You’re reading a blog so of course, I’m going to tell you that blogging can be a great way to make money. In fact, if you learn how to make money blogging you’ll find that you can live almost any type of lifestyle that you want.
I know, I know. To a lot of people that sounds like complete bullshit and I can understand why they think that.
It’s not an easy way to make money but if you have time, patience, and a decent work ethic then it’s not crazy to make 4-6 figures a month from blogging.
I’m not the only one doing this. There are tons of bloggers making money sitting at home in their pajamas or going to a coffee shop or not actually working at their job job. Hey, I’m not here to judge.
I just know that there are plenty of successful bloggers out there because I’ve helped mentor over 2,000 of them at Blog Simple Framework.
So who am I and what do I do?
My name is Paul Scrivens and ummmm…I’m a blogger I guess. It’s hard to just call myself a blogger because I do a lot of things but blogging is definitely one of the main things I do.
In fact, I do it so much that I run over 5 different blogs! I don’t know when you’ll be reading this so the list might be missing a couple of blogs but if you want to check out other blogs that I’m working on then here is a list:
- Struggle.co
- Bogoten
- Thrive/Strive
- The Daily Nutrition
I also run a number of online brands that teach people things:
Combined, these sites help me make over 5-6 figures every single month. That’s not a typo.
Fortunately for you, to make your first $100 you don’t need to be crazy like me and run so many different sites. In fact, I didn’t start off with all of these sites. I started with just Obstacle.co and Thrive/Strive and then slowly expanded once a site became established.
The goal of this post is to show you how I made my first $100 with each of the blogs listed below. Some of the blogs are new (at the time of this writing) so they haven’t made any money yet but I’ll still go into the details on how I plan on making my first $100 with them.
Sound like a plan? Cool.
Let’s see how you can go about monetizing your blog.
How to Make Your First $100 Through Blogging
The important thing to understand is that there are a ton of different ways to make money blogging.
So when you see one blogger write about how they made $5,000 a month from blogging and another made $3,000, you shouldn’t assume that they did it the same way.
More importantly, you should understand that not every way of making money works with every blog niche. Some definitely work better than others.
The reason why that is important is that however you decide how to make money with your blog will dictate your strategy for writing content and building your audience.
If I start a fashion blog and my plan is to make money through online courses then I better make sure I have enough knowledge to share in my course. Also, my content will probably skew more towards how to make clothes instead of actually showcasing clothes.
This all sounds great but how do you actually make money with a blog?
Build Your Audience
No matter which method of earning money you decide to go with, it’s impossible to make money blogging without an audience.
There is just no other alternative.
If you can’t get people (traffic) to your blog how do you expect to make any money?
It’s like opening a store and planning to make money without anybody stepping inside.
When people start to blog they usually go in with high expectations. When you read about how much money bloggers are making you tend to believe that you should be making just as much.
Unfortunately, they spend more time thinking about money instead of actually building blog traffic.
No matter what, building your audience has to be one of the top priorities for your blog.
How do you do that? Check out this guide on building blog traffic.
Once you do that you’ll want to start building your Tribe which can only happen if you create a mailing list. Yep, email is still the best way for you to reach people that actually want to hear from you.
Some people call this email marketing, but if done right, I just call it chilling with your friends.
The Niche Makes a Difference
I don’t want to sit here and tell you that any niche you enter is going to be a good money earner.
The fact of the matter is that some blog niches make more money than others.
It’s just simple business.
That’s why when I start a blog I make sure that it’s in one of these 7 niches:
- How to make money
- Personal finance
- Health and fitness
- Food
- Beauty and fashion
- Lifestyle
- Personal development
I don’t veer from these niches because I blog to make money. To understand more about these blog niches check out the post 7 Blog Niches That Get Good Traffic and Make Good Money.
How I Made My First $100 With Obstacle.co
Because Obstacle.co is about making money with your blog I didn’t want to make money through ads or sponsored posts. I knew that I had the knowledge to create my own infoproducts to make money but those take time so I wanted a short term solution.
(Sidenote: If you want to read about my journey with creating info products then check out the failure of my first product.)
One of the fastest ways to make money with a blog is through offering services.
Of course, not every niche lends itself to offering services but this one does.
The first service I offered was a homepage makeover service where I offered to redesign your homepage to make it convert better and look more professional.
I charged $99 and made my first sale during the second month of the blog.
This was only possible because I focused on building up the mailing list for the site. With the mailing list, I had an audience waiting to hear from me. More importantly, the audience was other bloggers who all had homepages.
Marketing a homepage makeover service to random people wouldn’t be a success. You can’t just blindly cast a wide net in the hopes that something eventually bites. You need to pick the right audience and target your message as much as possible.
How I Made My First $100 With Thrive/Strive
Thrive/Strive took a much different path than Obstacle.co. I didn’t focus on making money with it until 5 months in. What I mean is that even if people wanted to give me money or help me make money with the site there was no way to do it.
- No ads
- No products
- No donations
Why did I wait?
Because I was entering in a new niche I didn’t know much about and I wanted to spend time getting to understand my audience along with the problems they were looking to solve.
Once I had a grasp of these things I went looking for affiliate products to promote.
What are affiliate products?
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.
This is one of the best ways to make money with a blog because you don’t have to worry about setting up a shop, creating a product, or do any customer service. You are simply sending your audience to another site.
Your main concern is whether or not your affiliate partner can convert.
I found a decent weight loss product (diet program) and included some links in different blog posts. The first month I made a little over $200 and it has only grown from there.
Affiliate marketing is great for almost any blog niche because every niche has some type of product that an audience will find useful.
Every penny that I earn starts with my blogs. I’ve put together a free 12-day blogging bootcamp for you that goes through every step that I take to build a successful blog.
Bonus: How I Made My First $4,000 With Thrive/Strive
Because affiliate marketing was going so well I decided that I would create my own health product that would compete with the affiliate product I was marketing.
Since the site was doing so well traffic-wise I decided to apply to an ad network and try to make money with ads. I applied to AdThrive and have been happy with their performance ever since.
If you’re curious about ads, most ad networks pay on a CPM basis meaning that you get $X.XX for every 1000 pageviews. This can vary greatly from network to network with low levels being $0.50 and high levels around $10.
Because AdThrive only accepts sites that are doing over 100,000 pageviews a month they can get higher quality advertisers and therefore a higher CPM. I’m not surprised to look at my AdThrive dashboard to see my CPMs surpassing $10 for some months.
How I Plan to Make Money With the Other Blogs
As I mentioned before, certain niches lend themselves more to making money with info products versus others. For example, Blog Simple Framework, Struggle.co, Seek the Offer, Pocket Business, Home Sweet Money, and Tribe Collector, all relate to making money.
Because blogging is a great way to make money, some parts of those blogs will point people to Dare to Conquer.
Not every post on those sites is about blogging so it doesn’t make sense to throw the Club in people’s faces all of the time.
For example, on this post for making money with online surveys it makes more sense to join the affiliate networks of the survey sites and use that as my monetization strategy.
If the sites get large enough I might consider putting ads on some of them as well.
However, again, if I can’t get traffic to these blogs then there is absolutely no point in trying to make money with them.
You might have noticed that I didn’t mention Google AdSense and that’s for a good reason.
In my opinion, it’s a complete waste of time. You have to have the perfect niche with the right traffic to pull off any kind of money that is worth your time.
Before you go off thinking that any money is good money, you probably wouldn’t think that if you spend 40 hours a week on your site only to make $20 a month from it.
You’re much better off with a product or service that allows you to control the money and can scale appropriately.
Until you get to that point, focus on finding affiliate programs that work well for your audience and start building that up step by step.
Each $100 Is Another Progression
While you might be dreaming about your first $100,000 month, that isn’t possible until you have your first $100 month.
If you are consistent with building your blog you’ll find that each month builds on top of the progress of the previous month.
Your first $100 month could easily be followed by your first $500 month and then your first $1,000 month.
As you can see there are a number of different income streams that you can have on your blog and the reason why is because your blog itself isn’t the business. Your blog is actually just another form of content marketing. In fact, it’s one of the best free forms of content marketing out there.