How I Made $3,000 From Home Last Month

How I Made $3,000 From Home Last Month

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Alright so technically I was short $5.87 of making $3k, but saying that I made $2,994.13 last month is a bit of a mouthful. So by rounding it up, I’m not trying to be dishonest, I just want to make it easier to read. But beyond this, you’re probably wondering how I was able to do this as a stay at home wife.. with no college degree.

Well early last year, my husband and I had heard about creating a side hustle (a job apart from your 9 to 5) from many online entrepreneurs. There were plenty of ideas, like writing articles for money, making an online class, starting a Youtube channel, etc. but nothing really seemed to quite fit. That is until we listened to the The Side Hustle Show (a podcast) which interviewed Rosemarie Groner from The Busy Budgeter.

This woman had gone from just blogging about her passion for fun to blogging full time and making $5k a month. And she had done this in just a year.. which is great in the blogging world (since it takes some years), buuut.. we wanted this sooner.

Silas (my husband) had been working plenty of energy draining and soul sucking jobs (no joke), for a number of years and I was tired of seeing him coming home exhausted emotionally and physically. We both wanted change, and this podcast (which you can listen to here), literally changed our lives. It was packed with so much information on how to get started that without it, we’d probably be in the same place we’d always been: stuck.

Now I go into the tips that we learned from Rosemarie and I also give some of my own strategies that I used to gain huge traffic to my site in my post on how we got Over 150k Pageviews in Our Second Month of Blogging. But here I’ll give you some tips on how to start a blog yourself and tell you what I did in June to make my numbers rise.

How to Start a Profitable Blog

Starting a blog and making money sounds like something only outgoing people and social media experts do. But to be honest, I’ve known so many bloggers who started theirs in the middle of a divorce so they could stay home with their kids, and I’ve know some who started a blog just so they could travel full time. So starting a blog to create income doesn’t have to be a famous person’s thing, it can be your thing. It can be your project. And to be honest… it definitely beats the 9 to 5 job (maybe that’s an understatement).

So here are the steps we took for starting a blog and making money fast (or at least faster than a year).

Step 1: Do the Work Before

I can’t tell you how MUCH this helped us. What I mean when I say “Do the work before,” isn’t the obvious “find a niche,” “create a catchy blog name,” or, “figure out your audience.” Yes those are all important, but you can read that from so many other bloggers out there. What I mean is, once you’ve done all that, start creating content for your blog before it launches. Say.. 25-50 blog posts, so that when it does launch, people have more than just a couple of articles to read on your site.

There’s also another reason for this, but I’ll get into that in step 4.

Step 2: Sign up for Hosting

Do not, and I repeat DO NOT go with a free blogging profile. Yes you can get traffic, but making money is basically impossible (and sadly, the fair majority of people won’t take you seriously). So sign up for a hosting site like Bluehost which is $3.95/month (hosting is like renting a space on the internet to put your site out there). It’s super simple to get and they have awesome support to walk you through.

Final Note: Oh! I should also let you know that I have a post that shows you exactly how to create and set up your blog with Bluehost. Seriously, there’s so many benefits for going with them!

Step 3: Picking a Theme

Now whether you’ve heard about WordPress (a blog platform used by many) or not, Bluehost let’s you install WordPress. Once you’ve done that, you can choose one of their themes, but just make sure to choose one that’s very visually appealing. It probably goes without saying, but the better looking your blog is, the more viewers are going to see it and come back because you look legitimate.

Want to start your own blog? I created a free tutorial to show you exactly how to start and set up your blog on a budget (and in minutes!) You can start yours for just $2.95 per month (you can only get this low price through my special link) with Bluehost. Also, if you’re wondering if you actually need hosting or if you could just make money on free blogging sites like Blogger, I’d seriously recommend going with sites like Bluehost. Free blogging sites can delete your blog at any time. It happened to Michelle from Making Sense of Cents when she first started out. It’s also the only way to actually start making income too since you’ll only get accepted with advertisement and affiliate companies if you’re hosted.

Step 4: Sign up for Adsense and Amazon Affiliates

In my post on how I made $500 in May, I give a rundown on what both of those two things are. They’re both free and once you understand them, I suggest signing up for them as quickly as possible. Especially Adsense since it’s probably going to be your top money earner.

Now in step 1 I told you that there was another reason for creating content beforehand, and this is why. Adsesne is Google’s ad service. They’ll display ads on your site for people to see. And when those ads are on your blog, you’ll start to gain income from them. However, Adsense can be picky about who they accept, so you’ll want to have some good content on your site before you sign up. That way they can see that you’re legitimate, not just some person who started up a blog, threw a few posts up there, and then never did anything with it again. They want real traffic seeing their ads, otherwise it’s useless. So make sure you have enough content up so Adsense doesn’t turn down your blog.

Step 5: Make a Pinterest Account

This is literally the key to everything; making money, getting lots of traffic, everything.

I’m sorry, I’m not trying to direct your to different places to annoy you, but if I went into everything I did to get huge traffic numbers and money on just one page, it’d be way too long and you’d get tired of reading my post. So again, I will direct you to the same post on how I got 150k views in my second month of blogging. It goes into why you need a Pinterest account, how to get a large audience, how to create a pinnable pin (seriously easy), and how to get people to click through to your content. So read up and take notes, this is exactly how I get the majority of my traffic and income.

Step 6: Email List?

Many people wonder if they should start their email list right after they launch their blog. But guys… those first few subscribers are the most important ones you’ll have. It’s been shown that the ones that stick with you even when you’re just beginning will be your most loyal readers and they’ll be more likely to buy from you when you offer them a product.

So Which Email List Builder Should I Use?

Well you could use a free service like Mail Chimp, but there’s a couple things you should know.

First, there have been so many times where I’ve heard bloggers complain about how they regret starting out with free services like Mail Chimp. Because when they decide to switch over to a more efficient email list builder like Convertkit, it take hours for them to transfer their entire list. It’s a complete headache and takes DAYS to do.

Now the reason why I suggest Convertkit is because their services are SO EASY to use! I am not tech savvy… at all. In fact, I get seriously frustrated when something takes way to long to figure out. But with just one video tutorial, I was able to easily understand everything. Convertkit is seriously intuitive and simple.

Now the monthly cost for Convertkit is $29.99 a month which is basically 5-6 Starbucks drinks in a month. I get it, it’s so much easier to sign up for something free when you’re first starting out, but the ease of using Convertkit is so worth it (and you won’t have to deal with moving all your subscribers over later)!

You can check Convertkit out here and if you have any questions about it, feel free to ask me!

Now for What I Did in June

I Hit New Pain Points: WIIFM

In the same post I keep on linking to (I know, you’re probably tired of hearing about it), I talk about hitting people’s pain points. People’s pain points are the problems or lifestyle changes they want to make now. They don’t want to read about how cool your dog is, they want to know how they can lose 5 pounds in a week. They want to know how they can start to get out of debt.

It’s called WIIFM: What’s In It For Me? They want to know how this blog post can change something big or small in their lifestyle. And they want to know how they can do it now, not at some point in the future. So give them a title and subject that let’s them know how they can solve a problem

Now with all of that said, this month I’ve tried quite a few posts that help people’s lifestyle and what I’ve noticed brings in a lot of traffic are home DIY organization, cleaning, and home decor hacks. Everyone has a home (whether an apartment or a house), and almost everyone wants to know how they can improve it. Whether that’s through preventing messes, getting it clean, or making it look great with Dollar Store DIY projects and organization ideas.

So again, find out what’s hitting a reader’s pain point, experiment, and right down notes of your success. This helped us out greatly in June.

A/B Testing

For those of you who don’t know what that is, when you create a post and then create a pin image for the post, you create two of them to see which one does better. For me, I do a/b/c/and d testing. I make multiple because you never know which title or which image is going to do better and then make that pin take off like wildfire.

In June, I had too many times where I thought one pin would do better than the other, but I let them both run for about a week or two and it turned out that the other one did way better. You have to test, otherwise you’ll never know if your post had real potential or not.

Prayer

Now this may turn some of you off if you don’t believe in God, but we seriously couldn’t have gotten as many page views without his direction. In so many moments, he helped us realize what we could do better and what we could do differently to get more traffic. We know without a doubt that he’s helped us get the income we needed; he’s beyond blessed us. And that’s why I say prayer has definitely helped us with our blog taking off. If you believe in Him, then I suggest making him apart of the process.

Lastly, Remember Two Things

Apart from the methods I’ve used in the last few months, those are the only things I’ve done differently to actually make a change and increase my viewership and income.

Now this may be overwhelming for those of you who are new to the idea of blogging, but I promise you that if you put the work in, really pay attention to what is and isn’t working, and follow my tips and strategies in this post and others, you’ll be able to work from home too.

And even if you feel like it’s a lot of work (it is), just remember 2 things:

1. Putting a lot of work into a blog definitely beats working a nine to five or not making any location independent income at all. Seriously, I had to tell myself this when I was tempted to get a stupid part time minimum wage job (Remember? I don’t have a college degree), and it’s paid off in a huge way.
2. In a year from now, you’ll wish you had started today. That was a bit of advice I had read and took to heart. Even now I wish I had started a year ago.

Now I hope I was able to help you, and if you have any questions, just let me know in the comments down below! I’ll be happy to help you out.

Original article and pictures take www.chasingfoxes.com site