyle and living your dream life… but don’t leave your job when you started
your blog. Don’t even think of it that way or else you’ll be very disappointed. You
can dream of leaving your job by end of the first year blogging if everything goes really
great for you.
It takes time to learn something entirely new. You didn’t start reading and writing
in a month, did you? Blogging is a whole new profession, maybe several professions in one
to be honest. You’ll be learning it while doing it. It will not replace your salary
the first month, or even 6 months later.
If you have other expectations from blogging, if you think without an overnight success
it’s not worth the effort, then maybe this path is not for you. Maybe you need to look
for other ways of getting rich and famous overnight, but blogging takes work and patience.
3. Don’t even get started if you don’t have a basic understanding of SEO
Don’t even get started is a strong statement but I stand by it. Because SEO can play a
role even when you are just choosing a domain name for your blog.
You don’t have to know EVERYTHING about SEO from day one. And let’s be realistic,
you will never know everything about it. Because search engine algorithms are evolving all
the time, so you will need to keep learning about SEO and adjusting your strategies over
time.
But there are some fundamentals that you can’t ignore even as a beginner. You need to understand
HOW people will end up on your website. You need to understand that people use search
engines and keywords and that your content has to be relevant to what people ask in search
boxes.
How do you make your website and your content relevant, how do you find the right keywords?
That’s a whole big topic way beyond the purpose of this video. But I will give you
a link down below in the description to a FREE training on Google SEO by a fellow-blogger
Mike Pearson.
He has his Google SEO figured out and making over $10,000/mo with each of the two niche
blogs he runs. Mike knows how to talk about SEO in a way that it doesn't seem so complicated
anymore!
Again, check out the link to his FREE training in the description box down below.
4. Start with the End Goal in Mind
Well, what do I even mean here? I mean that most beginner bloggers do the same mistake
which I am guilty of as well. When I started, I was just mindlessly trying to find popular
content on other blogs and creating my own versions of their content.
I thought that traffic was the end goal for me as a blogger. So I tried to create content
that would drive a lot of traffic. And this strategy is better than writing about whatever
comes to your mind. At least you are doing some research and targeting popular topic.
But it’s still not the smartest strategy. It can make your way to a real blogging income
growth much longer.
Because monetizing your blog with traffic only is actually hard to scale. You need a
lot of thousands of visitors a month to make a living with ads on your website.
And as a beginner blogger, you are in a disadvantage compared to big teams of writers or online
magazines that make a ton of money with ads.
So what do I suggest?
Remember the story of David and Goliath… The small guy can win but you need to be smart.
Start with the end in mind.
I’ll tell you a secret. The best way to make money blogging is by selling something.
A product, a service. It can be your own or you can sell stuff as an affiliate.
So think of what you will sell first and then create content that will bring you the right
audience interested in this product or service that you want to sell.
Just don’t create content for the sake of traffic, you will spin your wheels without
seeing any financial reward from it.
If you are watching this and thinking, well what kind of products can I create, what can
I offer to the world? And how am going to make money with it? I will tell you this.
First, you need to watch my income report video to understand how all my income streams
work as a blogger. I’ll give you a link to that video, I explained there how I made
over $40,000 in a month.
And second, I’ll tell you straight away that my personal favorite way of monetizing
my blog is by selling my digital products, in particular my online courses. I even have
a program that teaches you how to build your own online course and how to do it without
unnecessary stress and overwhelm. I’ll give you a link to that program in the top right
corner and in the description down below.
5. Build an Email List Right Away – The Smart Way!
Building email list hugely important but don’t just add a form “Sign up for my Newsletter”
this is a waste of space on your site. You need to give people a specific reason to sign
up for your list. It can be a freebie – a checklist, a free challenge, a printable,
an eBook and so on.
And once you started the list, make sure to send them something at least once a week.
A new blog post a week is good enough, you don’t have to create a separate type of
content just for the sake of emailing your subscribers.
But a list that is growing without getting regular communication from you is a dead list.
If you don’t send emails to your subscribers, they will soon forget who you are and why
they signed up. Just a couple of weeks of a month and even if you finally decide to
send an email, don’t expect good open rates from a list that was abandoned for a long
time.
Hey how is it going so far? You know if you are enjoying my videos, there are these Subscribe
and Bell buttons, right? Yeah, they will help you see my new videos as soon as I publish
them. And if you have any questions to me, the best place to ask is in the comments below
this video.
6. Don’t spread too thin at the beginning
You can’t do well on all the platforms. you can’t get traffic from Pinterest, FB,
Instagram, Google and Quora at the same time when you are just starting a blog.
Mastering each platform takes time. My personal experience is that Pinterest works faster
than Google SEO for many niches. Not all, there are some types of content that are even
censored on Pinterest. If you want to understand better how Pinterest might help you build
your online income, I have 2 things to offer.
First, I have an online course called Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets. That’s for people who
already know they can benefit from Pinterest and want to master it right away.
Second, if you are just trying to understand how it all works, you can start with my free
Pinterest Masterclass. I will give you both links, to my paid course and to my free masterclass
in the info icon and in the description below this video.
For some types of content, Google is just a better traffic source. As an example, if
your audience is mostly men, it will be harder to promote your content on Pinterest because
the majority of users on this platform are women.
So you need to figure out where your audience is hanging out for the most part. And start
with that platform that’s the best match for your niche and your type of content.
Once you are done mastering one platform, or at least once you have things running smoothly
there, you can then shift your attention to another traffic sourse.
7. Don’t Remove Your Personality From The Content
Content writing tip – remember that a blog post is not a Wikipedia page. Don’t write
without your personal touch and opinion. Don’t use very formal style because it takes away
personality from your blog and kills the purpose of running a blog vs having some kind of corporate
website.
People trust opinions of other people more than they trust commercial websites. I already
mentioned David and Goliath in this video. Personality is what helps the small guy win.
So, remember that all your content needs to be written in a way that shows your personal
view.
And actually, if you are planning to use the blog as a tool to sell your products or services,
then it’s even more important as it helps you build your personal brand.
Well I guess this is it for today’s video. I hope that you found some of my tips interesting
and even unexpected. If you did, I’ll really appreciate a simple like and you know how
to Subscribe to my channel if you are enjoying what I share, do you?
Yeah, this is Subscribe and this is Bell button, you just need to click them once 
Now, before you leave this page, I manually picked a few videos that will be complimentary
to what I shared in today’s video. Check them out here and there. And I’ll see you
in the next video!