Good morning Tommy!
Day 4 and we are already talking about money?
Yes and for a very good reason.
While there are a ton of ways to make money blogging most people kind of fall and trip and stumble upon ways to make money with their blog.
You, on the other hand, are different.
You don't just want to make decent money, you want to make good money and that requires a plan.
Tomorrow you're going to learn about Sales Funnels but to really understand Sales Funnels you need to understand how you are going to make money.
If you're just going to make money with ads then you just have to figure out ways to get a lot of people to your blog (Pinterest is a great way to do that).
I run ads on some of my blogs and while it's a nice and easy way to make money, it's not the best way to do it. For example, if I have a blog that is getting 150,000 pageviews a month (that's a big number!) then I will probably make between $1,100 and $1,700 a month with ads.
Think about that.
I can get over 100,000 people to read my posts but I can't make more than a penny per person?
Yikes.
However, this doesn't mean you should ignore the ad route. Ads can be a good supplement to other forms of revenue.
The more you can diversify your revenue streams the better off you'll be.
For example, I make money the following ways:
  • Ads
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • eBooks
  • Membership sites
  • Online courses
  • Services
Now that is more ways than you'll have, but I run a number of different blogs and some niches work better with some methods than others.
For example, take a look at Thrive/Strive. It has ads which make me thousands each month but its main goal is to push people to Keto Dash which makes me over $15,000 a month. It also links to my weight loss manual so if people don't want to purchase a Keto Dash membership they can still get the book.
But that's not all!
Some of the posts on Thrive/Strive contain affiliate links which help to bring in even more money.
That means I make money with ads, a membership site, a book and affiliate links all from one blog. Not too bad.
So how will you make money?
Again, this is a good thing to research.
How are other blogs in your niche and related niches making money?
Almost every niche can make money with ads.
Every niche can make money with affiliate marketing.
Do people sell books or courses? Are they offering services?
Don't worry about if you're capable of doing such things now just be aware of what is working within your niche.
You always want to be looking ahead.
The reason why is because you want to start guiding your audience towards a destination.
For example, with the Billionaire Blog Club we have an awesome community with some great courses. I knew that was what I was going to create and that is how I was going to make money with the site.
Now that I know that I can tailor email opt-ins (like this bootcamp) along with articles/blog posts around the ideas that I teach in the Billionaire Blog Club courses.
All of this sets you up for the hard sell later on.
What if you don't want to sell courses and you just want to do affiliate marketing (another great course inside of the Billionaire Blog Club)?
That's great! Then what you would do is go hunting for awesome products to recommend your audience and then figure out what would be great content that provides awesome value that you can build around that content.
For example, almost every blogger in the how to make money/lifestyle/personal finance spaces has a post on how to start a blog, right? The purpose of these posts is to get people to click on an affiliate link so they can make money.
I knew that I wanted to take the same approach but do it a lot better so I created a whole guide around blogging.
Some bloggers even craft entire marketing campaigns around affiliate links and make a killing every single month.
Start to figure out the ways you want to make money with your blog now so you can start making plans for later.
If you just want to do it with ads and sponsored posts then you might not need to plan that much because you only need a ton of traffic.
If you plan on using other revenue streams then tomorrow's email is one you'll want to pay attention to.
I'm not implying that you need to make money on day 1. I'm just saying it's great to have an idea of how you MIGHT want to make money with your blog.
You don't want to spend 6 months blogging and then realize you don't have any solid way of monetizing that work.
- Scrivs
PS: Do I have a favorite way of making money? I'm partial to both affiliate marketing and selling my own products. Affiliate marketing means I don't have to worry about creating products or customer service but selling my own products means I control the experience and more money ends up in my pockets.
Services are another great way I used to make money but they take up a lot of time. If you're just starting off this might be the route you go:
  • Offer premium services
  • Create a product later on
  • As the product makes more money scale back the amount of clients you have