people often ask me how did I go from zero to earning a six figure income working from home I will break down how much I was earning at each step of my journey which income streams I tried and the key lessons that I learned so that you can follow the same path and no I didn't hit it big at 15 like some other YouTubers out there I reached this point around my 35th birthday so it's not like I was some kind of Genius I just stayed persistent and I wasn't afraid to try new things even
when they were completely outside of my comfort zone believe me when I say I'm no more special than the average person if I could do it you could do even better now depending on where you live a six figure income might be a lot or in some places you might be barely getting by with a family and kids but for me here in Portugal it was and it still is a very very good income it's something that I never imagined I could achieve when I graduated from University and I was thinking about my future career
path and I'm not sharing this to BR if you met me in real life you probably wouldn't even recognize me in a crowd I don't wear the latest designer clothes and I don't care about flashy things I'm sharing this because videos and blog posts like this one where someone who was just a few step ahead shared their Journey their successes struggles and how they felt about it they helped build my confidence and gave me the courage to start and I remember the way people smiled at me when I said that I was going to quit
my job to make money online they were nice Portugues people so they didn't laugh in my face but their smiles said something along the lines of sure girl you go ahead we'll see you back in the office in 3 months well I never went back to any job after that I also get tons of comments on my videos from people asking what if I don't live in the United States can I still make money online like you guys I don't live in the United States I've never lived there I just visited a couple of times
as a tourist and guess what that hasn't stopped me from earning the majority of my online income by working with clients and companies based in the United States so instead of looking for excuses about why things will not work for you let's focus on finding ways to make it all work just fine so let's talk about my step number one and let's start from the beginning my first job was when I was 14 years old I made a little bit of money by staying an hour or two after school to clean the classroom you cannot
imagine how embarrassing it was at first especially when a few of my classmates saw me doing it uh my mom worked as a kindergarten teacher but her salary was barely enough for us to survive and she was Raising as alone you see it wasn't like a teacher salary in a developed country I grew up in a small country of mova in the aftermath of the Soviet Union where most of the people I knew were poor but it was even worse for teachers and doctors because they were and I believe there still are unfortunately some of
the low most paid jobs in the former Soviet countries what a shame right these are such respected professions that are vital to society but it is what it is the teacher who offered me this cleaning gig told me that I shouldn't be ashamed but proud of myself because it was the first money that I earned through my own hard work no one out of my classmates were making money at the time I've never told this story to anyone before and certainly not to thousands of people like I'm doing now so it stirs up a lot
of emotions but you know I learned one of the most important lessons from this experience one that's helped me get to where I am today it taught me the value of hard work I also had my mom's example to follow because besides working as a teacher she also took extra jobs as a postwoman she worked evening shifts at a supermarket and that's only a few jobs that I could remember now the next stage was when after University when I started working as an editor for online magazines while also pursuing a master's degree in marketing I
worked for other people until I was about 30 but it was actually at 31 when I hit a bit of a midlife crisis like many Millennials I was in my 30s with no savings no house and living in a rented apartment where I couldn't even decide which would be the color of the walls I couldn't even consider myself middle class the idea of having kids at that point in life felt impossible I knew I had to change everything and passed I had been doing the corporate job thing by that time for almost 10 years and
it led me nowhere except the to burnout so I decided I was done working for others I wanted something of my own the biggest lesson I took from that time in my life is that when you work for others you are helping them build their dream life most jobs and careers do not give you that in return sure there are jobs in it or CEOs might be making millions annually but that's something only one in a thousand people or even fewer achieve I definitely wasn't one of those lucky ones but starting my own thing wasn't
an easy mindset shift for me you know I grew up in a society where the word entrepreneur had a negative connotation it was a transitional period from a Soviet planned economy to an open market and back in my childhood it was actually illegal to run a business people would literally go to prison for just making Den in their basement I think deep down I always had the entrepreneurial spirit I was never afraid to try new things or take risks but because of my upbringing and the society that I grew up in I didn't start my
own business until after I turned 13 what made the dream of starting an online business attainable for me was actually the internet and the fact that I learned English which allowed me to look a bit outside of the box and learn from others from people who were years ahe had who had their first computer and maybe access to the internet earlier than I did because um I was actually 17 when we were able to afford our first computer at home with an internet connection I won't go into detail about my corporate experience because it's not
the point of this video I can just say that it did help me build up some of the skills that I'm using later in my own business the rest of it I think we can Skip and move to my my step number three which is when I went from $0 to my first $1,000 a month made online we should actually say it was not from $0 but fromus $100 because that's how I started my blogging journey I was still working full-time and I had to invest about $100 uh in my hosting and the main name
and that was pretty much all my expenses to start a blog and by the way your business doesn't have to be a Blog it was was something I could do because of my corporate background in editing copywriting and SEO it was the easiest thing for me to start but there are so many other business opportunities that you can learn about even here on my channel you can just check my playlist with online business ideas I'll link it up there but having a website is absolutely essential for your growth no matter what business you're thinking about
and you can't have a website without a domain name think of it as your business address on the internet you should look for URLs that stand out and are easy to remember and I've got a suggestion for you do online domains it's the world's second largest new domain extension with over 3.4 million registrations whether you are an offline or an online store you're in Consulting Tech or in any other industry Dot online is perfect for businesses of all sizes unlike com domains which is often unavailable and oversaturated online domains give you a better chance to
get the exact domain name that you want try searching for something short like besom deals.com on name chip this is one of the biggest domain registers and I've been using it for over 7 years to get my own domains you seecom domain is taken but online is available as it will be in many other cases the great news is online has partnered with name chep to offer you an amazing deal you can grab atonline domain for just 98s much lower than most other options out there with name chip you can also get all the tools
that you need to build your online presence including hosting and email so you can focus on growing your business bigger and Bolder visit the first link in the description below to get your online main for an absolute steal of 98 it's name chip.com Anastasia by the end of the first year of blogging I managed to get enough traffic to my blog and get accepted to medine premium ad management company and that gave me my first income report where I made over $1,400 with ads on my blog so like many bloggers I used to document the
growth of my blog through income reports I didn't do them every single month but I did share them during the key milestones and if you're curious you can still find the entire history of those reports on my website these days I don't post them as regularly honestly at a certain point it just got a bit repetitive the income streams stay pretty much the same month after month and the only real difference is the total amount so it didn't feel as valuable to keep updating it the first year was hard because I still worked full-time at
a stressful job and every evening plus most of the weekends I used to spend working on my blog but it was manageable for me because well I already talked about the work ethics at the beginning of the video and here are some screenshots from my Google analytics uh from that month where I experienced a viral traffic Spike from Pinterest that search really helped me achieve incredible ad income right out of the gate and I'm not kidding right then and there I decided to quit my day job and focus full-time on the blog and here is
the thing while working my full-time job I knew my hourly rate and it was so much lower compared to what I was already making in my free time from the blog so I saw huge potential for growth if I could spend more than just a few hours and weekends working on it if you check my income reports for the following months and years you will see that my gut feeling was spot on about that growth potential by late 2018 in my second year of blogging I had a month where I earned over $6,000 and by
then I already monetized my second blog with medine and the majority of that income came from display ads across both of these blogs as you can see in my second year of blogging ad income became my top Revenue stream I have noticed the same Trends happens with many other bloggers who share their income reports another common pattern that I've seen in traffic sources is that in the first year at least a lot of bloggers get most of their traffic from Pinterest that's because Google SEO takes a lot longer to gain traction usually about 2 years
before you see significant results a brand new site has no domain Authority making it hard to rank for popular keywords on Google now Pinterest on the other hand doesn't care about your site's domain Authority it acts like a search engine that displays image results to users and it's much easier to get traffic from Pinterest quickly plus sometimes you can even get traffic from Google through Pinterest if your Pinterest images or boards start ranking in Google searches this is common in niches Like Home Decor or recipes fashion where images often show up in search results so
so your pins might rank on Google even before your website does for the same keywords there are so many benefits to free Pinterest traffic for new bloggers if you're new to this feel free to sign up for my free Pinterest master class I'll leave a link to it um up there and also in the description below on this step I finally realized that I'm never going back to an office I felt so much confidence in myself as a person who actually achieved something I took the risk I started from zero and I was able to
work from home and increase my income month after month now step number four was when about 2 years into blogging I was that 35-year-old who was already running a six figure business online but I've seen a lot of drama in the blogging world you know all these algorithm changes it's not always just going up and up and up sometimes websites with even solid Authority can suddenly lose their traffic overnight it might bounce back sometime later it might take a year to recover and I personally had a scary moment when Pinterest got my domain blocked so
suddenly all traffic from all the pins I ever saved went to zero I appealed of course and they restored It 2 or 3 weeks later and they confirmed that the algorithm has gone a bit crazy and it affected at that time a lot of legit websites my traffic bounced back back up but it was scary you know I realized that I shouldn't keep all my acts in the same basket I had to diversify income streams and platforms so in addition to my display ads on the blogs I started this YouTube channel and I started focusing
more on affiliate marketing and if you would like to know what are the best paying affiliate niches that are at the same time good for creating content with AI tools then check out my recent video that I linked up there ino in the info icon it will help you understand how to make money with your blog faster even if you have a small audience then I also released several small digital products like ebooks templates and I made the first version of my Pinterest course the best part about digital products is that they are easily scalable
you can create them once and then you can sell as many copies as you want to without extra efforts or extra expenses around that time I published two income reports one where I made $25,000 and my biggest month so far was when I earned over $40,000 I hit that number because of a spike in core sales it was in 2020 along with the sales from other products that I promoted as an affiliate during uh back then it was a Black Friday sale you see 2020 turned out to be a great year for my business in
spite of the lockdowns and all the chaos that started that year fast forward to now I have a stable sixf figure business that has been active for over 7 years now making money with display ads with affiliate income digital products and brand deals between my blogs and this YouTube channel my life has changed so much from where I started in 2017 in Just 2 years after leaving that day job my husband and I we were able to afford our own house we like to travel and we can afford the luxury of having a child and
I mean it because children are beautiful additions to our lives that require at the same time a lot of attention and a lot of resources we can also help our parents when they need some support as they're getting older and I want you to know that I'm by no means any special it took me almost a decade to get in the right mindset to start my own business you don't have to waste so much time and if this video motivated you enough to start your own business why don't you hit the like button and subscribe
for more of my videos and you know what I discovered the best businesses to start this year uh the video is linked up there so you can watch it next I'll see you in that next one
