ProBlogger: How to Make a Full-Time Income From Your Blog

Posted by work smart 0 comments

ProBlogger: How to Make a Full-Time Income From Your Blog

How to Make a Full-Time Income From Your Blog

Posted: 15 Aug 2019 05:30 AM PDT

The post How to Make a Full-Time Income From Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

This post is based on episode 48 of the ProBlogger podcast.

While there are no guarantees, earning a full-time income from your blog can be a realistic goal provided you're willing to:

get specific about your money goals
be patient and consistent
break the work down into achievable chunks.

I'm going to share my personal journey, along with tips for how you can work out a realistic journey for making a full-time income from your own blog.

The first thing is to work out exactly how much you need to earn from your blog to make a full-time living.

What's the exact figure you'd need to quit your job and totally focus on blogging?

Here are my top tips for earning a full-time income from your blog.

1. Don't give up your day job

It will take a while to get to your goal, and there are no guarantees. It took me two years of blogging to get to my income goal ($36,000 USD/year) where I could focus on blogging full time (in 2004).

2. Be specific

Saying you want to be a full-time blogger is great. But try to come up with a specific income goal. Talk to your partner (if you have one), family and friends, and work out the exact amount you'd need. This will give you a figure to aim for as you make the transition to full-time blogging.

3. Break your goal down into achievable milestones

For example, let's say you need to make $30,000 a year. To make it seem more achievable you can break it down to $576.92 a week, or even $82.19 a day. So what do you need to make each day or week?

Remember: a blog can earn you money 24 hours a day (if you have a global audience), 7 days a week.

What do you need to do to make your income target? And what revenue streams should you tap into?

Here are six different ways you can immediately start earning an income from your blog.

1. Adsense. This was my number one revenue stream when I started. I make about $1.72 for every 1,000 pageviews, which means I need 47,000 pageviews to make $82.19. But that's a lot of pageviews, and something you may not be able to achieve straight away.

2. Direct advertising. You could also sell ads on your site to niche advertisers on a monthly basis. To make $30,000 a year you'd need to sell around $2,500 worth of ads each month. If you had six ad spots on your site for six different advertisers, you'd need about $416 per advertiser per month.

3. Sponsored posts. Let's say you charge $300 for a sponsored post. To meet your monthly income goal you'd need to publish about eight sponsored posts per month, which may be more than you're comfortable with.

4. Affiliate products – To make $82.19 a day in affiliate revenue you'd need to work out the value of your affiliate referral fee – whether that be high- or low-value commissions – and then calculate how many referrals you'd need to make.

5. Your own product. If you had an ebook you could sell for $20, you'd need to sell four a day to make the $80.

6. Consultancy. Some people sell their services as a consultant or coach via their blog. If your day rate is $300, you'd need to sell eight day's worth of your time each month to reach your target revenue.

As you can see, you can make money from your blog in a variety of ways. For more ways, check out my mindmap on how bloggers make money.

Some of you may still think this is way out of your reach. Getting 47,000 pageviews per day to make $82 might seem unrealistic. And selling eight days of your consulting time every month may be way more than you can contemplate.

But here's the thing: Most full-time bloggers don't monetize with just one income stream.

You can do all the revenue-making activities I just mentioned at the same time. That way you don't need to earn all of your target revenue from any one of them. Instead you can reach your goal by earning a portion of the money you need from each one.

Makes that goal seems a lot more achievable, doesn't it?

Fashion blogger example

Sidebar ads on your blog for $150 per month, with four running over the month = $600
Two sponsored posts per month at $450 per post = $900
Selling a friend's ebook for a commission of $10 per sale with ten referred sales = $100
Affiliate referrals to an online retailer selling clothes and shoes, with around 20 referral sales per month at approximately $20 commission per sale = $400
Writing a freelance article for a fashion magazine each month at $400 per article = $400

Total monthly blog earnings = $2,400

This example goes to show that if you diversify your income and break down the larger goal into smaller, more achievable ones you can get there.

Photography Blogger example

Selling 100 ebooks a month at $10 each = $1,000
Adsense = $200
Freelance writing = $500
Affiliate commission from promoting other people's ebooks and courses = $400
Photo sales = $300

Total monthly blog earnings = $2,400

Food/recipe blogger example

Having a $10 per month membership area and 100 members = $1,000
Ebook sales = $400
Affiliate commission from promoting other people's ebooks = $200
Three sponsored posts at $200 per post = $600
Occasional speaking gigs (averaged out across the year) = $400

Total monthly blog earnings = $2,600

So that's three different bloggers monetizing their blogs in different ways.

And they don't have hundreds of thousands of pageviews each month. In fact, they may have only a few thousand.

Of course, even those figures might seem out of reach. But if you stick at it for a few months (or maybe a couple of years), hopefully you'll reach this level of traffic.

When I went full-time as a blogger I earned my income target of $36,000 USD per year from five main sources:

Adsense = $35/day
Chitika – another ad network popular at the time (and still around today) = $25/day
A few private ad sales and sponsorships = $20/day
Recommending products on Amazon = $15/day
Affiliate commission from recommending other people's books and courses = $10/day

Together they got me close to that full-time mark. The exact amounts went up and down from month to month, but they averaged out.

This was after blogging for two years.

I found it really helpful to break my revenue down and think about how I could add other income streams without having to increase my traffic. Some income streams will monetize with less traffic than others. For example, to monetize through Adsense (whether it's your own advertising or sponsorship) you'll need a lot of traffic. But monetizing via affiliate product commissions or selling your own product (such as an ebook) requires less traffic. And selling your own higher-value services requires even less traffic.

These monetization strategies depend on both your niche and the specifics of each income stream. But the key is to diversify your income. And that's something you can do over time as opportunities open up.

The other thing to keep in mind with making money from your blog is you want to target the 'right' readers. Identify who you want to reach, because it's much easier to monetize when you have a few of the 'right' readers, rather than lots of random people reading your blog.

Pay attention to where your readers are coming from, and make sure they're the right type of reader for you. They'll be much more likely to:

buy your ebook
click on the sponsorships you have
take your recommendations for affiliate referrals.

Attract the right type of reader, and keep them coming back again and again. It's much easier to make money from a reader who comes to your site every day/week and feels engaged, connected with you, and like they belong to your community.

If you:

develop multiple income streams
find the right reader and get them subscribed, engaged and interacting with your community
stick at it for several months (or perhaps a couple of years)

you're much more likely to reach the level of a full-time blogger.

Whatever your target income is, don't think of it as a massive amount of money. Break it down into smaller, more achievable targets, and work out what you need to do to achieve them. As you gain traffic, start monetizing it, and work out how it converts to dollars, you'll begin to understand how much traffic you need to achieve your goals.

Which will make creating an action plan to make money and build a full-time income around your blog much clearer.

Want to know more? Here's even more information on how you can make money blogging.

Image credit: Alexander Mils

The post How to Make a Full-Time Income From Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Relaunch Your Blog After it Becomes Dormant

Posted by work smart 0 comments

ProBlogger: How to Relaunch Your Blog After it Becomes Dormant

How to Relaunch Your Blog After it Becomes Dormant

Posted: 08 Aug 2019 05:30 AM PDT

The post How to Relaunch Your Blog After it Becomes Dormant appeared first on ProBlogger.

How to relaunch your blog after it becomes dormant

This post is based on episode 234 of the ProBlogger podcast.

Today I want to answer a question I get regularly from listeners: How do you relaunch a blog that's died or become dormant?

I'll lay out two scenarios for relaunching a blog, and then give you 11 things to consider during a relaunch.

Last week a ProBlogger reader asked for advice on how to relaunch their blog, which had been dormant for the past year. (They took a 12-month break from blogging.)

This is something many of us bloggers have to deal with at different times. There have been times where I've put my own blogs on hold – not ProBlogger or Digital Photography School, but other blogs I've put on hold that I may need to relaunch one day.

So it's something I've thought about numerous times, and talked other bloggers through it as well.

Maybe your blog became dormant for family reasons. Maybe a health crisis forced you to put things on hold for a while. Or you may have simply lost the motivation or passion to keep the blog going.

Whatever the reason, many blogs have a period where they slow down (if not stop completely).

The first step in reawakening your blog is to thinking about where you and your blog are at right now. There's no one piece of advice I can give you here, but assessing how you and your blog are will help you to determine what to do next.

And then you need to answer three questions about yourself.

1. Why did your blog become dormant? Why did you stop blogging?

These are important questions to answer, because it will help you avoid the same thing happening again down the track.

2. What are your dreams and goals for the blog?

It's really important to revisit them, because they may have changed since you first started blogging. Getting back to your 'Why?' will help you become more realistic about what you do this time around.

3. Do you want the blog to have the same topic or focus?

You may think your blog is great, and that you want to just keep doing what you were doing. But you may also want to tweak things a little bit. (I'll be talking about pivoting your blog soon.)

Having answered those three questions, it's now time to answer some questions about your blog.

1. How long has your blog been inactive?

The answer to this question will help determine how you relaunch it. If it's only a month then you can probably get back to blogging pretty quickly. But if it's been a year or more, the strategies you use will probably be different.

If your blog has been dormant for five years you'll probably want to do some redesign, update the archives, or even change the technology you use.

2. How much traffic does your blog still have?

Dig into your Google Analytics account (or set it up if you don't have one) and work out if you still have any traffic.

I looked at one of my old blogs the other day and discovered it was still getting a thousand visitors a day. And they were all coming in from Google.

Is your blog still getting traffic? Where's it coming from – search engines, social media, other sites?

Do you have a post or page that's still performing really well? A lot of bloggers with dormant blogs tell me they have one post in their archives that's going really well. Knowing what that post or page is can really help as you think about moving forward. It might be a good starting place to do some analysis, do some updating, and think about leveraging it in some way.

Of course, if you don't have any traffic you can skip this question.

3. How many followers do you have on social media?

Do you have social media accounts set up? How many followers do you have? What platforms generated the most activity?

4. What about your email list?

You can ask the same question about your blog's email subscribers. How many does it have? Are any of them new, or are they all years old?

Knowing about the health of your social media and email subscribers is important. Are they warm? Has automation kept those subscribers and followers warm and connected, or have they gone cold? The answer will shape your strategy for warming up your list again.

5. Is the current domain still relevant?

This question is probably only relevant if you're thinking of changing your blog's topic or focus.

Okay, so we’ve asked you to answer questions about yourself and your blog. Now it’s time to answer an important question about your niche.

What's the current state of play in the niche you're operating in?

If it's been a couple of years since you blogged, you might want to find out what other people are doing in your niche. Who are the big bloggers? Who are the big social media influencers? What are other bloggers doing at the moment? Have they changed tech? Are they using different mediums? Are they all doing podcasts now? Are they all on video? Where’s the action happening for them in terms of social media?

This can help you work out where you should be doing things. Of course, you shouldn’t just copy what everyone else is doing. But you may find a gap or an opportunity you could take advantage of. It can help you decide how you should be engaging with people in terms of social media. You may even find an emerging trend in your niche or industry you could latch onto.

For example, in the past four or five years we’ve seen new types of cameras and drone photography emerging in the photography space. If I was relaunching my photography blog I’d probably focuses on these new cameras and technologies because things have changed over the years.

Having answered these questions about you, your blog and your niche, hopefully one of two scenarios will emerge.

Scenario 1

The first scenario is realizing you were already on the right track with your blog, and that you were simply interrupted by something. Your blog is relatively healthy, and you just want to get back to it.

This is obviously the easiest scenario, but there’s still some advice I’d encourage you to consider.

Pay Attention to Your Content

To shorten the re-growth time for your blog, look at the content you've already published that's still working, or has worked in the past.

Update and republish the posts that are still getting traffic. Put a new date on them (providing it doesn’t change the URL), then put them back up as fresh content and leverage them to get some new subscribers.

Write some follow-up content on those topics. Repurpose your good content into a different medium such as video or audio.

And think about how you can expand on your good content. If you've got a category that's still getting traffic, focus more on that category.

Pay Attention To Your Archives

Just don't start writing new content all the time. A lot of bloggers now pay as much attention to their archives as they do to new content. By all means write new content for your relaunch, but you should also update your archives. Try to alternate between writing a new post and updating an old one.

Pay Attention to Your Readers

Now it’s time to warn up your old followers, subscribers, and readers. Because if your blog has been dormant for a while then your email list and social media following are both going to be pretty cold.

They might remember you. They might still think highly of you. But they might also be a bit frustrated that you haven't updated your blog for so long. They may even be wondering if you’re still alive and healthy, or whether you're still interested in them and their topic.

So how do you warm them up again?

If you’ve been gone for a while, you might need to explain your absence. This might be a good time to do a video post about what’s been happening during the past last 12 months (or however long you’ve been away). If your absence was health related you may not want to go into great detail. But telling your story may actually help reconnect with your audience.

Now’s a good time to create something to give your readers as a gift. If you’re sending something to your new email subscribers, send it to your old subscribers as well just to say, “Thanks for sticking around”.

Another option is to launch a content series that challenges your readers to do something. Use live video, images, or something else that's a bit more personal to warm up your readers.

But above all, you need to start creating content again. The best way to relaunch your blog, particularly if you’re just picking up where you left off, is to be as useful as possible to your readers.

Scenario 2

The second scenario is realizing you need to change direction.

Maybe you you lost your passion for the topic. Maybe the niche changed. Or maybe your blog wasn't working in some way.

Whatever the reason, if you start blogging again without changing anything, chances are you won’t last very long.

Pivot

If you haven’t been blogging for a few years, you'll probably find your niche has changed quite a bit. And you may have trouble connecting with your readers if you keep blogging the way you did.

It might be time to consider pivoting your blog by changing your topic, perspective, medium or audience (or even a combination of them).

Change Your Topic

If you want to change your topic completely you're probably better off starting a new blog than relaunching your old one. Maybe you had a photography blog, and now want to start a blog about blogging. Maybe you had a fashion blog, and now want to blog about travel. Unless your domain name is relevant to both topics, you should probably start a new blog.

But chances are your pivot will actually be more like a tweak. Here are a few ways you can tweak your topic to bring you new life for your blog.

Narrow Your Topic

Donna Moritz (who we talked to in Episode 117 of the ProBlogger podcast) ‘pivoted’ her blog by narrowing her focus. She used to have a blog about social media that wasn’t much different to every other blog about social media. So Donna decided to focus on the topic of visual content in social media such as infographics and images.

Donna soon became known as one of the key people with expertise in visual content for social media. Narrowing her focus helped her stand out from all the other social media blogs.

Ask yourself whether there's a category in your old blog you should focus on when you relaunch. (Hint: Look at any categories that are still getting lots of traffic.) By doing that you can become the expert in that particular field.

Broaden Your Topic

You can also take the opposite approach. If your previous topic was too narrow, try broadening it. For example, a blog about printers could be broadened to include other related technology topics.

Change Your Perspective – Voice

Another thing you can try is using a different voice.

I talked a little bit about voice in episode 213 of the podcast, so I won’t go into great depth here. But in that episode, I reference five voices Jeff Goins says you can use for any topic:

the professor who teaches
the artist who brings out the beauty in their topic
the prophet who tells the cold, hard truth and busts myths
the journalist who is curating and gathering ideas and putting them together in stories
the celebrity, the one that everyone wants to know your opinion.

But you can use your own voices as well. You could be:

the companion who journeys with people around a topic
the mentor
the entertainer
the reviewer
the curator
the storyteller
the guide
the teacher
the thought leader.

Whatever voices you come up with, try and bring some of them into your blogging.

Change Your Perspective – Intent

Another way to change your perspective is by changing the intent of your content.

If your blog was about bringing the latest news to your readers, you could pivot and make it more of an opinion blog. You're still talking about the news, but now you're adding your opinion. It’s a slightly different intent, and chances are you’ll also have a slightly different voice.

My original photography blog used to be a review blog. I was reviewing cameras, and I got completely sick of it. So I decided to pivot that blog and start teaching people how to use their cameras. I changed my domain, updated the older content, and Digital Photography School was born.

That was a big pivot for me. But you might just want to tweak your voice, or add new types of posts to sit alongside the old ones.

Change the Medium

If your blog was mainly written content, you might want start using audio, video or more visual content when you relaunch it.

It could be a complete shift. You may switch from writing a blog to having a podcast or video blog. Or you might just want to add the new medium to what you're already doing. You could even experiment with a mix of mediums.

Change the Audience

The final way to pivot is to start serving a different demographic – something I've seen a number of bloggers do this quite successfully.

It’s similar to narrowing your focus. But instead of blogging for everyone, you blog for a particular demographic.

For example, instead of just offering general travel advice, you might focus on travel advice for retirees, families, single women or gay men. Writing about your topic for a particular audience will make your content much more useful to to them.

Narrowing your potential audience may sound dangerous. But your content will be much more focused, making it more attractive to anyone in that demographic. Just keep in mind you may also need to redesign your blog and your branding.

However you choose to pivot your blog, you may find that it reignites your passion for what you're doing. Rather than going back to the same old routine, you get to try something new.

What’s next?

Once you've worked out if and how you're going to pivot, you'll probably need to consider other factors. I recommend taking our free Start a Blog Course to make sure you're across them all and relaunching your blog with a strong foundation.

And finally, here are 11 other things I'd focus on if I was relaunching my blog. (Most of these are in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Course.)

1. Think about your goals and objectives for your blog going forward

What are you trying to achieve with the blog? Where do you want it to take you? Are you trying to generate income? Are you trying to open up opportunities such as landing a job or a book deal?

Knowing what you’re trying to achieve will help inform how you design your site and create your content.

2. Think about how your blog will change you readers' lives

For me, the key to success is having a blog that will change people's lives. Knowing what you want to achieve is one thing, but what do you want your readers to achieve?

3. Come up with lots of ideas for content

Many bloggers abandon their blogs because they run out of ideas. Before you relaunch your blog, spend as much time as you can generating ideas for content. Map out the next few weeks, months and years. I've seen a lot of bloggers mapping out a year’s worth of content ahead of time.

4. Build your archives up and build on your archives.

If you're restarting your blog with minor changes, think carefully about your previous content. Audit what’s in your archives, and delete anything that no longer serves your readers.

Identify the top 10-20 posts that are still getting any traffic and:

make them more visually appealing
make them more scannable
optimize them for search engine optimization.

Think about the calls to action you have to get new subscribers. Could you do a follow-up post? Could you add a link to further reading? Could you repurpose the content in some way?

5. Plan your editorial calendar

Now that you’ve brainstormed all those ideas, when will you publish them? How often will you publish? What mediums will you use?

You might want to come up with a weekly format. A tips article on Monday, an audio post on Tuesday, a link post on Wednesday, a review on Thursday, etc.

You don’t necessarily need to post every day. But think about the types of posts you are going to publish. By putting topics alongside them in a calendar you’ll have an editorial calendar.

This is really important, particularly if you gave up blogging because you had issues with planning.

6. Analyse where your readers are coming from

If you've already got readers coming in, find out where they're coming from. And think about how you’ll grow your readership. Could you do some guest posting? Should you be interacting in forums or Facebook groups? How can you be useful in these places? Who else do you want to network with in your niche?

7. Decide what social networks you’ll focus on

Chances are there are more social media platforms than there were when you stopped blogging. What are the new ones like? Could they provide new opportunities for you? Have the people in your niche moved from one to another?

Decide which ones you’ll focus on (choose one or two), and register all the accounts you need. Then come up with a strategy as to how you'll use those social networks going forward.

8. Start creating content

Focus on your pillar content first – the evergreen content you’ll build the rest of your blog around – because you’ll be referring to it constantly. It's what you stand for. It's your core teaching.

On Digital Photography School it's my post around aperture, shutter speed and ISO – the three key components of photography.

As you relaunch your blog, look at your old pillar content and decide whether there’s any new content you need to write first. Believe me, it will pay off for years to come. So deliver as much value as you can with your early posts.

9. Think about your list

If you have a cold email list, how will you warm it up again? How often will you send emails? How will you the list going forward? And will you grow it?

10. Figure out your blog design

Blogs look different to how they used to look. Does you need an update? Do you need to change the logo? Do you need to lay it out differently? Is your blog responsive? With so many people looking at blogs on their mobile phones these days, you may need to refresh your blog design so it is.

11. Decide how you’ll use your time going forward

One reason so many bloggers abandon their blogs is they struggle to find a balance between blogging and everything else going on in their lives.

We all have a limited amount of time. But we can be more productive if we plan how we’ll use whatever time is available.

Make a list of what you need to do, and then look at how much time you have (whether it’s one hour a week or forty). Start prioritizing all the things you need to do, and then add them all to a calendar. This is exactly what I did, and I now have a weekly template. On Monday mornings I write content, and on Tuesday mornings I record a podcast. Knowing when things will happen has made me so much more productive.

Even if you've only got two or three hours a week, you can still fit a lot in if you plan how you’ll use your time.

Ultimately, the success of your relaunch will be determined by what you do over the coming months and years. It's the accumulation of the content you create, the value and usefulness you deliver, and the engagement you have with your readers. So make them a priority.

Create content. Promote yourself. Engage with your readers. Create value.

The 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course is designed to help bloggers kickstart their blogs, whether they’re new, established, or being relaunched. And if you’re about to put a lot of effort into relaunching your blog, the course will help you direct that effort and make your relaunch a success.

Image credit: Nick Jio

The post How to Relaunch Your Blog After it Becomes Dormant appeared first on ProBlogger.

Google Adsense

Point of Authorithy