Make Money Blogging: How to Make ~$10,000 a Month (TRAFFIC, MONETIZATION METHODS, AND USING TOOLS!)

What’s up you guys and welcome to howa2z.com; Today’s post as you can tell by the title you and I are gonna be talking about exactly how you can make about ten thousand dollars a month as a direct result of any blog more specifically without doing some big crazy product launch; so in other words this was passive slash semi passive income now a lot goes into building a blog up to this point and there are just so many little details that this could be like this post but I don’t want to put you through that I’m just gonna focus on three really important things in today’s post which is content strategy and traffic any monetization methods which can be used and the tools and technology that can be used to build any blog up to this point and just things were super key to having that ten thousand dollar a month.  Before I talk about anything else at all and that is that there is no magic bullet or one weird trick to making $10,000 a month blogging frankly anybody who tells you that there is just totally foolish and I’m not gonna be that person,  I’m not that stupid who’s gonna sit here and tell you; you can get crazy results overnight and there’s like this magic solution to all of your blogging problems because that’s just not true, but what I will say is that there is a clear approach to content marketing content strategy and blogging in general that can help you get results faster than if you don’t go into it with that clear strategy just for reference. One can grew any blog what I would consider to be quickly and when I say that I mean I grew it to what I would consider to be a full-time income within less than a year of actively promoting my blog and building my email list so you can get those kinds of results if you are willing to put in the work alright; so now that I’ve officially talked your ear off before even getting to the first point, let’s go ahead and talk about the first point which is content strategy and traffic the first thing you need to know about building a content strategy is that you need to actually give about your readers and actually be in tune with their goals their struggles their motivations all these different kinds of things not only because that’s going to be good for your readers and allow you to create beneficial content for them, but it’s also gonna help you. It’s gonna create this win-win situation where they get amazing content and since you’ve created amazing content. You are gonna get loyal readers and email subscribers instead of people who are just kind of that one and done situation where they might read through one of your blog posts but then they leave and never come back;  you don’t want that, you want to genuinely care about your readers and create content that reflects that so you can be helpful and keep them coming back to your website for more information, another thing you want to think about with your content strategy is that you want to be teaching X type of person about X thing that they really want to learn about; now when I say teaching I get a lot of people who say oh but I don’t want to teach blogging or business what am I supposed to do? but you could teach so many different things you can teach how to cook vegan food, you can teach men’s fashion you can teach stoicism which I’ve literally seen a successful blog about stoicism and I just thought that was so cool so the point here is don’t feel like you have to be in a business niche to be successful that is absolutely not the case. Now what about specific ways to get blog posts topic inspiration and build out your content strategy? well I’ll show you one specific method that I used a whole lot when I first started my blog and this was back when I really didn’t have like a huge audience to directly get blog post ideas from it’s one. I had to do a little bit more digging and a little bit more research online to get topic inspiration, so you can use reddit; if you’re familiar with Reddit you probably already know the deal here and you can find a subreddit which is kind of like a little Question and Answer forum a lot of the time for whatever your niche topic is so for example if you have a blog about female hair advice and you teach people how to style their hair how to dye their hair all that kind of stuff this is where you could go and I found this just doing like a quick google search. I think I search for like female hair advice reddit or something like that and then it popped up so something like this is really easy to find just google reddit and then keywords related to your blog niche so you can see that there are a whole lot of questions and this can be great inspiration for your blog post topics, so for example here we have I have cool undertones what tone of black would work for me. Well if you’re like me and a little bit obsessed with the hair color and all that kind of stuff you know this is a really important question because if you do not match your hair dye to your undertone you’re gonna end up looking kind of weird so this is something that you could create a blog post about the right shade of black hair dye for different skin tones you could then create a chart for it or something like that just a really useful piece of content based on these questions in this subreddit so let’s keep looking we could find more inspiration here so natural hair tips and care that would be a good one to write a blog post about and what else do we have does my face shape suit a bob cut you can do a really informative blog post on that and the right haircuts for different face shapes that’s something. I know a lot of people want to learn about when they’re going to get their hair cut and just so on.  You can see there’s tons and tons of question and topic inspiration here but basically the whole point of using reddit to look for topics is you look at what your audience’s problems are and how you can solve those problems you look at what their questions are and you figure out how to answer them in the form of a super in-depth blog post, now keep in mind this is just kind of a surface level overview you definitely want to know exactly who your target reader is more so than just people looking for hair tips are you catering to men are you catering to people with short hair are you catering to people with skin that has cool undertones really get clear on your target audience and get specific when you are searching for topics for them this way because you want to have a really good idea of how your blog post topics are gonna tie in to your audience specifically and also tie in to your business goals that is super super important in something you definitely want to do, because if you spend a lot of time blogging and your blog posts build the audience that’s not a good fit for the product or service you eventually offer you’re gonna have a really hard time selling that product or service so I think I’ve used this example before but I’ll go ahead and use it again if you are planning to create a advanced guitar playing course don’t spend six months writing blog posts that attract beginner guitar players or piano player or other types of people maximize your time and create blog posts that are gonna attract those advanced guitar players that way when you go to launch your product or even if you launch a guitar lesson service or something like that you have already built an audience of the perfect perfect fit for your monetization method and another important thing you’ve got to make sure you are building your email list because you don’t want traffic that just comes to your site leaves and never comes back you want to build an audience of people who really love your content keep coming back to it and people you can stay in touch with via email and one really great way to do that is add lead magnets to your blog website and to your blog posts; so I’m gonna give you an example of what a lead magnet is and I’ll tell you in this blog post that one can have site which is all about how to pick a highly profitable freelance writing niche and you can use right on the site some lead magnet advertised i.e. for example it’s a free guide with 10 profitable writing niches; so basically a lead magnet if you’re not familiar with it it just means a free download you give someone in exchange for their email address creates a mutually beneficial situation and they get an awesome piece of content you get a new email subscriber. It is that win-win but anyway let’s you can use some graphics all kinds of other stuff in your post to advertise lead magnet.  You can use little kind of ad looking thing for it it saying free guide the freelance writing niches and how to break into the past and if someone clicks there they get taken to this landing page that has a big-ass picture of a  face on it and then they can get the free guide by entering their first name and their email address so that allows me to create something super helpful for my audience and also build my email list that way when I go to launch a product or a service or whatever then I have an email list of people who are likely to be interested in it.  Suddenly we’ve talked about kind of how to create content blog post topics all that kind of stuff let’s talk a little bit about traffic. I do have to say that different things work better for different people different industries different niches different audiences at the end of the day I can tell you what has worked well for me and things that work pretty universally well in tons and tons of different niches but it’s still going to be up to you to figure out what works best for your blog now for Pinterest and SEO have been – really really amazing sources of traffic to my blog and I will tell you what I use for SEO it is called the Yoast SEO plug-in; so if you have a wordpress blog you can use this and it really walks you through optimizing your blog posts for SEO super easy to use just a great tool it’s kind of an essential if you’re planning on optimizing your blog posts for SEO what you definitely should be and you can see it just walks you through putting in your focus keyword and it has all the analysis down here so you can change your content around until it kind of hits all those requirements now like I said Pinterest has also been another amazing source of traffic for many bloggers.  I’m consistently sharing content that is specifically relevant to my target audience and let me tell you doing this has really really helped my blog traffic grow so much but like I said you got to put in the time and do the research to figure out what’s gonna work well for you if you want to use Quora or reddit or guest posting or something else try different methods until you see what works for you and look for those high ROI situations where you’re putting in not a ton of time but getting massive results the high ROI of SEO and Pinterest that’s why I use those methods and recommend them so much but again it’s really just gonna depend on you and your personal preferences and your target audience and your niche and all those different kinds of things and also just remember that you got to be patient no one’s traffic is gonna explode overnight when they’re just starting out you got to be consistent and keep putting your content out there even when you’re not getting that many readers because it does take a little while for blogs to pick up so just make sure you’re a pro you get with that right strategy from the start if you need help with that I have a free profitable blog planner down in the description box below so you can grab that it’s like a 13-page fillable PDF that’s gonna help you get clear on your niche your target audience. Your brand your unique selling point all these things that are really gonna help your blog grow so be sure to grab that before you leave alright so that was the first point of this post. let’s keep it moving in talk about the monetization methods I used to make around 10k as a result of my blog last month I made money last month for my blog from two different sources the first one is digital products including a master class that I have in an online course that I have and then the second one is affiliate income and affiliate income just means that I promote products that I use and enjoy on my blog with a special affiliate link and then when someone clicks that link and purchases that product through my link then I make a commission; now I actually have a whole other posts on affiliate income so I will link to that above I don’t know which side it comes up on but you guys know the deal it’s gonna pop up there somewhere so go ahead and watch that if you want to learn more about how to make affiliate income but I will tell you my main focus is on creating and promoting products. I really like doing that because it’s that situation where I can create something super helpful and useful for someone and also make a really good living doing it and with digital products those can be higher priced than something like merch like t-shirts and mugs and like that so I really like doing digital products they are a little bit more demanding as far as if you create like communities and you have to do the customer service and all that kind of stuff but for me. I’ve found that it’s just really fulfilling and it’s definitely worth it now creating and launching a product is something I could talk about for a really long time but let’s just go over a few of the key things you want to note about doing something like this first of all build the perfect audience for your product before you put it out in the world because if you just launch a product and you’re not launching it to anybody nobody knows about it that means you’re probably not gonna get a whole lot of sales but if you spend some time building up your audience first not only is that gonna be better because you will have people who are ready to just your product if you built your audience up the right way it’s gonna be good because once you know your audience and you’ve spent time building that relationship with them and getting to know their struggles and all these kinds of things you can create the perfect most helpful product for them based on all of that so for example I have a digital course called killer cold emailing teaches freelance writers how to start their business without content mills in bidding site so it focuses heavily on things like cold emailing but I also cover how to pick a profitable niche how to set up a site that sells really just those business building things that a lot of freelance writers who are starting out are really looking for help with and because I built that product after getting to know my audience in their struggles. It ended up being super successful not only for my students who are getting awesome results but also for me because I get to make some semi passive income from it so with my digital products I have done launches in the past which is just a little period of time where you basically promote your product to your email list a whole lot and use a lot of other promotional methods again another one of those topics I could go on about for like an hour but I’m not gonna do that today but I did not do any launches last month and what I’ve done instead is I’ve set up sales funnels that automatically help me make sales, so let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. Suppose I have a free email course called make money freelance writing where people who enroll in that get like a lesson per day from me automatically via email and then at the end of that it automatically pitches my paid product so if any of them are ready to take that paid course they can go ahead and take that next step and again it’s all on autopilot so I’m not really actively having to do much I might do another video on sales funnels to explain this a little more in depth so definitely comment below and let me know if that’s something you would be interested in but one thing to remember here especially if you do something like a free course to kind of give your audience helpful information while also getting sales for your paid products or services or whatever just make sure you’re providing them with super helpful and actionable information don’t do this thing where you’re just creating some piece of crap just to sell people because I’m only is that unethical but people can sense that it’s not gonna be good for your audience and it’s not gonna be good for you so make sure you’re creating something super actionable and super valuable with just tons of relevant advice and information because not only is that good for your audience but it helps you build trust with your audience and your free content is gonna give people an idea of the value of your paid content; so if you want to sell you gotta put that value out there upfront first whether it’s with your blog posts your lead magnets your sales funnels whatever you’re creating  make sure it is super useful and super helpful for your target readers all right so onto the third point I want to talk about in this video which is the tools and tech I’ve used to get to this point first of all you at least need a nice blog website with a custom domain don’t do this thing where it’s like the name of your blog WordPress calm because that’s just like an instant credibility killer just go ahead and get the custom domain otherwise people who land on your blog website honestly they’re not gonna take your blog seriously as a business so even if you gotta save up for a little while definitely get that custom domain because it makes a big difference in how your readers are gonna perceive you so for my blog website I use a wordpress with the WordPress theme. I use convertkit and leadpages so convertkit is the email marketing software and then leadpages is a landing page builder and I use both of those together and then for product creation I use teachable which is just an awesome course creation platform you can also use it for master classes and other types of things like virtual summits I’ve seen people use it so many different ways so you can really get creative with it and it’s super super easy to use.