How to Monetize your Blog and Make Money Blogging Fast!

I received a question from one of my readers and my response ended up in this 1500-word post. Maryann, I hope you are reading this as I promised you a detailed reply to your questions 🙂

So, just like many of you guys, Maryann is on the fence now before starting her first blog. She asked me for suggestions or guidance as to how to prioritize all of the social media that she will need in order to have the best chance at reaching her goals.  The word GOALs made my morning, and I was so happy to reply to her email.

Maryann wrote me she wants to start a blog which will not only cover her blogging expenses but also support her family.

That’s the spirit! I love when people know WHY they start a blog and what is their priority number one. It’s not a way to spend free time or share something about your hobbies once a month when you are in a good mood.

Her goal is to make money blogging. That’s such a relief for me as I know HOW to talk to Maryann. Her perspective on blogging is the same as mine. I am blogging to achieve the lifestyle I dream about and to help my family.

For me, it’s so much easier to share my recommendations with people who have the same mentality.

I will tell them how I reached my 172, 000 pageviews with the first blog in 10 months, and how I’ve got 60,000 page views in 2 months with my second blog… and I will tell them to focus on growing traffic fast – and they will appreciate this piece of most valuable advice. And try to use the fastest route to success. Because it works.

They will not talk about how they want their blog to be a mirror of their eternal soul, and that they need to make something so great that their grand-grand-grand children would be proud of them. In fact, they will not talk at all.

They will just make the first step, the second, the third… and will learn to be successful bloggers along the way.

As you may know, if you follow me for a while now, for starters, your blogging expenses don’t have to be high. Depends on which hosting company you choose and whether you decide to use a premium WordPress theme. I recommend this hosting because it’s ideal for beginners – the price is the most affordable, and it’s a leading hosting company with 24-hour support, 7 days a week. This hoster also offers a free domain name (first year free) if you register hosting with them, and a free SSL-certificate (lifetime).

You can use this handy Bluehost’s tool to check whether the domain you are thinking about is available:

In this post, I decided to be generous like never before.

I will share with you my exact formula of growing a blog from 0 to a stable income fast. I tested this on my two sites so I can tell you guys, this really works. Why I’m so generous sharing the formula?

I just realized that whatever I share, it will work only for those of you who actually want to achieve their goals. Who doesn’t know why they are starting a blog, all this info will be just a white noise. The formula will only reach those who have enough reasons to actually put it into action.

The income level I reached with the blog anastasiablogger.com is not even close to $100,000 a month (yet :)), but it’s something that most of you would love to have, even as a side hustle. I make around $1500 – 2000 on this blog monthly, mainly from Mediavine ads. Yes, ads are basically passive income. The second significant income source is affiliate products. You can see all the details in my January 2018 income report when I made $2085,34.

I started my second blog on Feb 5, 2018. It was about 1 year since I started anastasiablogger.com. One year in the game, and I decided to scale my blogging business. And it worked faster than I ever expected!

My new blog momshealth.co has grown from 0 pageviews on Feb 5, to over 60,000 monthly pageviews by April, 16.

By the way, if you have a new blog and not much traffic on it yet, you can still monetize it way better with Ezoic than you could with Google Adsense. Application to Ezoic is free and you might be making 1.5-2 times more than with Adsense even on a small traffic volume. 

How am going to monetize it? You got me right, with ads for starters. My goal is to have two sites with stable ad income around $3000 in total so I can dedicate more time to creating my own digital products.

I’m currently in the application process, it’s not fast, so meanwhile, I run Adsense there. You know how low Adsense RPMs are? Well, I can tell you, with the same traffic, Mediavine pays you 3-5 times better (depends on the niche).  So, I’m looking forward to getting my second site accepted to Mediavine too.

My exact blog monetization scheme which I follow for the two of blogs is as follows:

1. Grow traffic fast with a broadly niched blog writing about anything that is popular on Pinterest – DIY, recipes, holiday, moms and babies stuff, weight loss, diets, money saving and money making, etc.. Maybe not everything in one blog, but also possible.
2. Reach 25,000 sessions a month to apply to Mediavine. You are getting there around $10 per 1000 sessions. With 30,000 sessions you will make about $300-$400 a month from ads. With 90, 000 sessions you can make about $900 – $1200, depending on the season and your site’s metrics, because RPM varies even within the same niche.
3. Add affiliate links and create more content with affiliate offers to have an extra income source. In some niches, affiliate income can be higher than ad income.
4. Create a digital product, most probably, an eBook, but also could be something like a binder, a checklist, a troubleshooter, a mini-course by email or a webinar. I would start with a lower price range (up to $20) smaller product which doesn’t take too much time to create. This way I would test on a smaller product if in this niche people are ready to purchase digital products.

I would choose which product it should be based on which topic seems to work the best on my broadly niched blog and what I can learn about fast to become an expert on that topic.

See, my formula seems pretty simple. The question is, how do you implement all of this? Where do you get the traffic?

From Pinterest! Currently, this is the fastest way to attract traffic to a new blog. So, focus on Pinterest.

You really need to master Pinterest to get traffic fast.

As you start a blog, you probably should create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, Google +, etc. But do it JUST to have the usernames reserved for your blog, don’t spend much time on those as a beginner!

Side note: You can use Facebook groups with reciprocation threads though (people will repin your pins and you need to reciprocate) as an additional boost for your pins. 

I don’t spend time on any other network except Pinterest, and I will only start doing it when I’m satisfied with my traffic stability and have time for those extra social media accounts.

The amount of traffic these other networks can bring you is not even close to Pinterest. The only reason I would put some effort into those is that when you apply to some sponsorship influencer platforms, sponsors prefer to work with bloggers who have established accounts in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, not Pinterest only.

I didn’t know what I was doing with my first blog, and it took me 10 months to quit my day job. If I knew from starters, what I was doing, if I had a step-by-step instruction for the Pinterest traffic generation machine, like the one I had in my head by the time I started my second blog, I would be able to quit much earlier.

P.S. Updated on May 1, 2018

Since I figured out how to get consistent traffic from Pinterest, I decided I have to try to do it with a brand new blog and see if I use my strategies – how fast I’ll be able to get my site to a significant traffic level. So I started my second blog in Feb 2018, and the new blog momshealth.co already hit 74,000 monthly pageviews in less than 90 days! And again, almost all the traffic comes from Pinterest.

If you are interested in growing your Pinterest traffic fast, you can get yourself set up for success with my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course. It’s over 6 hours of video training packed with my personal know-hows and Pinterest hacks.

I can guarantee that at least 50% of the Pinterest tips and tricks I share with you in the course, are absolutely exclusive and you will not find them in any other Pinterest course.

If you don’t need to grow fast and don’t mind working at your 9-5 job for a lot longer, you can totally keep reading my emails and posts because I also share tons of free advice. It’s just a matter of how FAST you want to grow your blog and income.

Found some of these blog monetization tips useful? Save THIS PIN to your Blog board on Pinterest and check the post at any time later.

How to Monetize your Blog and Make Money Blogging Fast!

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Instructions

1. The formula will only reach those who have enough reasons to actually put it into action
2. My new blog momshealth.co has grown from 0 pageviews on Feb 5, to over 60,000 monthly pageviews by April, 16
3. If you are interested in growing your Pinterest traffic fast, you can get yourself set up for success with my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course

Anastasia Blogger

I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.

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