Mini Case Study: Earning $360,000 per Year for… Blogging?!
The best bloggers out there are absolutely killing it, earning far more than most people can even imagine. For example, Ryan Robinson is earning more than $30,000 per month simply from his blog. Not bad, right? Let’s discuss earning income with blogging in greater detail…
In Ryan’s case, it took him over two years to begin generating serious income from his blog. He launched the blog in 2014, and the first monthly income report he published was in 2018 for $9,322.
Generating traffic organically takes time and patience but it can pay off. Ryan says he doesn’t expect a new post to rank on page one of Google any sooner than after six months, if they rank at all.
Blogging will not get you rich overnight, but if you keep at it then you could build to a serious income over time. I began blogging soon after coming online in 2006, at the urging of an early mentor. I was not a writer and not even sure of my niche topic, but I committed to writing a short (250 words) post every day for a month.
My results came slowly at first, but while almost everyone else I knew at the time was giving up and searching for the next best thing, a few of us honed our writing and marketing skills and began earning regular income from our blogs. I now have three blogs – this one, my name site, and one where I share my life experiences and stories that are not related to my business.
Here’s how Ryan has found success:
1: He writes massive 10,000 words posts. These are enormous authority articles that sometimes rank for the most popular of keywords, such as “business ideas” which is a 100,000 monthly search volume keyword.
2: His favorite post is the listicle; huge, exhaustive lists such as ‘101 Business Ideas’ and ‘70 Genius Ways to Make Money Online.’ These posts could easily be Kindle books but he chooses to place them on his site to bring in traffic.
3: His other favorite type of post is the ‘how to’ guide, such as How to Start a Blog and How to Start a Freelancing Business While Working Full Time. These are long, detailed and all-encompassing guides that Google loves to rank high.
4: 92% of his income comes from affiliate sales. His top three affiliate products are A2 Hosting, the autoresponder AWeber, and the now free personal development site, Heroic Optimize.
5: Ryan writes about freelancing and making money online because he’s worked as a freelancer and because there is substantial affiliate income to be made in this niche. He doesn’t recommend choosing a niche just because you love it unless you know ahead of time how you’re going to monetize it. I know from my own experience and from mentoring hundreds of people for more than a decade, monetizing is crucial to your niche choice.
6: Ryan focuses on getting backlinks because Google determines your ‘social status’ with your niche via the number and type of backlinks you have. Some of his backlinks come from major sites such as Hubspot, GoDaddy, Yelp, Money.com, LinkedIn blog and Sitepoint.
7: To get prized backlinks from major players, Ryan schedules a call with them, interviews them and then mentions them in his article. He says this dramatically increases the odds they will back link to you, as opposed to simply writing about someone and then telling them they are mentioned in your article.
8: Ryan continually updates his content and then places an ‘updated on date’ tag next to the title. He does this because Google encourages content creators to continually update their content.
9: He uses personal anecdotes and stories in his articles. He likes to open with a story and continue the personal tone and his own thoughts throughout the article, and it works.
10: Ryan stays focused on earning income with blogging on his primary blog site. He hasn’t started a second and third blog (unlike me!) on other topics and he’s not doing anything outside of this niche. He does, however, still do some freelancing work, which makes sense since he writes about the freelancing experience.
Most of his posts don’t do all that well. Crazy as it might sound, his average blog posts only garner a few hundred views per month. And yet his top 15 posts bring in a flood of traffic that compensates.
You never know which posts are going to explode, which is why you just have to keep writing and doing your best. Sooner or later, you will hit upon posts that drive massive traffic, and that traffic will then discover your other, less popular posts as well.
Perhaps the most important piece of this information on earning income with blogging is that it turns you into a writer, a skill that now accounts for most of my income.
I’m author, blogger, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and would love to connect with you. If you are new to the world of online entrepreneurship please check out my comprehensive training on how to set up Funnels That Click and learn how to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building a lucrative online business.
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