That’s 1350 days or 44 months of hard work, late nights and low points before I had the thought that this blogging to make money might work.
Let me say, if you’re not passionate about your blog, you won’t survive, or you’ll not enjoy the journey very much.
I did start making money quite quickly into my blogging journey but the kind of money I‘m talking about is money where I might actually consider thinking about quitting a full-time job and going full-time on writing.
Initially I think I made $20 and that was enough to remind me I have done this before and I can do it again.
I love my main niche site. It was born out of a passion for the topics.
It’s not the hardest journey I’ve been on, but it is certainly one of the hardest. It’s definitely the longest time I’ve ever taken to grow a business to this size.
In the past, I’ve built & sold or built & closed down or built and had closed down (thanks Google) a few different successful enterprises. The most time I spent on most those was a couple of years before I ran out of steam on them.
When you’re choosing a niche to start blogging in, or deciding on a type of business to start running, the biggest challenge is choosing something that can continue the scale and grow.
Unfortunately, the businesses that I started that focused on selling products online, had a market capacity that I maxed out.
One in particular, after reaching the number 2 seller in the country for a particularly popular brand of product I was selling, I realized that I couldn’t really grow that much more.
What I love about making money from blogging is that there is no cap on what you can do, or earn if it works out for you, or you work hard for it.
There’s no limit on how much you can earn, so I’m told.
It is important that you choose the right niche for this to happen.
The other option that you have if you don’t choose a limitless niche is to run multiple niche sites.
I definitely have one site that I’m still bubbling up slowly which only focuses on one particular, very narrow space in the FMCG Marketplace space.
I know that there will be a limit to how much I can grow this particular site.
But I also know that the average order value of the products and the search volumes are high enough that it makes it attractive to me.
In addition to this, I have a lot of propriety knowledge in this topic and can speak quite confidently to it, which also makes it quite attractive. Less competition.
Back to my first site, it’s really making me the most money right now, it’s the site that is taking me a long time to build because it is in a very large highly competitive niche.
And I’ve chosen that niche because I’m passionate about it and I know that my passion can sustain the work required to get a site to a level that will earn me a decent income.
My commission cheques this month where around $7500 which was great, although, a lot of that was thanks to Prime Day.
The July prime day was good and then this month, with an additional Prime Day in October – I’m sure in a couple of months when the commission cheques roll in, it’s gonna look pretty good.
I never get my hopes up too high.
The challenge I have is to build up the quiet times, the summer times, the July-August times when people are shopping less and spending less and outdoors more, enjoying the sunshine.
We’re coming up to the run-up to Christmas so, with an additional early fall Prime Day in October, and soon a Black Friday, Cyber Monday event, then rolling in the Christmas, there’s no doubt that search volume will be high and affiliate commissions and advertising revenue RPMs will be high also.
So, it feels really good to finally feel like I’m making head way and that the money is starting to roll.
The other thing to know is there’s been numerous google algorithm updates in the last 6months which have benefited me as I continue trying to create really great quality content rather than churning out low quality, uninformed, unintelligent information, that is clearly being scraped source and rewritten from other websites.
I’m really focused on creating the best and most unique content that I can for this site. I’m proud of what I’m putting out.
So, if you’re on your journey to make money and its feeling like hard then just believe that if you stick with it, and you create good content and you keep publishing then you can make it.
It sounds like a cliche, but it’s true
I love Jon Dykstra’s course. He says in his mind – just publish at least one thing every day. If you publish one thing every day then at least you’re taking small steps forward to a successful site.
I’ve definitely been knocked down a couple of times at google, and it happens.
But if you just keep consistent and keep plugging away eventually, you’ll see some returns.