The Condensed Guide to Making a 4-Figure Income From Your Blog
Everyone wants to know how to make money blogging, but not just pocket change – but REAL MONEY. According to John Chow, if you’re making more than $100 a month from your blog you’re ahead of 98% of the 120 million+ blogs out there!
I make 4-figures every month from this blog and that is consistent even in months where I don’t post much or do promotional work. In this post I’m going to spell out EXACTLY how I make money and what the really important factors are. This is not theory – this is what is putting cash in my bank each and every month.
Where my Money Comes From
There are two main sources of income from this blog – one is direct sales of my courses such as Traffic Rush and the fast track version of The Bloggers Bible. The other is various affiliate sales. These in turn come from three main sources. Some are from links embedded in blog posts such as reviews or places I mention services I use such as Unique Article Wizard. Another source is from affiliate links embedded in my other products – most of my BlueHost income has come from my WordPress ebook for example. Lastly, I also plug a few affiliate products in my courses and get the occasional sale from there.
So to conclude the money aspect I would suggest the following:
- Promote affiliate products in as many places as possible
- Sell your own products
These days my income is probably split around 50/50 with these two sources but note that my own products have often led to affiliate sales also. I strongly recommend you create your own product even if it’s just a short report.
Now, here’s the killer – NONE of this is possible without eyeballs on my stuff and that means traffic / subscribers.
Getting Traffic & Subscribers
These two work hand in hand to some degree. Notice that over the last couple of months my blogging has slowed dramatically and yet my traffic is still fairly stable. This is because much of that traffic comes from search engines. Now in my Bloggers Bible course I talk a lot about traffic and there are many places you can get it. Social media has many sources if you have the time to be active with it. However, social media requires constant work and the traffic will mostly be in proportion to the time you can invest.
I no longer have time to be active on sites like StumbleUpon etc and it shows in my traffic. On the other hand, search engine traffic can last for months or even years. My highest visited resource on this blog is still my Twitter Guide and I wrote that in October 2007! The traffic comes from search engines. It ranks number #1 in Google for the term “twitter guide” and also ranks for many other terms.
Now when you are getting traffic, there are three ways that I suggest you use it to your benefit:
1) Monetize it Directly
Traffic comes in to certain pages, check your analytics to see which are you most highly trafficked (is that a word?) pages and make sure those pages sell something. For over a year I gave away my Twitter Guide for free without making a cent from it but this month one of my readers Nathan Hangen released the rather cool Twitter Rockstar course which I now heavily promote throughout that Twitter guide and the sales are trickling in.
That guide will continue to get traffic for a very long time and so I expect those sales to continue to trickle in. This is a residual income stream – if you can build up enough of these you’ll develop a strong residual income from your blog.
2) Capture an RSS Subscriber
As bloggers you should all know the rules of RSS – make your button prominent, showcase your best work, have a good about page etc etc. If any of this stuff is unfamiliar to you then read my Bloggers Bible course – it’s all explained in there in detail. The bottom line is, when visitors come to your blog, if you do things properly then you will wow them with your content and a proportion of them will subscribe to your feed.
3) Capture an Email Address
The third thing to do, and I would argue that this is more important than RSS subscribers is to capture an email address via an email list. My bloggers bible course is delivered via email and is what is promoted in the popup that appears 5 seconds after a new visitor lands on my site. Here’s the thing – with a popup like the one I use, FAR more people will subscribe to the list than will subscribe to the RSS feed.
My current subscriber count shows 8k+ and over half of that is now the email list.
What To Do With Your Subscribers?
Ok so you’ve built a steady stream of traffic and you have mechanisms in place to monetize it directly where you can and to capture those people in one way or another otherwise. So now, how do you make money out of your subscribers? Well you have two very distinct channels here and they are different:
Monetizing RSS Subscribers
Your RSS subscribers are your readers, these are the ones who are getting to know you and who love to read your writing. You can develop a relationship with these guys, especially the ones who comment although that will be a tiny minority. The best way to monetize these people is to promote something either in a time sensitive way or to have a few killer products that you continually promote.
For example I heavily promote Blog Mastermind, BlueHost and Unique Article Wizard. Blog Mastermind changed their affiliate links last week and I had to trawl through over 40 posts to change the links!! That’s how much I mention it. Over time your readers will learn to trust you and what you promote and if those products are of interest to them, are likely to buy from your recommendation.
The second method is to occasionally do a time sensitive promotion and I do mean occasionally! This is when I will sometimes promote something that I’m not too sure about myself and will give my opinion as best I can. In general though, I avoid these and prefer to focus on a few core products that I can thoroughly recommend from personal experience.
Monetizing Email Subscribers
I take a slightly different approach to most people with this. Most marketers that I know of have a fairly simple formula – they have an email list that provides some value of some kind and then every now and then they will inject a sales pitch into the email sequence in order to sell something. They will also do time sensitive promotions to the list. Now I don’t know about you guys but I have an extremely low tolerance for sales pitches. Generally speaking I will unsubscribe from a list the moment I get a sales pitch.
There is only one exception to this rule – if the list I am on is providing me with such fantastic information that I really don’t want to miss out and so I put up with the sales pitch anyway. This is what I am trying to achieve with my courses. I hope that the course content is so good that subscribers will forgive my sales pitches :-)
There is another tactic at work here too but I’ll discuss that in another post.
Conclusion
Step 1 – you need to get traffic. Search engine traffic is best but one downside is that it can take a very long time to develop. However the more you write the better chance you have of ranking for stuff and when you start to get some SE traffic you can build on it with related posts and so on.
Step 2 – capture subscribers in any way that you can.
Step 3 – monetize in as many ways as you can. Directly in posts that get traffic, sell your own stuff, promote affiliate products everywhere. You can get away with being fairly aggressive in a subtle way if that makes sense. You can promote lots and often without resorting to the hard sell – this is the approach that works for me.
This is a really consensed post. I can and have discussed all of these individual topics in great detail in the Bloggers Bible so read it if you haven’t already. Yes it is possible to make money with blogs and it can provide a semi-residual income but it can take a long time and a lot of work to get to that point.
If you have any questions about anything I have written in here, then please feel free to ask in the comments.
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Problogger Making Money Online With Blogging
April 16, 2009
You summarized what needs to be done very well. Even though it is easier said than done, this is a good road map. As one of your regular readers since your early days, I really appreciate your progress in such a short period of time. I wish you post more often. Good luck!
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