Boost Your Income Challenge – Day 5

Blogging is a great way to make extra money, in fact it’s slowly become a second job to me. I know of lots of bloggers who know call this their full-time job and they’re making amazing amounts of money.

The thing with blogging is that it’s a slow burner. But if you’ve got the dedication and the passion for it, then it can be extremely lucrative.

I started My Money Cottage around 18 months ago, but it’s only the last 6 months or so that I’ve put any real effort into making it a successful blog.

What I will say is that you do need to be really passionate about blogging. I absolutely love pretty much everything that blogging entails. If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t be able to make it work.

How can you make money blogging?

There are lots of ways that bloggers make money – I go into more details about these here. But just to sum up, I make my money in the following ways:

• Sponsored posts
• Paid guest posts
• On-site adverts
• Affiliate marketing

I’m working on other income streams too, but these are the main ones for me at the moment.

There will be a module all about making money from affiliates later on in the course.

How can you get started?

It’s so important to get your blog off on the right foot. Good hosting is so important. You need to be confident that your site is going to load quickly and you’re not going to constantly be suffering downtime.

I’ve used Siteground for just over a year and they’ve been the best host I’ve used. My site loads 5x faster than it used to and I’ve never had any issues with downtime.

You may want to think about having a niche – there is a theory that niche blogs can be more successful BUT there are lots of really successful bloggers who don’t.

Then, you’ll need to decide on a blog name. Do a little research with this as you don’t want to regret your name once you’ve purchased your domain and started to build your blog. Although I do love the name “My Money Cottage”, part of me wishes I’d gone with something a little different – I’d perhaps have been better with “The Money Cottage” for example!

I’ve taken some courses over the last year to help me to build on areas I’m lacking knowledge and confidence – I’d definitely recommend doing this if you want to get off to a head start.

This one really helped me:

• Turn Your Dreams Into Money – The course covers everything you need to know to make a success of your blog, whether you’re just starting out or you’re part-way through your blogging journey. The course is run by Emma Drew from emmadrew.info. Emma has turned her blog into a six-figure business, so she really knows what she’s talking about! I was able to increase my email subscribers 40x just by following the advice in this course.

If you need ANY help with getting started – let me know, I’d be happy to give you a hand.