6 Tips You Need To Know To Make $1,000/Month Blogging

Folks, we have an amazing guest post today from Lidiya over at Let’s Reach Success. She’s taking us through her tips you need to know to make $1,000/month blogging. It’s what she used to reach her success. So, enjoy and let us know your thoughts in comments!

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It’s true when they say the first $1,000 online is the hardest. That’s especially true when we talk about making money from your blog. But once you get there, most other obstacles don’t matter anymore and you can double your income in a few months and then do it again in a few more. That’s what I did.

I started Let’s Reach Success as a personal development blog and simply enjoyed the process of publishing content on it for years. Over time, that consistency paid off and I started making real money from it. It’s thanks to my platform that I am able to earn more than $3,500 per month by offering sponsored posts and promoting my freelance services.

Let me share some things I did and how they influenced my journey to being a full-time blogger working from home.

I didn’t start with the money in mind

Plenty of bloggers start just because they want to make quick money. But that itself is a distraction and it prevents them from providing real value with their blogs, which is the cornerstone of building a reputation and audience.

My online business is based on passion. I truly care about personal development and never stop reading about it. As I enjoy writing too, it made sense to combine these two.

Together with sharing useful content and naturally ranking it for keywords, that led to building traffic. Eventually, I started covering anything related to personal, spiritual and business growth and Google seemed to like what I was doing.

The point is that I never got bored with it, I loved the process and it gave meaning to my days. So if you’re about to start a blog that will soon make you $1,000 per month, you’d better choose the right niche and start publishing valuable content.

I kept reading about other successful bloggers

What better way to learn the ins and outs of your industry and understand online business in general than to follow others who’ve already been there and are now making big money from this.

I found my mentors in the face of people such as Pat Flynn from SmartPassiveIncome, Tim Ferriss, Mark Manson from MarkManson.net, Neil Patel from QuickSprout.com, and many more. These and many other successful entrepreneurs have succeeded in more than one area in life. And, most importantly, they documented their journey.

That’s all I needed to start believing I can achieve something similar, to find the courage to take the first step, and to then stay consistent even when things got tough.

One thing I’ve enjoyed in particular over the last year and which plays a big part in doubling my income is reading income reports of bloggers I respect. Let’s take Michelle from Making Sense of Cents, for example.

While it might sound crazy to someone earning $1,000 a month to even consider getting to $100,000, it becomes a bit more doable once you find out exactly how that money could be earned online.

Transparency is a big part of blogging and that’s why I too started publishing my income reports. It’s important to track everything, analyze the results, keep working on new things, and follow those who are at the top in order to dream bigger.

Find the right way to monetize your blog

When you’re just starting out, it’s important to monetize right. While many people go for affiliate marketing and build niche sites that they can’t wait to fill with links to products, that might not work for you. I know it didn’t for me.

But the blog itself is something you’ll always keep working on and growing as that’s the foundation of your online business. Even if you have no idea how you’re going to be making money from it, that’s okay.

Until you find that out, publish content and rank it in Google, be on social media and connect with people, contribute to other sites in the niche, learn more about WordPress, invest in a premium theme and add more features, grow your email list by offering freebies to subscribers, and more.

Once you have some traffic, you can start testing different monetization strategies. While I do sell my books and do affiliate marketing, I don’t consider that part of my income, at least not yet. Instead, my main income stream from my blog is sponsored posts.

It all began with a few brands and companies reaching out to me with an offer for a sponsored post. I simply had to publish their piece on my site and include a link back to their resource. Some paid me $100-$200 for that.

I realized there’s potential in this (although I never planned to be making money from it), so I started investing more in the blog, making it look professional, being stricter with links and who I allow to publish on it, etc.

Maybe for you that will be an online course. Assuming you like video content and have the time to create a course around a topic you know something about, you can easily get that done, upload the digital product on platforms like Teachable or Udemy and promote it on your blog, or sell it directly there. Then, each of the pages on your site will somehow point people to the sales page or encourage them to learn more about the course.

Whatever the right way to monetize your blog is, find it and focus on making it work. It’s worth experimenting with a few strategies first to see what has the best return on investment.

Go the extra mile to make your site authoritative

You don’t need to be tech-savvy, have a big budget or know the right people to run and grow a professional-looking platform. All you need is to turn this into a game and ask yourself this every day: ‘What’s one thing I can do to make my site perform better, rank higher or offer a great user experience?’

That’s how I learned more about SEO, making a site mobile-friendly, personal branding, bringing traffic from social media, organizing content well,  designing the most important pages, adding new features, and more.

Over time, I invested in a better hosting provider, got a premium WordPress theme, started guest posting on big sites and even got published on TIME magazine, began using visuals to make content appealing and create brand consistency, and so on.

All these matter because when a potential client enters your site they will look for such elements. If they see you take good care of your platform and are constantly doing something to grow it, then they’d be ready to do business together with you.

Prioritize your side project

In the beginning, your blog will just be a side project for you. Which means you’ll need to invest your energy and focus in your free time and to make sacrifices. Plenty of people started making a few thousand dollars a month by doing this on the side, and so can you.

I worked hard to build some productivity habits that help get a lot done, stay focused, be motivated to do my best work and unleash my creativity.

Some things that helped me a lot include:

• Waking up early and having a morning routine;
• Using the first few hours of the day to focused work and nothing else;
• Keeping to-do lists;
• Putting the key items on top and starting with them;
• Skipping breakfast seemed to increase my productivity too, which led to following the intermittent fasting diet plan over time;
• Defining distractions and removing them;
• Mindfulness;
• Keeping in mind why I do what I do (have a vision!);
• Not sharing my goals with others;
• Not letting anyone talk me out of my projects;
• Being ruthless with my time and investing it in the blog and online business.

Short-term action, long-term patience

Patience is key if you want to make it in the digital world. Most entrepreneurs regret being in a hurry at the beginning of their business and say this actually led to making more mistakes and never finding the focus to complete a big project.

I learned early on that blogging is a long journey and I was okay with that. There are over 1600 articles on the archives of my blog, I faced rejection when pitching my first freelance clients, big publications didn’t want to accept my content back in the days either. But it was the daily action and macro patience that made all the difference.

Making $1,000 from your blog is just one aspect of all that you’re going to be doing. You have no idea where this can take you and how far you can get in terms of making money and providing value. But you need to take the very first steps with this in mind – it might take you longer than you expect but that’s actually a good thing. Because during that time you’re building discipline, learning how to manage your time and money and understanding a ton about your field.

There were moments where I wanted to give up. But after you invest a lot of work and time in something, it’s worth taking it further and working twice as much. Do that with your blog and you’ll see plenty of opportunities to make money coming your way.