How to Make Money with a New Blog – The Steps I Took to Make $346 on My New Blog
When I first started my blog my goal was to make money. I wanted to see if I could make money with a new blog or make money at all! I have always been drawn to blogging and I thought it was so interesting. One of the interesting points for me was that you could make money while staying home. We have one daughter and my husband has always worked long hours so it has always fallen on me to take care of everything. That probably isn’t far off from most moms that do it all and they may have more than one child but we lived far from family and I had no one to help me when I needed it.
I would work all day and then be the only one that was cleaning, cooking, caring for our daughter, and well-keeping everything going! My husband is the hardest working person I know and when he got home it was time for bed just to do it all over again.
I loved the idea of me being able to stay at home with our daughter and making money online. So I started to do a lot of research and boy is there a lot of information out there!
Learning How to Blog
I tried and gave up blogging several times. It just wasn’t the right time for me but I never stopped dreaming about having one. In August of 2016, we moved to Georgia from Kansas and I took a job as a receptionist. Then in 2017, I was laid off from my receptionist job when the company closed down so I decided to take the summer off and spend it with my daughter. She was 7 at the time and loved to spend time with her friends playing so I had free time and decided now was a great time to take another crack at blogging!
Luckily, I came across this awesome coursethat walked me through starting my blog. I was excited to see that everything was much easier than years ago so when I first tried blogging! After many changes to my design and my niche it all finally came together and I officially launched it in September of 2017!
Driving Traffic to My Blog
I had spent the summer working on my blog, spending time with my daughter and helping my husband with his side lawn care business. Once fall came we were still very busy with the lawn care, birthdays, Holidays, and we took a family vacation to Disney. So once it all calmed down in January I kicked my blog into high gear.
I followed this Pinterest strategy and was able to take my blog traffic from 300 page views a month to over 5,000 a month in less than 30 days!
Things Were Looking Good
Even with the trickle of traffic I had at the beginning, I had already started to make money with a new blog. Then my email list doubled with all the new traffic in January. It was all coming together!
Until the flu hit my daughter and I hard at the end of January. Also, I was offered the lead teaching position at a private school to help them through the rest of the school year. I took the position after healing from the flu and life got a bit crazy again.
It was great to help out the school however, it did put a ding into my blogging “business”. I still was able to rake in a little more money even with my traffic slowly trickling down. From August of 2017-May of 2018, I was still able to make $346.84!
Making Money Blogging
Now, if you followed along with me you will see that I did not put blood sweat and tears every day into my blog for 10 months to only get $346.84. I still lived life and worked on it very much part-time and was still able to make a chunk of change.
I can only imagine what I would have made had I not taken all of the Fall off, gotten so deathly sick with the flu, or taken the teaching job. That is the furthest I had ever made it blogging so I call that a success!
My goal was to launch my blog by my birthday in October and I was a whole month early. My other goal was to start making ANY income from my blog and I was able to do that before I even technically launched my blog!
Affiliate Marketing Sales
All of the income I made during that time was from affiliate marketing. I was able to start bringing in some money fairly quickly without dedicating that much time. Again, imagine if I would have been more vigilant!
August 2017-May 19, 2018
Siteground – $100
Start a Mom Blog – $113.84
Moms Make Cents – $88.50
Elegant Themes – $44.50
Total — $ 346.84
My niche is helping moms start their own blogs. I love to share what I have learned and pass it on to other moms with the same dream as mine, being a work from home mommy! The hosting I use for my blog is Siteground, the courses I promote are from Start a Mom Blog, and Moms Make Cents, the WordPress theme I use is Divi by Elegant Themes. That is where my sales came from, sharing those affiliate links in my blog posts.
My traffic at the beginning was small then I had a huge month in January and then from flu to full-time job my traffic slowly trickled down.
I would say that the main thing that has saved me and helped me earn any money at all has been my email list. Of course, Tailwind and Pinterest have been a huge help as well for getting traffic to my blog but I tried hard to stay up with my email list to keep the list warm and not let it go cold while I was teaching.
How to Use Affiliate Marketing on Your Blog
Here is a quick break down of what you need to be able to earn affiliate sales with your blog.
Set Up Your Blog
First, you need a blog if you don’t have one already.
If you are ready to just jump right in, then you can get hosting and a domain name with HostGator and get up to 60% off using my Promo Code – MBFH2020
Check out this blog post for a quick walkthrough on how to start your blog.
Set up your email service provider.
I use Convertkit. There are free email providers out there but they are only free for so long. I went straight to using Convertkitbecause I have heard so many amazing things about them I didn’t want to try and switch later. I just started with the best.
Implement Affiliate Marketing
Sign up for affiliate programs.
There are SO many affiliate programs out there. You can be an affiliate for almost anything. A good one to start with is Amazon since they have such a wide variety of products. Then you can promote any product you want or you can go directly to a company you want to promote and join their affiliate program. The best way to find out if a company offers an affiliate program is to scroll to the bottom of their homepage. Most of them have an affiliate link at the bottom of their homepage. Also, you can search for the product+affiliate on Google.
This is a great eBook on how to really get the most out of affiliate marketing on Amazon!
Write great blog posts and add your affiliate links.
Now that you have a blog and are signed up as an affiliate you just need to share your link with your readers. After signing up as an affiliate you were given a link. That link tracks the sales you send to that company and the company pays you for sending them paying customers. To share your link with your readers, you write a blog post about a product or company and insert your affiliate link! Make sure your post is informative and not just salesy! Make sure to write good quality blog posts that solve a problem or give great information for your readers. When suitable insert your affiliate link.
Disclosure of affiliate links.
You will also have to disclose your affiliate links. There is a great plugin that you can install into your blog that will add this disclosure to the top of every blog post. You can have it say something like “Mom Blog From Home may earn a commission for purchases made after clicking links on this page”. Also, create a disclosure page on your blog to let your readers know that you have affiliate links on your blog. You need to be open and honest with them that you receive commission or compensation for sales after clicking your link. Here is my disclosure page.
Gain Readers
Offer an awesome freebie to gain email subscribers.
To gain email subscribers you want to offer them something to sign up. Most are not going to just sign up because you have a Sign Up Here link. They probably won’t sign up for your weekly newsletter either. However, they will sign up if you have something to offer for free! Like here is a FREE list of Facebook Groups to join and their Promo Days to promote your new blog! Give them something for free in exchange for their email address.
Drive Traffic to your blog.
Joining Facebook Groups are a good way to promote your blog and drive traffic to it but an even better way is Pinterest. Pinterest is a very powerful tool! An even more powerful tool is Tailwind (try it free for a month!) that pins to Pinterest for you! This makes life so much easier! Instead of spending hours pinning yourself it will pin for you! I can honestly say that is why I gained over 5,000 page views in one month.
Mastering Pinterest is one of the most important steps in having a successful blog. It sends traffic to your new blog right away! Learn more from these blog posts.
As a new blogger, to get yourself some sales I would suggest to write a few good blog posts and include your affiliate links. Have your email marketing provider set up and able to gain subscribers by offering a freebie to your readers. Then drive as much traffic to your blog as you can with Tailwind and Pinterest. You will also need to have a business account on Pinterest, don’t use your personal account. Again, I walk you through how I did it all right here!
Continue to add blog posts to your blog and to email your list weekly. The more content you create the more sales you will make!
The Best Advice: Just start!
I used to worry about my blog not being perfect or sending people to it not finished…but you are losing out on sales waiting for your blog to be perfect. Just get it up and running, add affiliate links and take email addresses, and you are good to go!
Start driving traffic to it as soon as you can! Then, don’t leave your email subscribers to just sit there and forget about why they signed up. Keep sending them great information in a weekly email and keep them warm. This helped me so when one of my affiliates ran a sale I was able to send out an email letting my list know. Then when they got my email they weren’t thinking “Who is this?” Or all she does is send out sales pitches. I kept in touch with them and then let them know of a sale without feeling guilty.
How to make money blogging? That’s the question everyone wants to know the answer to. Some people start blogging for fun or for adult interaction. Others, like myself, start blogging to make money.
I knew that there were people making really good money blogging and I wanted to know how! I have always dreamed about being a stay at home mom to my daughter, but that job doesn’t pay very well, and our family needs two incomes.
My husband has worked so hard to be able to provide for us on his own. He even started a small lawn care company on the side plus his full-time job. We were very thankful he did that too because I found out in the spring of 2017 that my place of employment was closing. This gave me the opportunity to stay home and help him run the lawn care company.
Also, now that I am home, I am working very hard to make money with my blog, so he doesn’t have to mow yards on the side anymore!
I did so much research on blogs before I ever had the guts to start one. I had gone down the blogging road years before, but it just didn’t work out. My desire never went away though. But this time it all just worked out perfectly for me to start when I did.
How To Make Money Blogging
During all of my research, I learned that there are several ways to make money blogging.
From what I read it really depends on the blog as to which way works best. Some blogs make the most money from placings ads on their blogs and some say affiliate marketing makes them the most money.
You have to decide what works best for you.
The 5 main ways to make money with your blog are:
Affiliate Marketing – This essentially is getting compensated for promoting another product or company.
Ads on your blog – You can place ads on to your blog.
Services – You can offer different services.
Create and sell products – This could be an ebook, a course, or even a physical product.
Sponsored posts – Get paid to write posts for other blogs or companies.
1. Affiliate Marketing
If you are new to blogging, I am sure this is the one way to make money that you have heard the most about. It is a very simple concept yet when I explain it to anyone outside of the blogging world, they look at me like I’m crazy.
Affiliate marketing is essentially getting paid to advertise or sell for others. I recently found out that companies will even pay you for leads you send to them not just purchases made.
Here is how you can use affiliate marketing on your blog to make money.
Let’s say that your blog is about puppy training. You love to write about how to care and train your puppy.
While writing a blog post about the best products to use for puppy training you will most likely be suggesting the products you use and trust. Now let’s say that your readers want to purchase that product because they trust your opinion.
If you were an affiliate for that product, your reader could click on a link that would take them to that product for them to purchase it.
This is a win-win for everyone involved.
Your reader was able to solve their problem and get the product that you recommended to help them train their puppy
If they used your affiliate link to click through and purchase that product it will tell the company, you sent that customer and the company (depending on their affiliate program) will compensate you for sending them a paying customer.
Then, of course, the company wins by receiving a new customer with little effort on their part.
How does it work?
When you sign up to be an affiliate for a company, they will give you a special link that attaches a cookie to the reader that clicks through the link. It depends on the affiliate program how long that cookie will last.
For example, I believe Amazon’s cookie only last 24 hours. However, I am apart of affiliate programs where the cookie lasts 365 days!
This cookie tells the company who sent that customer and it is a way to track where the customers are coming from and who to compensate for referring them.
Each program pays out differently, so you have to check those details when you sign up.
All of the affiliate programs I am a part of will pay me even if the customer that linked on my link purchases a different product.
For example, if I have an Amazon link on my blog to a book and a reader clicks through but doesn’t purchase that book but instead purchases something else in the correct time frame then I will receive compensation for that purchase.
Here is an example of what an Amazon affiliate link may look like.
There are three different options to add affiliate links to your blog from Amazon. The one above is the text and image option.
Or you can just have it be the image itself with no text like this one below.
Either way that ring light is awesome and I love mine!
Another example of how you can get paid even if the reader doesn’t purchase the product you first recommended is if a reader clicks on one of my links to one of the courses that I recommend such as Michelle course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing and that cookie lasts 365 days so any other purchases they make during that time I get compensated for as well.
There are some stipulations such as they would have to be on the same device they used to click the original link but that is still pretty cool! If that reader that clicked through decided later to purchase another product from Michelle, I get compensated!
How do you sign up?
There are literally thousands if not millions of affiliate programs out there. The most popular one is probably Amazon.
It covers such a wide range of products that you can pretty much find any product you want on there to add to your blog.
Amazon doesn’t pay out a large amount per sale and as I said the cookie doesn’t last long either. They also have strict rules on disclosure and making sure you aren’t hiding or concealing anything from your readers.
Make sure to read through all of the terms and conditions before signing up.
Amazon, like other affiliate programs, only gives you a certain amount of time to make a sale before the kick you out of the program. Don’t worry though you are able to try again to rejoin and make a sale.
How do I find affiliate programs?
If there is a certain company that you know you want to work with then you can go to their website and scroll to the very bottom and look for a link that says Affiliate or Affiliate Program.
If they don’t have a link, then you can try to contact them and ask if they offer an affiliate program. Some of the bigger companies use affiliate networks.
These networks host affiliate programs for multiple companies. This just saves that company from having to deal with it themselves. They just have that affiliate network take care of it for them. Some of these networks include Commission Junction, ShareASale, and Rakuten(Link Share).
You can go to those websites and join the network and have access to join hundreds of name brand companies.
If you don’t know a company but you just are interested in a product, then you can google that product + affiliate and it will list all the companies that have that product and offer an affiliate program.
If affiliate marketing sounds like the way for you then the best course to take to learn all the in’s and out’s is Making Sense with Affiliate Marketing by Michelle Gardner. She makes over $50,000 a month with affiliate marketing!
I personally don’t use ads on my blog as a major source of income. I did add Google Adsense to my blog to test it out. However, to make money with ads on your blog you need to have a good amount of traffic coming to your blog each month.
It isn’t the fastest way to make money with your blog, but it can be done.
There are two main ways you can get paid for ad placement on your blog. The first is RPM/CPM and the second is CPC.
RPM/CPM stands for Revenue Per Mille/Cost Per Mille and what that means is basically per 1,000.
This is the rate that you are paid per 1,000 impressions. So for example, if you have 20,000 page views per month and your RPM is $5.00, then you would earn $100 a month from ads on your blog.
CPC stands for Cost Per Click and that means that you get paid per click not just by how many people see the ad.
There are pros and cons to using ads on your blog.
Pros
Residual income
Steadily grow
Extra money on the side
Not much effort
Easy to maintain
Cons
They can make your blog look spammy
Ads can turn readers away
They can distract readers
Ads can slow down your blog
They can take a while to see any money made with them
A great resource to learn more about ads is Victoria Pruett’s ebook Make Money Blogging at Any Level. She breaks down ads and how she uses them to help her earn over $8,000 a month blogging about Homestead life!
3. Services
There are so many different services you could offer to make money on your blog!
Virtual Assistant
Graphic Designer
Freelance writer
Social Media Manager
Coaching/Training
Those are just a few of the main ones but if there is a need then you can charge for it!
A great way to advertise your services is by having a blog.
This is where you can show your experience and knowledge in that particular area.
So many major companies have a blog to draw in new customers. Let’s say you provide a service of grooming dogs (I must have dogs on my brain today) then you can blog about dogs and grooming dogs to draw the attention of new customers.
Blogging itself is a great way to bring in an extra income on the side of providing that service as well. But if your main goal is to showcase your abilities of the service you provide then blogging about it shows your expertise on the subject.
By starting a blog about the service, you provide it is the perfect way to advertise yourself. If you are a Graphic Designer, then you can use your blog to show your potential customers why you are the right person for their need.
They can go to your blog and see your work, your work ethic, your commitment, and your experience. It is just a great way to sell your service!
You can make pennies with ads and you can make dollars with affiliate marketing but selling your own products puts you in charge of how much you make.
With affiliate marketing, you don’t have to create any products but the highest you will probably make per sale is 40%. Maybe 50% if you are lucky!
However, selling your own products you are able to make 100% of the profit! All you have to do is pay for the hosting of your products but that’s it! And there are probably ways to host it yourself for free with a WordPress plugin or something.
I have products I offer, and they are hosted on Teachable and I have to pay Teachable monthly and per sale, but it is a small amount. I get almost all of the profit per sale. But this way I know that my products are handled with a trusted company that is going to be secure for my readers and myself.
You can sell a physical product such as a t-shirt, an ornament, wall décor, etc. or a digital product such as an eBook, a course, a PDF, a file, a worksheet, a chart, a guide, a booklet, and so on! The possibilities are endless!
Then you get to set the amount you want to sell it for!
Maybe you feel your knowledge is worth $100 per sale on your course, then you can put that as your price! Maybe you think that it’s worth $10 and you hope more people buy it at the lower price. That’s your choice as well!
If you choose to sell a digital product and you go through Teachable, they have an option to offer a discount on your products.
This makes it easy for you to run sales for your products. You can offer a discount as a promotion, a prize, or a holiday special! Plus, you are able to offer your own affiliate program and have other bloggers sign up to promote your products!
Teachable also integrates with most email marketing providers so you can keep everything tracking altogether. This way not only can you make more money selling your own product you can make sales from your affiliates too!
5. Sponsored Posts
A sponsored post is when you get paid to write a post by a company or brand.
A company may ask you to write a review on a product they offer or write a post about their company in general or a service they provide. It really just depends. It also is up to you on how much you want to charge for you to write a sponsored post. Or how much you charge for the post they wrote to go on your blog.
You have to keep in mind a few things when it comes to sponsored posts.
The time and effort it is going to take you to write the post and promote it.
If you actually believe in this company and want to share it with your readers.
If they write it, make sure you proofread it first.
Make sure they understand it will be a nofollow link.
Set up standard rules to follow such as how long the post will be, how many links are allowed in the post, what quality pictures will be used, and so on.
The amount of traffic that will see this post. If you don’t have that much traffic coming in, then you can’t expect to charge them too much.
The best suggestion I have for you if you are serious about doing sponsored posts is to really do your research.
Reach out to other bloggers that have dealt with them before and get their expertise. I love going on to the blogging Facebook Groups and asking all those amazing bloggers for their advice.
They are more than willing to help you out and give you their opinion and steer you in the right direction!
You also want to do your research on the company that you are working with too. I have had many emails come through asking to work together and after a little research, I can tell it is not a good idea.
There are too many scams out there so please be careful!
On the other hand, there are actual legit companies and bloggers out there wanting to work together!
I love to feature mom bloggers on my blog and help them connect and grow! I offer this service for free, but I also offer paid feature spots that come with more benefits!
This gives bloggers the opportunity to get their blogs in front of other like-minded driven mom bloggers! This gets their blogs not only more exposure but it is a perfect way to showcase many mom blogs at once so you can find the perfect match to work with! Learn more here!
Conclusion
As you can see there are many options to make money with your blog. These are just the main ones but if you can dream it and there is a need for it you can make it happen!
I would say the first two I would start with as a new blogger is to add affiliate links to your blog posts and sign up for Google Adsense to get some ad revenue coming in. It won’t be much at first but over time it could really pay off!
Do you make money with your blog using a different method? I would love to here!
