Over $25,000 in one single month blogging! This number still blows my mind as I’m recording
this income report for the last month. I started my blog less than 3 years ago and had no idea
how I was going to make money with it.
I had a dream of leaving my day job and building a different lifestyle for myself and my family.
Ok, I’ll tell you honestly, I just wanted to work sitting on my sofa while making a
lot more than I could ever make at my day job.
I couldn’t stand the idea of working at a corporate job my entire life. Starting a
blog seemed like a good option, especially because it needed very little financial investment
to start with.
Starting a business online is nothing like starting a traditional business, like a restaurant
or a travel agency, or whatever other ideas you might have. You don’t need an office,
you don’t need any expensive equipment except your laptop. The only investment that is hard
to avoid even as a beginner is purchasing your domain and hosting for the blog. And
luckily, in our times there are options that can cost you about $3 a month for your blog
hosting. If you can afford that, you can probably afford starting a blog. I have a link in the
top right corner and below this video with a very special offer just for my audience
so you can start your blog without any technical overwhelm for less than $3/mo.
Now, maybe you are not anything like me. Maybe you are not working at a sole-sucking corporate
job and you are already an entrepreneur – a coach, a Yoga instructor, a nutritionist,
a psychologist, an interior designer, a marketing specialist, you name it!
Why would YOU be interested in blogging? Well, because a lot of people scaled their solopreneur
and local businesses thanks to blogging. By blogging I mean all the major platforms you
can use to reach your audience – it can be a website, it can be a channel on Youtube,
an Instagram account, a Pinterest account, even a TikTok account if your audience is
there!
But having your own website and domain as a home base for all your content is always
a good idea even if you are doing really great on social media. Because that’s where you
will make money – on you site, people won’t pay you directly on Instagram or on Pinterest,
they will find you there but eventually they will end up checking your website.
In this video, I will not speak about ALL the ways you could use to make money as a
blogger. I already made a very detailed video on the channel where I showed you how to start
a blog in the right way, and about all the monetization methods which are popular among
other bloggers. That video received a very positive feedback so in case you want to check
it as well, I’ll give you a link to it in the top right corner and in the description
below this video.
But today, I want to focus on the methods that worked best for ME and I want to also
show you how this income that you see in the title of this video, is distributed between
different channels in my business.
And I have steps for you in this video. Because as I was growing my blogging business, the
ways I used to generate income from it, also were going through stages. You can hardly
use all the monetization methods right away as a beginner. If you try, you will spread
too thin and will have a hard time seeing results with any of the strategies.
By the way, I also have a free online course for those of you who want to start a blog
but don’t know where to start and how to build a website in the right way to make sure
it will actually make you money in the future. The link will be in the top right corner and
in the description below this video.
So here is how my income growth looks over the last 3 years. If you want more details
on specific months, I actually made a few videos in the past showing how I made between
4 and 5k dollars only with ads on my websites. So you can check those two videos as well
– I’ll give you links to them in the top right corner and in the description below
this video.
I have to make a side note for the full disclosure here that this is how much I made last month
but it’s not exactly the amount that hits my bank account, and not all of this money
is what I actually take home. The majority of companies that pay bloggers have at least
60 days of delay in payments. So, most of the money I earned last month, I will only
actually receive 2 months later. I also have certain expenses on my blog to run the business,
like website hosting, email provider, various tools and plugins. And of course, before taking
the money home I’ll also discount a big chunk of it to pay taxes. This is just for
you to understand that when people say here is how I made $10k or 25k or even a million
dollars, most of the times they mean the revenue they generated in their business.
1. Affiliate links
The monetization method that made me my first 500-800 dollars when I started blogging was
affiliate marketing. At that time, I was writing a lot of posts about work from home opportunities
and some of the affiliate offers in that niche made me consistently several hundred dollars
a month. My main traffic source back then was Pinterest – but if you know me well,
Pinterest is still my main traffic source anyway 
As a beginner, I registered in lots of affiliate networks and was testing different types of
offers. My traffic wasn’t big enough at that time to apply for Mediavine ads, so I
had to mainly rely on affiliate links on my site.
I joined Flexoffers, iGain, Shareasale, MaxBounty, CJ affiliate and a few other networks, but
these were the main ones I used.
Nowadays, I don’t rely on these networks and general work from home blog posts that
much. I invest more time into building useful content specifically for beginner bloggers
and online entrepreneurs. When I do so, I mention various tools and services which I
personally use in my business – and many of them have quite generous affiliate programs.
Last month, I made $975 in total on different affiliate products I offer to my audience.
2. The second way of monetization is through ads. I can tell you honestly that using Google
Adsense in most of the niches will not pay your bills when your traffic is low.
But once you get at least 10k/mo sessions in your Google Analytics (ok I often get the
question what are sessions – to simplify things, you could say it’s the number of
website visitors but it’s not exactly that, so if you are not sure what are sessions just
search on Google: sessions in Google Analytics and you’ll find the exact definition).
So once you have 10k/mo sessions, you can apply to ad companies that will help you make
more with your ads – like Ezoic and Monumetric. Then once you hit 25,000/mo sessions, you
can apply for Mediavine ad management company. It’s the one that I use on my sites and
I can tell you honestly, their support and the revenue per 1000 visitors on your site
are the best. I am not getting paid to tell you this, Mediavine
doesn’t have any affiliate program but I am truly thankful to this company for being
where I am now.
Because the first ever significant income from my blog was done with Mediavine ads – and
it was about 1500 dollars earned in one month from the same blog that used to make 10 times
less with Google Adsense.
Mediavine ads have supported my family for over 2 years now, it was thanks to this ad
company that I managed to quit my day job by the end of the first year blogging. And
on good months, I make over $5000 only with Mediavine ads on my blogs. Last month I made
$4609 in total with ads on my two blogs.
3. Youtube ad income
The third monetization method is Youtube ads. I started my Youtube channel just because
I wanted to show my Pinterest marketing tips here and didn’t plan on making it my new
ad income stream. But slowly, Youtube started bringing me more and more ad dollars and last
month, I made $830 just with ads that Youtube shows on my videos. So Youtube accidentally
exceeded my other income steam which I created very intentionally and will cover next.
4. It’s selling my own eBooks, printables and other similar products to the visitors
of my blogs. For example, I know there is demand for people who struggle with pin design,
for click-worthy templates that can actually generate you traffic from Pinterest. So I
created pin templates for Canva – I know that a lot of people like Canva as it’s
an easy and free online tool for graphic design. So it’s just one example of my own products
I created to help my audience solve their problems. If you want to see in detail how
I present this product on my site and who knows, maybe you actually need these Canva
templates to create your own pins – I will give you a link in the top right corner and
in the description below this video.
These products are usually in the low-cost range, something between $10 and $30, something
that’s easy to buy for North American visitors, even if they only visited my site for the
first or second time ever.
I made $650 with this kind of products on the two of my blogs last month.
5. I also have 1:1 services related to Pinterest marketing and I sell them through my blog.
Last month, I made almost $3200 with these services and in case you’d like to get my
eyes on your Pinterest account and give you an advice specific to your online business,
to your website, then check in the description the link to my Work with me page where I offer
these 1:1 services.
6. And my next income stream performed really well last month, I sold my courses for over
$15000. I have to admit though it was my best month so far in terms of course sales, and
funny enough, I didn’t run ANY promotions or sales on my courses last month.
I think it was mostly due to the beginning of the year when a lot of people are looking
for a new program or a new way to grow their business or website, perhaps that could have
some influence on the sales volume.
If it’s not your first video you are watching on my channel, you know about my signature
program Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets in which I help my students drive free organic traffic
from Pinterest to their websites.
I also have to admit that the growth of this Youtube channel gave a great boost to my course
sales because here I’m sharing a lot of Pinterest tips, people try them and see that
they really work so they are interested in joining my paid program too. I also found
it a lot easier to work with my students inside the program because mostly people who join
it these days, already know my teaching style. Most of my students first learn a few things
about Pinterest from my channel so they have the right expectations from the course, from
me, and
from Pinterest.
Essentially, all these monetization strategies that I use, are the steps you could take for
growing your own website or online business. It’s really hard to tackle all of this at
once and when I look back at my journey, I realize that I’ve only had real breakthroughs
when I was working on one platform or one monetization method at a time.
What I mean here is that I first had a goal to simply drive traffic, a lot of free organic
traffic to my site. And that was how I ended up growing quickly on Pinterest and learning
about this platform enough to later start teaching others.
But while I was building my presence on Pinterest, I had no Youtube channel to work on. Then
I decided to make my course, I dedicated full 3 months of work to building that first version
of the course which later evolved and was updated many-many times together with Pinterest
platform.
About a year ago, when I focused on this Youtube channel it was a bit shift – I started investing
about 40-50% of all my time into creating new videos, doing keyword research for new
tutorials, replying to questions and comments here under the videos every day.
The beauty of online business though is the accumulative effect of all your work and efforts.
You invest yourself in one platform and once you built your authority there, you can move
on to the next one. And the first one keeps working for you with some minimum required
maintenance. I hope you guys enjoyed this video and learned
a few things from it whether you are just starting online or you are currently in a
stage where you need to decide about the next step in your journey. I will be happy to answer
any questions all your questions below this video. If you found it useful, give me a thumb
up, subscribe to my channel and hit the bell button to get notifications when my new videos
go live.
Also, I selected for you the best videos on my channel that are perfectly complimentary
to what I shared with you today, you can check them here and there. And I’ll see you in
the next videos!