How I built a Six-Figure blog in 12 Months (Lockdown Project)
Back in April of 2020, I wrote a post all about how I started a new site during quarantine. I started this new project at a time when this website, Goats On The road (our baby for the past 8 years), was suffering greatly due to COVID.
Saying it like that makes it sound as though this site actually had COVID.
While it certainly wasn’t that serious, we did suffer some pretty intense losses in traffic and income on this blog (luckily it has mostly recovered now).
It wasn’t so much viewing the income and traffic drop that hurt (although that was a bit uncomfortable I’m not going to lie), it was the thought that our pride and joy, a site we had poured our heart and soul into for nearly a decade, was seemingly dying best in front of us.
Working on my new blog while locked down in Portugal
But this post isn’t a “woe is me” tale of a travel blogger complaining about having no traffic when there are people in much worse situations.
Ani náhodou.
This is a story of a project I started during those dark moments in our blogging career.
A project that breathed new life into our company minds and gave me and Dariece new purpose and goals during a time when there wasn’t much else to do but stay inside and work on the laptops.
I know that a lot of people who read this blog either have their own website/blog or have always thought of starting one.
So I hope this extensive case study will be the inspiration (or the kick in the butt) that so numerous people need to get a new side hustle started.
In this article, I’m going to share with you the progression of the new blog I started a year ago, much the way we did a few years back with our post about Goats On The Road’s progression called “From hobby To Career: The evolution of Our Blog“.
I’ll show you my traffic and income each month and discuss how I was able to grow the site from $0 to $8,483 per month in just 12 months.
I’ll also show you how you can replicate my successes (and avoid common failures) with your own new project, ought to you choose to start a blog today (if you do want to start one, Click here to get my totally free blogging chod).
Note: I share my particular income from my site to inspire others to hopefully start turning their passions into profit through blogging. If you’re not interested in blogging or online entrepreneurship, then this post isn’t for you. check out other amazing travel jobs in our sustaining travel section.
Why Did I start a new Blog?
I’ve been preaching to my students in my Beginner blogger course and my totally free SEO training Course for years that it’s possible to build a new site and grow it to the point that it can earn a good income in a year.
But when I tell it to people who aren’t in my courses, I always had the same pushback.
“Easy for you to say. You started your site 8 years ago when there were hardly any blogs online and there was no competition.”
My rebuttal was always that while the competition is higher these days, so is the opportunity.
With so numerous new companies starting to understand the value of being featured on blogs, it’s simpler than ever to grow and monetize.
Nevertheless, deep down I was also curious to know if I really could create a successful site again. all of those naysayers really got into my head!
Přemýšlel jsem…
“What if Goats On The road was just a fluke?”
We have had quite a few of our blogging students from our courses use our SEO blog growth techniques to grow their sites and quit their jobs to blog full-time, so I knew that the techniques I use still work for new blogs, but I had to show it to myself.
And so, in the middle of March 2020 I started a new site around another topic that I’m passionate about (not travel), and on April 1st, 2020, I published my first post.
How Did I pick a Niche?
This is one of the most essential steps when starting a new blog or website. Every blog needs a niche. Gone are the days of blogging about anything you want to blog about, and still get enough traffic to earn a living.
You need to have a niche.
And I don’t imply just “travel”, or “tech”, or “cooking”. You need to niche down even more than that and be much more specific.
Even Goats On The road wasn’t successful when we were just about travel, so we eventually niched down into remote work and remote jobs that can fund a permanent digital nomad lifestyle.
The passions To profit Method
For my next site, I knew that I needed to be in a niche that I was passionate about.
A lot of people will start a site about anything they see as monetizable, like “bestyogapants.com”, even though they’ve never done a ‘downward dog’.
While that’s absolutely fine and I’m not knocking it, I knew that if I was going to go all-in on this new site, it had to be something that I was interested in, and something that I can earn an income from.
So I went through a few of the hobbies and interests that I have and after a pretty extensive market study, I picked one.
Initial Market Study
Even though I had picked a niche that was quite specific, I needed to make sure of two things.
People were actually searching in Google for this topic
The phrases they searched into Google were potentially lucrative
After a lot of work diving into the competition and the volume of search terms, I knew it was a viable niche to get into.
Monetization Strategy
If I were starting a site just as a hobby to share my stories with pals and family, choosing keywords and then planning a monetization technique wouldn’t matter.
But as I was building this site as a business, I needed to know how I was going to earn that income.
Monetization Methods:
Ads: These days in-content ads (like the ones you see on this page) have become so well-optimized that they are typically a monetization technique in themselves. There are thousands of sites (particularly in the home cooking niche) that earn terrific money with little or no other monetization technique besides lots of traffic and in-content ads. While this was part of my strategy, I certainly planned on diversifying.
Amazon: even though Amazon slashed their commissions at the very start of COVID (had they not, my new site would be over $10,000 per month today), I knew that I could still make a good income from Amazon so it was my #1 affiliate strategie.
Backup Affiliates: Amazon seems to slash their affiliate commissions every 2-3 years, so I needed other affiliates as a backup. I searched around in my niche and fortunately found quite a few. They never convert as well as Amazon because everyone is much more comfortable ordering with their Prime account, but they have higher commissions and longer cookie durations that could bridge the gap a bit ought to Amazon commissions get lowered again.
Sponsors: I knew that the big companies in my space had some money to spend on advertising so I knew that I could get them on board once I had enough traffic and sales numbers. hopefully on an ongoing monthly basis.
YouTube: I hadn’t planned on this from the get-go, but after a couple of months working on the blog, I chose to start a YouTube channel for it as well and hopefully monetize that down the road.
Starting The Website
Starting and developing a site is really easy and this only took me a few hours in total.
I purchased my domain name, paid for hosting ($106 for 3 years using this discount with Bluehost), and picked a beautiful-looking design template for my new site.
Voila, after a few tweaks here and there, I had my site up and running using Elementor. The site is practically the exact same design and set-up now as it was the day I started it.
Cíl
It’s always essential to imagine goals when starting any new project and for me with a new blog/business, I always have a purpose goal and a monetary goal.
Purpose Goal
The purpose of this new site was to share my passion with my readers and hopefully help them to be much more sustainable. I also had a couple of traffic goals which helped me to guarantee that I was reaching enough people to have an impact.
My traffic goal for this new site was 25,000 sessions after the first year. I actually doubled that — which is fantastic.
Monetary Goal
There are numerous ways to monetize a site or blog in every niche. When it concerned monetization with this site I had two goals in mind. The “Acceptable” goal and the “Best Case” goal.
Acceptable goal ($1,500 / month): I told myself that I would be pleased if this site made $1,500+ per month after one year. That would show that you can earn a minimalist life-supporting income from blogging in a year. And, when living in a much more inexpensive country, that money goes pretty far.
Best case goal ($3,000 / month): While I’d be pleased with $1,500, I really wanted this site to earn $3,000 per month or much more after a year. I figured at that point it’s pretty much a full-time-job-replacing income in 12 months and that would be amazing.
Hiring Writers
I know a lot of people are going to read this and think that it’s a substantial investment to hire writers, and it is.
If you’re thinking of starting your first blog, you’ll probably skip this step because you can write all of the messages yourself, as long as you know how to write a terrific blog post.
My new site averages přibližně 5 zpráv publikovaných týdně. Tyto zprávy mají průměrný počet slov přibližně 2 000 slov.
Pomocí technik produktivity a nástrojů, které poučžu v mém kurzu pro začátečníky blogger, je docela možné dokončit 2 000-slovní příspěvek za 2 hodiny.
To znamená, že pokud byste měli psát pro sebe místo toho, abyste platili za spisovatele, museli byste strávit dalších 10 hodin týdně prací na svém novém blogu.
V mém případě, i kdybych napsal všechny zprávy sám, na tomto webu bych stále pracoval méně než 20 hodin týdně.
Ale neměl jsem luxus času!
Také provozuji 3 další weby a 2 blogovací kurzy, které každý týden zabírají zbytek mé pracovní doby (navíc plánuji cestovat nepřetržitě, když je to možné).
Takže jsem se rozhodl najmout spisovatele ze dvou důvodů:
Jak jsem řekl … neměl jsem čas.
Mohl bych najmout lidi, kteří mají mnohem více znalosti než já.
Kde jsem tedy našel tyto spisovatele? Našel jsem je 2 způsoby.
Upwork
Upwork je největší komunitou nezávislých pracovníků kdekoli online.
Do vyhledávacího pole jsem napsal ve svém výklenku na Upwork a našel jsem asi 10 výsledků, které vypadaly, jako by se vešly do účtu, což nebylo hodně vzhledem k tomu, že na platformě je přes 18 milionů nezávislých pracovníků.
Jen jsem je najal nejlépe pryč. Vytvořil jsem rozsáhlé šablony blogových příspěvků, abych se ujistil, že sledují všechny kroky k psaní úžasných blogových příspěvků SEO.
Mým plánem bylo nechat je, aby tyto šablony pečlivě sledovaly, a tak jsem jim poslal příklady, aby se podíval. Pokud by zjistili, že by mohli naplnit šablonu designu svou vlastní odborností, přemístění na další krok.
Dále jsem rozhovor s každým z spisovatelů pouhým chatováním tam a zpět s nimi na Upwork. Především jsem se chtěl ujistit, že to byli úplní odborníci na témata, která jsem pokrýval, a musel jsem se rozhodnout, který z nich bude napsat, který obsah.
Nakonec jsem zúžil 4 spisovatele, kteří s námi začali pracovat.
? Pro tip: Budování motivovaného a věrného týmu je nezbytné. Připisuji hlášení hodně úspěchu této společnosti se skupinou odborníků, které jsem byl schopen dát dohromady. Pokud najímáte lidi pro vaši firmu, nespěchejte to. Tým je základem společnosti, kterou vytváříte.
Tady je malý hack. Pokud hledáte spisovatele pro svůj blog, zadejte do Google Niche a poté zcela bezplatnou platformu blogů, jako je blogger.com nebo wordpress.org (tj. „Paintball blog blogger.com“).
Pak se podívejte na jejich blogy, přečtěte si několik zpráv a pokud se zdají jako dobře fit, můžete je kontaktovat a najmout je.
Důvod, proč do vyhledávání přidám zcela bezplatnou platformu blogů, jako je blogger.com, je to, že to znamená, že již bloguje na plný úvazek. Pokud někdo již bloguje na plný úvazek a vydělává příjmy, pravděpodobně nemá volný čas na volné noze.
Nalezením bloggerů na blogger.com, wordpress.org a podobně jsem byl schopen najít hobby bloggery, kteří měli zájem vydělat trochu vedlejších peněz blogování o věcech, o kterých již psali zdarma.
Takto jsem našel několik svých spisovatelů a pro mě to fungovalo velmi dobře.
Blog se rozběhne
Po několika týdnech s mými čtyřmi novými spisovateli se dostaneme do houpačky věcí. Každý pátek odesílají 3 zprávy a já trávím víkend úpravou zpráv a jejich plánováním.
Publikační kalendář, když jsme byli na publikaci Max
Když jsem neupravoval blogové příspěvky, oslovil jsem další weby v mém výklenku a kontakty, které jsem měl prostřednictvím blogování na kozách na silnici, abych dělal zprávy hostu a získal jméno svého nového blogu.
Celkem jsem udělal asi 35 hostujících příspěvků