Last Updated on October 17, 2020 by Emma @ Making and Saving Money
I love blogging! For me it’s the ideal side hustle that combines my personal interest, with my desire to help people, while also creating a semi-passive income stream.
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My blogging story
I’ve procrastinated about starting a blog for years! I’ve always enjoyed writing from a young age and quite fancied the idea of writing some books ‘when I grew up’. Fast forward to my corporate career and writing was always a strong element of the roles I took on; everything from writing speeches for the CEO, to internal crisis communications, to Boards papers; you name it, I did it!
In 2020, I got the itch to start writing more formally again and started creating articles for clients. The thought of creating my own blog came up again but it wasn’t until COVID-19 turned everything upside down that I realised the time was NOW. So many of my friends and contacts were struggling to find work and I realised I knew a lot of information that could help them. I go continually frustrated that I didn’t have a central repository of that information to point them to so makingandsavingmoney.com was born!
How can you earn money blogging?
One of the great things about a blog is that there are so
many ways that you can create income streams from it, including:
- Affiliate marketing – promoting other products and services to gain a commission
- Offering courses – turn your expertise into an online course that will help others
- Advertising revenue – one you have a decent amount of traffic coming to your site you can join an advertising network and get paid for adverts to show on your site
- Paid posts – brands with products and services that are relevant to your audience may pay you to write about them
- Get other work – a blog can build your personal brand and open up paid consultancy, interviews, speaking gigs etc
How much money can you earn from a blog?
Bloggers earn anything from zero to seven figures depending on whether they are consistent with their content and monetise their writing through one of the options I mentioned above.
If you are looking at blogging as a side hustle, it’s very realistic to reach £500 to £2000 a month within 12 months and scale from there.
How do you create a blog?
The most important thing is to just get started. The biggest barrier for bloggers tends to be procrastination and thinking that they need to do umpteen courses before they write their first post. You only need to do two things:
- Pick your blog topic, which is also known as your niche.
- Create your blog. This was the piece that scared me the most because I had no clue how to create a blog website. Thankfully one of my friends recommended a website creation and training platform called Wealthy Affiliate which has made everything so much easier!
The one-stop-shop for bloggers: Wealthy Affiliate
The fact that you are reading this article right now is testament to Wealthy Affiliate. I am not the most patient or tech savvy person, so finding a site that gave me easy to following training that enabled me to buy a domain name and have my blog up and running in a few hours was AMAZING!
I joined Wealthy Affiliate through their free membership; it’s good to get a feel for the style of the training and the community before committing too heavily. I liked the fact that they do not make you hand over card details for the free trial, so there’s no automatic upgrade.
I got so much value from the free trial days that I decided to upgrade to premium membership which gives you access to the following:
- Comprehensive training
- A tool that helps you find relevant affiliate opportunities
- Hosting for up to 25 websites
- Choose from 3,000 plus website designs
- Technical support
- A writing platform that helps you create nice looking blogs with graphics
- Keyword selection support
- Supportive community of other bloggers at different stages of their journeys who you can learn from
The downsides of blogging
Like all side hustles and ways to make money, there are some disadvantages of blogging:
- You need to write, a lot! If you don’t enjoy the writing side, the other option is to employ someone to ghostwrite for you which will add additional costs to your business.
- Many of your friends and family will simply not understand what you are spending your time doing and will not see it as a legitimate way to make money.
- It takes time to build an audience and to see the income coming it. It’s very different to a job where you know you are going to get a consistency salary payment at the end of each month. Here you are your own boss.
The advantages of blogging
For me, blogging is the ideal way to make money because:
- I spend my time writing about something that I am passionate about and know that my content helps people to change their financial future for the better.
- It gives me the opportunity to create multiple streams of income within one business.
- I can blog from anywhere in the world.
- I don’t have to dress up and be in front of a camera! I could blog all day in my pyjamas if I really wanted to!
- Once I’ve written the content, that is online forever and becomes a source of passive income. Yes, I may have to go back in and edit articles so they stay up-to-date, but essentially it’s job done.
Today is the best day to start blogging!
If you’ve been considering starting a blog my advice is to give it a go; you have nothing to lose and you may just find a way to unleash a new passion, connect with new people and change some lives.
The Wealthy Affiliate free trial gives you a risk-free way to dip your toe into the water.
Happy blogging!
This post contains affiliate links. Affiliate links mean that if you click through to a website and register or purchase something from some links on this blog, I may get a commission from that sale at no extra cost to you. Any commissions I receive help to fund this blog.