Check out July blogging income and these four simple steps to make money blogging from home
This is my seventh blogging income report and I’m still amazed at how quickly the blogs have become profitable. I’ve been blogging for just under two years and freelancing for a few years before that and am already making about 60% more than my last year as an economist in a traditional job.
Whoever said you can’t make money blogging from home?
Up to now I’ve been separating my blogging and freelancing income reports. I’m combining them this month because I’ve got a few other projects and couldn’t fit in two separate articles.
I started posting my monthly blogging income here on PeerFinance101 but then moved them to my Work from Home blog. It’s all about the strategies you can use to make money from home, some requiring less than 10 hours a week to make thousands a month! Check out all the blogging and freelancing income reports to see how I’ve grown the business and pick up some ideas for your own work from home biz.
I’ll walk through my July income below and then outline a simple four-step process to creating your own work from home income stream at the bottom of the page.
Get started on your own blog with this limited-time offer from GoDaddy. Click here to get started for just $1 a month.
Blogging is a REAL Job, and I’ve got the Checks to Prove It!
So last month was definitely part of the summer blogging income slump with just over $2,600 from the blogs and self-publishing. I had a long-term contract start up on the freelancing side so still made just over $8,000 on the month.
It’s one of the defining characteristics of the new ‘gig economy’ in which we live. Your blogging business can boom one month only to see income fall pretty hard the next. Stick with it though and even your lows keep rising.
Even the $400 hit in June blogging income was still more than a grand over the previous big down-month in February.
Your blogging income won’t be the same every month like a salary from a normal employer but you have control over the growth. Traditional jobs will hold you back to a 3% to 5% annual pay raise. My blogging income jumped 247% in July against the same month last year!
The $3,078 I made on six blogs in July breaks down from:
- $1,557 from seven books published on Amazon Kindle. This continues to be the best source of passive income I’ve ever found. It’s a great complement to blogging income. Check out our resource guide on how to publish a book to get started.
- $1,021 from affiliate sales and Google Adsense. While book sales tend to be pretty consistent, affiliate sales jump around more and tend to be lower in the summer.
- $500 from sponsored posts. These are starting to increase with the help of a virtual assistant that is sourcing clients.
I booked $4,500 on freelancing during the month. I have been an investment analyst on StreetAuthority for four years and now write weekly for three of their websites. In June, we started a bi-monthly crowdfunding newsletter for the new equity crowdfunding opportunity.
When the books were closed on July, I ended up making just over $7,500 on the blogs and freelancing for the month.
Remember, this is pretax and I have to pay employer’s share of payroll taxes as well as my own. You can deduct the employer’s share of taxes from your income as a business expense but taxes still end up being about 25% depending on your bracket.
Visitors to the six blogs surged to 39,949 from just over 30k in the prior month as the new blogs started to build a following. I did some social media marketing in July which boosted readership by a couple of thousand so am expecting August numbers to be about the same if not a little lower.
Simple Steps to Make Money Blogging from Home
I’m still amazed at how quickly this all has grown and wondering why I didn’t start blogging years ago.
I promised a few simple steps to get started and make money blogging and we’ll get to that. A warning though, don’t think that because the steps are simple that it will all happen overnight. A lot of blogging is just putting in the time and writing new material. It will take six months to a year before you really start seeing the money come in.
Remember, your work from home business doesn’t have to start as a full-time job. Work through the four steps below devoting maybe five or ten hours a week at first. That’s going to help build your business gradually without having to rely on it to pay the bills.
- Check out our resource guide on how to start a blog and write one post a week for six months. Write about something you love doing and don’t worry about making money or traffic to your blog. After six months, you’ll start to see bigger increases in monthly traffic.
- Use this 6-month Blogging Cheat Sheet as a game plan for how to grow traffic and make money blogging in your home-based business.
- Plan out a self-published book and post each chapter as a blog article each week or two. This will give you something to post on the blog and you’ll have a book to publish in less than six months.
- By the time you are ready to transition to full-time in a year or two, you’ll have a ton of experience in writing, social media market and all things blogging to start freelancing your skills.
Thomas Edison said 99% of ‘genius’ is the perspiration you put into the work and it’s no different for work at home jobs. You can make a lot of money blogging but expect to work just as hard…or harder than you ever did at a traditional job.
The upside is that you control your own income. Work harder and get paid more. It’s as simple as that.
If you’re still undecided about getting started blogging, I’d recommend just working on a simple blog at first. You can start a blog on GoDaddy for as little as $1 a month by clicking on this special offer. At that rate, you can try it out without spending much more than your time.
The reason you want to get started now is because so much of the business is just time. Your blog’s age is a factor in Google search ranking and it takes time to develop a website. Even if you start out slowly, that extra few months is going to give you all the experience you need when you decide to really get to it.