You can’t make money blogging can’t you yes you can let me tell you so I’ve been blogging for about nine years now my blog goodfinancialcents.com personal finance blog when I started this blog in 2008 I didn’t know anything about blogging and the story that I share a lot is that I thought that blogging meant that you were on MySpace remember that thing called MySpace but the truth is I hadn’t know anything about blogging but yet I was determined to start my blog now I’m a financial adviser so initially the blog was started so that I could attract new clients to my financial planning practice so I wrote content I published blog posts all trying to market myself and to get more visibility that people would see me and want to hire me but then something funny happened and I started to connect with other personal finance bloggers and as I connected with them they shared with me that they were making money from their blogs and at the time that blew me away because I didn’t know you can make money from blogging how do you make money from blogging that just sounds weird but then one of these bloggers confided in me and shared how much he was making and he told me he was making between 30,000 to 40,000 dollars from his blog now for most of you making thirty to forty thousand dollars from a website that’s pretty awesome I mean that’s almost an annual salary for many people but here’s what blew me away he wasn’t making thirty to forty thousand dollars a year from his blog he was making thirty to forty thousand dollars a month from his blog how much did you say yes you heard that right thirty to forty thousand dollars a month from a website now that got my attention so I started to learn some of the basics of how to monetize my blog so I learned how ads work I learned how a filius worked and eventually I learned how to create digital products different ways that I couldn’t monetize my site and actually get paid for writing and I’m not even that good of a writer but here’s some of the top as I learned from monetizing my blog and making my first $1,000 so the first thing that I learned is that search engine optimization matters and if you don’t know what SEO means or search engine optimization it basically just means when you go to google and type in some phrase like red hot dogs I don’t know why you’d be googling red hot dogs but whatever whatever shows up in the top of the rankings that is what SEO or search engine optimization stands for now when I first started my blog I want to rank for Jeff rose because that’s my name don’t wear it out and before I started my boy if you google Jeff Rose you didn’t find me you found Jeff Rose the Oregon superintendent Jeff Rose the golf polo shirt maker and Jeff Rose the actor and no it’s not me nothing I’m a pretty good actor how dare you talk to my mom that way so I figured if somebody wanted to hire me as their financial advisor and they went to Google and put in Jeff froze and they didn’t see me that wouldn’t be a good thing so I wanted to be found but then it hit me if somebody doesn’t know who Jeff rose is and they want to hire a financial advisor they’re not gonna Google Jeff Rose so I started to think what would potential customers or clients type into Google to find me or to find a financial advisor so the first key word that I targeted was financial planner Illinois I wanted to be the top in Google for that term now you can pay Google through Google AdWords advertising to be at that top position but I didn’t want to pay $25 or $35 every time somebody clicked a link and came to my website because I didn’t know if they were gonna call me pick up the phone and shoot me an email or want to schedule an appointment so I wanted to be found the free way because free is so much better so I learned the tactics and strategy that I needed to be found for financial planner Illinois and sure enough within I think 2 or 3 months when you went to Google and typed in financial planner Illinois oh there I was I was at the top of the search result a position that I’ve held to this day so once I figured out how that worked I started to think about other ways that I could be found for different search results so I started to think about what are other terms that people would type into Google if they’re trying to find a financial advisor and I started down this path of writing articles about 401ks and Roth IRAs and how to invest and how much life insurance do I need now some of these worked and I was found and other ones didn’t work because there are other sites to outranked me but nonetheless I was showing to Google that I had a quality website and they were putting me at the top of the rankings now remember I was doing all of this before I realized that I could monetize my site so I was trying to rank for a lot of search terms that were relevant for people trying to hire financial advisor though we’re also relevant if I wanted to insert some sort of advertising and get paid so as my search engine traffic increased I added what is called Google Adsense or Google ads to the website if you’ve been to any web site I guarantee you’ve seen Google ads someway somehow or if you went to Google and typed in some search you’ve seen a Google ad how this works is that you sign up for a free Google Adsense account and then you get Google’s code you copy that paste that into your website and then Google will match which companies are willing to advertise for different search terms that are found on your site and one example I could give you is that if somebody wanted to buy a life insurance and you put that Google essence on your code if there’s a big insurance company like MetLife John Hancock and if they’re going to advertise for a certain keyword they would then start a count with Google and by you pacing that code on your site you’re going to get matched with whatever advertiser is willing to pay the top dollar it’s by far one of the easiest ways that you can monetize your site all you got to do is write the content copy and paste the code from Google Adsense paste it on your site and then poof you’re done now if there is a trick you have to rank for these search terms and that’s something we can talk about at another time now by copying and pasting this Google Adsense code on my website I didn’t start getting checked for $1,000 immediately I don’t remember exactly about pretty sure like the first month I might have made 10 or 15 bucks maybe $the next month it went up to 30 or 40 eventually I got my first 100 dollar payout and if you get a hundred dollar check from Google it’s sweet because it’s like it’s money in the mail thanks Google I got $100 but as I started to write more content and start to rank for other search terms and my traffic increased then I also saw my revenue increase and within six or seven short months I was making $500 a month and within about a year I was making over a thousand dollars a month all from Google Adsense now mind you I didn’t know what I was doing I was still trying to figure it out but by networking with other bloggers understanding some of the basics of search engine opposition I was able to start making some extra money at the time making $1,000 extra a month was pretty sweet another method that was able to take that Adsense revenue to the next level is something that I would call the crystal ball method now this is hard so if you are not really involved in industry where you’re plugged into what’s going on and have a decent understanding of what’s going to happen in the future this might be hard to do but here’s how it worked for me so back in 2009 there was this thing called the Roth IRA conversion and I knew that in 2010 that the IRS was going to change the code and how this worked now I wasn’t the only one that knew this every single financial advisor in the country knew this every single and investment brokerage or investment firm and knew this too but I got lucky or I had the foresight how do you want to look at it I wrote this blog post about this Roth IRA conversion in March of 2009 well before anybody else wrote about it so as 2010 approached all sudden I was getting tons and tons of traffic from everybody that was searching this term and I was able to take an advantage of that traffic for the entire 2010 year so back in 2010 if you googled Roth IRA conversion you didn’t find fidelity you didn’t find Vanguard what you found was my blog goodfinancialcents.com unthe almost making $5,000 in one month now the crystal ball method is probably something you can’t do every single month and you might not be able to do even every single year but other opportunities I’ve been will find this with is the Facebook IPO the Twitter IPO snapchat IPO these are all occurrences that we knew were happening and a lot of people were talking about it so whether it was writing a blog post or recording a video talking about these I was able to capitalize on that so whatever topic that you decide to blog about in that industry what is something that is contentiously going to change that no one else has wrote about yet that you can be the first one to write about and you don’t even have to be the first person to write about it you could be the second a third person but if you publish a good piece of content that’s better than anything else out there then you can potentially outrank them and also get more social shares out of it so for the longest time Google Adsense was the only way that I was making money from my blog and when I was making over $1,000 $2,000 a month I really didn’t see any other reason to change it but when I started to once again talk to these other bloggers and how they were monetizing their site I realized that I was missing out on even more money so that’s when I started incorporate affiliates onto the site with affiliate marketing you’re representing a company that offers a product or service that you believe in preferably one that you’ve tried out yourself and if you write about them and mention them on your blog if one of your readers clicks that link and then opens an account with that affiliate or buys a product through that link from that affiliate then you get paid a small commission now in the investment world that was so easy for me because there’s so many different online investment options one of the first affiliates that I signed up for was Scottrade now Scottrade does not exist anymore they merge with another investment company but they’re based out of st.
Louis which was close to me at the time now at the time I didn’t have a Scottrade account so I didn’t really feel comfortable talking about them or recommending them so what I did was I opened an account what’s contray I went online open an account put some money in so that I could actually experience what it felt like to be a Scottrade customer and let me tell you I was impressed with the whole experience the next day I got a phone call from a branch manager that was 45 minutes from me offering to meet with me to help me make my first investment now I told them I was a financial advisor and I was just kind of doing my own research on their platform but they were still gracious enough to answer any questions I had and help me with anything that I needed so after being a customer for a while I was able to understand how their platform worked and then I could share with others what my experience was I recorded a video on how to open a Scottrade account a behind-the-scenes tutorial I wrote blog posts about it I answered reader questions on opening account with Scottrade and how it compared to other online and best platforms out there so because I was a customer of Scottrade and wrote a lot of content on them and published videos about them they end up becoming a very good affiliate if all I had it was Adsense on my blog and I didn’t have that affiliate relationship I still would have made money but I can roughly estimate that I made five times maybe 10 times as much because of that affiliate relationship so what I’ve learned about affiliate marketing is that you don’t want to be scummy you don’t want to be a douche bag make sure you’re representing affiliates that you believe in and that you trust if you’re just signing up to be an affiliate for some companies just to earn a quick buck your readers are gonna know they’re going to figure it out and you don’t have to be professional to recommend an affiliate company yes I’m a financial planner so me opening a countless Scottrade maybe I had some credit to it but I know a lot of personal clients bloggers that are not financial advisors that have a day job that have open accounts with places like Scottrade other online investment platforms and just by showing their readers what they did and how they did it they are now perceived as being expert because they’ve done it and that’s all you have to do become an expert with that affiliate by opening account by giving it a try so that you can share that experience with your readers so between Google Adsense and representing different affiliate companies I was able to take a blog that had zero readers that was making no money and go from making nothing to $1,000 a month five thousand dollars a month up to 15 to 20 thousand dollars a month now it’s grown a lot since then and we’ve added a lot of different monetization channels but Adsense or some sort of banner ads and affiliates just by getting started with those two different methods you can easily make an extra $1,000 a month in fact I want to show you how to do it I’ve created a free email challenge called the make 1k challenge and I want to show you how to start your blog and make your first $1,000 I’m going to show you the exact blueprint that I use that I talked about today to go from making nothing to making my first 1,000 dollar payout so if you want to make $1,000 from your blog you can go to make one cake challenge com sign up for the free email challenge cuz free is awesome I don’t like to pay for stuff it’s free sign up and you’ll be immediately enrolled in this challenge because I want to help you make that first $1000 I want to change your life I want you to start something new that excites you and also inspires others so check out make one cake challenge calm and let’s get started take care but then one needs balls and then you get Google’s code I don’t know if that’s funny about whatever cut that part out real quick now it’s grown a lot
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