Do people actually make money blogging? Some make six-figure income with blogs, some make a living while spending as much time as they need with their families and some just start a blog and close it at the end of the first year because they don't even make enough to pay for the next year's hosting. If you don't want to be one of the last type of bloggers, you need to be very strategic about blogging and making money with your website.

I'm here to share my experience building a blog from zero to over $8,000 in monthly income. Hi! I'm Anastasia of AnastasiaBlogger.

com and I started blogging about two years ago. By the end of the first year, I've had my first month when I made about 1500 dollars with my blog my average monthly income is now about $6000 and my best month so far I made over $8300! This is the Ultimate guide for how to make money blogging in 2019!

Just seven steps that will make all the difference between a success and a failure. I'll do my best to keep this video short and nice even though it includes all what I learned about making money with blogs in my two years of experience. So, the first step is decide about your niche for the blog.

Since we're now talking only about profitable blogs and not blogs that are just a hobby we need to look for blog niches which can actually bring your money. Based on human nature people are always ready to pay for information about health, personal finance, making money online. And you probably know that Pinterest is my best source of traffic.

And I can tell you also which niches work the best for driving traffic from Pinterest - these are home decor and DIY, recipes, parenting, specific diets like paleo, keto, vegan and others. Lifestyle, beauty and fashion, relationship advice. And something I want you to keep in mind is that it's very likely that your topic might be changing over time.

When you start a blog and when you think about a name for your blog, which ideally should have something to do with your niche of course, just don't overthink it. And don't choose a name that is too narrow. I'll explain what I mean.

For example, if we take diets. A few years ago, everyone was crazy about Weight Watchers diet, then about paleo die, then about the keto diet. And if you pick a name that defines one specific diet, it will make it harder for you to change the direction and start working on content related to other niches.

The second step: pick your blog name (also called domain name). Your blog name and domain name essentially is the same thing. And several rules apply to the process of picking a domain name.

First, it should be short and easy to remember. You have to avoid using numbers and hyphens in domain name. I also want to tell you don't use weirdly spelled or misspelled words just because the keyword you wanted to to target is not available as a domain name.

Because wrong spelling will always confuse people. And domain names can be descriptive and they can define the niche or the main topic of your blog. They can also be completely unrelated to the niche.

They can be just something original that stands out in your niche and your domain name can be just using your your own name as a brand. And the last option is quite convenient by the way when you're not sure what your blog is going to be about. You can put any niche or topic under your personal name, right?

This option doesn't work well if you have a very popular name. In that case, you will hardly find this domain available. But for my blog, it worked fine :) We're moving to the step 3.

Now you have to technically start a blog. Obviously, the first thing you need to do is actually start this blog and it's a pretty quick process. You can set up a domain and hosting for your new site in about 10 minutes.

I have a full little step-by-step guide for this process. I'll give you a link to this guide in the description of this video. And here are a few things you need to know and to have when you're starting your website.

First, it's a content management system. The most popular platform for bloggers is WordPress and I don't recommend you start using platforms like Wix or Squarespace because they are suitable more for static sites which have just a few pages. As a blogger, you will need a more flexible platform, that's why WordPress is the best option.

Second thing you need is a hosting provider. I always recommend this Bluehost company for beginners because it's the most affordable it has 24 hours support and it has seamless integration with WordPress. And there are other similar options out there.

If you want to learn how to start a blog the right way I have left a link in the description below this video it's my FREE COURSE and I will walk you through all the steps to help you with the technical part of starting a blog. But also I will give you all the details you need to know about blog monetization. We're moving to the step 4.

You need to select now a WordPress theme that helps you actually make money blogging. Now I'm sorry if it's getting more and more confusing because I just told you about hosting services, about Wordpress blogging system, and now there is another term. So, what are the WordPress themes?

These are some templates that define how your blog will look. If WordPress platform is the engine of your website, a blog theme is how it actually looks from the outside. Some of the free themes are pretty good and you can start with a free theme so you don't have to invest in a paid one from the beginning.

You can go to WordPress directory and find a free theme you like the most or just pick one of the highly ranked themes. I can recommend you these themes: Astra, Flash Blog, Ocean VP and Hestia. When you're choosing a blog theme, always check that it's a responsive theme which means that the theme is optimized for mobile devices because it's very likely that about 60-70% of all users to a site will be coming from phones or tablets.

And if you want to start a blog with a premium paid WordPress theme right away, I always recommend Divi theme for beginners because it's easy to customize and to understand how to use it. And it's a very user-friendly option, that's for sure. Then I also recommend Genesis Frame framework if you're a more advanced blogger or maybe you have had experience building websites on WordPress.

Step 5 create content that converts. What is so different about the strategy of a blogger who makes five dollars a month from a blogger who makes a thousand dollars or even ten thousand dollars a month? So, what sets them apart, is the way they approach content creation and how they select topics for their content.

A blogger who is struggling is just posting random stuff that happens in their life something that no one would actually search for let me tell you the hard truth nobody cares about you on the internet unless you are maybe a celebrity like Ronaldo or Kim Kardashian people care to find solutions for their problems and answers to their questions so you have to do keyword research to find one of those questions and what are those problems you could solve for them some of the tools you could use for free to do keyword research and to validate your content ideas before you start writing our keywords everywhere Chrome browser extension this one shows you the search volume for your keywords in Google as well as lots of related keywords and search volumes for them to Venice Pinterest search suggestions this is also a great way to come up with ideas for content Pinterest shows these suggestions in the descending order from left to right which means that the suggestions on the left are the most popular and now that free keyword research tool is new Patel's ubersuggest this tool is a little more advanced since it shows you how competitive is the keyword and it shows you which of your competitors rank high for the same keyword step 6 promote your content and get traffic to your website so when it comes to getting visitors to your website and getting more eyeballs on your content you can work with so many platforms like Pinterest Google for both organic and paid traffic with Facebook with YouTube you can work with forums and with Q&A sites with guest posting most people when they're starting a blog they only think about this biggest platform like Facebook and Instagram that have lots of users but there is something they don't understand is that it's a lot of competition and they start working on vanity metrics like impressions like likes on their posts inside Instagram or Facebook and the problem that most of these metrics are not correlating with the traffic to the website here is my opinion on the most popular platforms as traffic generators on Instagram you cannot add links inside your posts so the only way to link to your blog is in your profile bio even your followers will barely check the profile by link and if they do it's probably just the first time when they're deciding about following you you can also have links in stories on Instagram which can I will be available for 24 hours and it's only available for people who have more than 10,000 followers so it's not an option for beginners an Instagram is good for building your personal brand it's good for influencers for fashion bloggers but keep in mind that Instagram is designed to keep users on their platform not to send traffic to external websites now let's look at Facebook it used to be a very good traffic source for a couple of years ago but this has changed Facebook decided that pages have had enough of free traffic and should pay for views in the feed of users you can still see if you organic viral posts on Facebook here and there but they're usually engineered as viral posts something entertaining something shocking memes funny videos this type of content is not suitable for every blog right and for every nation so Facebook unfortunately cannot be an organic and sustainable source of traffic so many bloggers only look at Facebook and Instagram because those are the two most popular social networking sites on the Internet and everyone's grandma and their dog is on Facebook or on Instagram but as I already mentioned in my experience while they have very big user base it doesn't mean that they're going to provide you with the best source of traffic for your blog now let's talk about Google and search engine optimization for Google so compared to traffic from social media search traffic is more stable because it doesn't have this viral nature which is a good point but there is a downside to it you have to work really hard to make google SEO work and it takes a lot of time I would say a brand new site would need to wait at least six months before they're seeing significant traffic and high positions in Google and if you don't know about it Google even has a term sandbox for new sites it means that a new site has low chances to compete in search results they usually keep this newer site it's far away from top ten for many months but the positive side of Google traffic once you get a certain level of it it becomes more or less passive because your post is ranked there and you don't need to upload new posts every day like on Instagram or Facebook to keep getting more eyeballs on your content we've talked about search engines and you might be surprised that I switch now to Pinterest because it's often considered a social media site like Instagram or Facebook and this is not entirely true for Pinterest because it's a mix between a social media platform and a visual search engine which makes Pinterest unique as it combines the viral effect which you can have on social media with more passive and stable traffic which you have on search engines the majority of traffic to my blogs and I'm not joking it's about 90% of traffic comes from Pinterest and it comes from two types of pins first is viral pins which can drive in my experience up to 13,000 visitors in one single day from one single pin and the second type is pins which are not currently viral but they rank high in Pinterest search results and by the way sometimes in Google search results - for specific keywords in in Google Image Search usually these are my old viral pins which are not bringing thousands of visitors a day anymore but they still hang out in Pinterest search very high and bring hundreds of visitors daily and the beauty of Pinterest traffic is that you can start seeing consistent traffic much much faster than from Google and you don't need an older main with high authority to rank on Pinterest for competitive keywords any new blog can succeed on Pinterest and it doesn't take years to see significant traffic from Pinterest it works great for almost any niche you can see that it worked multiple times for so many of my students of Pinterest SEO traffic secrets program and they're all from different niches most of them went from 0 to 25 thousand monthly sessions which allowed them to apply for premium ad company and start making consistent ad income online twenty-five thousand monthly sessions is the minimum requirement to apply for the company I personally work with its media vine they accept sites almost from any blogging niche so you should keep that in mind you will find a link to my Pinterest SEO traffic secrets course in the description below this video and people often ask me with so many Pinterest courses what makes my program better well the answer is that I'm a practicing educator I do what I preach and I run several blogs in different niches and I get over 300,000 monthly pageviews from Pinterest to my oldest and my most successful blog AnastasiaBlogger. com. And the second reason is that I have a private Facebook group where I personally answer all your questions several times a day.

Plus, I have a very unique bundle offer which includes an account audit, and one-on-one coaching session with me. I don't know any other Pinterest course that can offer the individual attention from the course creator because everyone wants passive income from courses. I genuinely care about the results of my students, so for students who need that one-on-one attention to improve their results, I have this option as well.

So, check all the details on my landing page if you're interested in growing your traffic with Pinterest. Another traffic source that definitely is worth mentioning here is YouTube I find YouTube similar to Pinterest in so many ways. It would be crazy to ignore YouTube while you found me and you're watching my video on Youtube, right?

So, why I think it's similar to Pinterest? Because it is also a visual search engine with strong social factors. There is a term "early engagement", right?

Have you heard of it? It's how your followers interact with your content in the first 24 to 48 hours after you published your content on the platform and if Pinterest or YouTube tracks high early engagement scores, they will show your pin or your video to wider audiences. And eventually, you can start ranking with your content for desired keyword and it's also great that you can also rank with your YouTube videos in Google search results.

Often it's much easier to get to the top three Google results with a YouTube video than with the same blog post on your site. And of course, the big difference between YouTube and Pinterest is the type of visual content. Because video has a high entry level - you need to be on camera, you need to have some equipment to shoot a video of a decent quality.

And then you also need to edit video which often requires learning additional software. Because I'm working on my channel for a couple of months now and I can honestly tell you as much as I enjoy doing this, it is not easy to make a video for Youtube. It takes a lot more time than creating a blog post or a pin for Pinterest.

A full production cycle for a 30-minute video for YouTube can easily take me a couple of full working days. And I hope it might get easier in the future but for now is what it takes me. So I hope you at least are getting good value from the video!

And if you do, don't forget to do the THUMB UP on this video and click the bell button to get notifications when I publish my new videos. Now let me show you what could be your monetization strategy as a beginner blogger and how it should change over time. The easiest way to start making money with your blog is advertising.

Google Adsense and Media. net have a low entry level. You can apply as soon as you have about 20 posts on your blog and just don't forget the Privacy Policy page because it's very important to have it before you apply.

But I have to be honest with you: Adsense and Media. net pay very low per thousand visitors compared to premium advertising management companies like Mediavine or Adthrive. I could be getting about ten times less with ads if I stayed with Adsense until now and didn't join Mediavine.

but now I'm able to make over four thousand dollars just an ad income on one blog from Mediavine. To apply for Mediavine publisher network you need to reach at least 25,000 monthly sessions to your blog. And about 80% of your audience should come from the United States.

Pinterest by the way is a perfect traffic source for getting United States audience because it's much more popular in this country than in other parts of the world. So if you want to apply for Mediavine or for Adthrive, or another premium network but you're not getting enough audience from the United States, you just need to make Pinterest your priority! And my general recommendation is to start with advertising but if you want to scale your income in the future, you need to look for other ways of making money with your blog.

I'll talk about all of them in this video. I know bloggers who get paid from one to two thousand dollars for one sponsored post companies which are interested in working with your blog might contact you through your site contact form directly. But usually you will need to actively outreach to brands and pitch them about your blog, about your audience, your following, engagement.

And you will have to fill a lot of information for the brands to look through to your application. I have to warn you though that sponsored posts are far from being a passive income stream. It is time-consuming but it can be very rewarding especially if your blog is still new and you don't have your own products or services to sell.

Now it's a good time to talk about affiliate marketing. As a new blogger, you probably don't have your own products to sell but you can make money adding affiliate links to products of other people and companies to your content. Most of the beginners start with Amazon affiliate links.

And when I started my blog, affiliate marketing became the primary income source for me until I was able to join Mediavine publishing network for advertising. And back then, I made a really good income with affiliate networks like iGain Network and FlexOffers. Other popular networks that have thousands of advertisers from different niches are CJ affiliates and Share a Sale.

Now let's talk about selling your own services through your blog. You can be an online English teacher, a coach, a web developer or a graphic designer, a virtual assistant, a video editor, a digital marketer, project manager, voiceover creator, translator. Basically, every job that is offered on a freelance site can be better sold through your own blog.

On your territory, it is you who defines the prices and makes the rules. And you also avoid the Commission's which freelance platforms apply to your earnings. But one important note here: while selling services is a great way to make a living, your income is always hard to scale.

There is a certain hourly rate people are willing to pay for every type of services online and you have only 24 hours in a day. And essentially, you are still selling your time for money and your growth is limited by the hours in a day. So, what is the solution for this problem?

It's selling your own products! Selling your own product is kind of next-level blogging when it officially becomes a business. I already mentioned that you can sell digital products and physical products.

And I can't tell you much about physical products because I've never sold them. All I know is that because they're physical, they're there's a lot of steps that come into the process like manufacturing branding, delivery, dealing with returned products, customs, various real world regulations in different countries, and so on. And at least half of these steps are not necessary if you sell digital products online.

Plus, your initial investment, in this case, is usually much lower. Most of the times what is needed for a digital product is just your time, your knowledge and your skills. But not an actual financial investment.

So, selling your own products works so great through a blog because your content helps you build trust with your audience. Once you have proven yourself as an expert, it's much easier to sell your products and services. Digital products changed the way many of us would answer the question how to make money blogging?

About five or ten years ago bloggers were relying mainly on ads in terms of blog monetization but today we see that many professionals from various fields start their blogs as a way to present and advertise their products such as themes and plugins for web developers, graphic design elements, photo and video or audio products, ebooks, webinars and online courses. And I have a pretty solid experience by now selling printable ebooks and my video courses through my blog. I still make a lot more with ads on my blogs though, so I need to focus on building more products to increase and diversify my income sources better.

Now we can also mention paid subscription or membership models. In some niches, for example in coaching, in money making, professional topics, bloggers can earn very well by offering paid VIP access to information or for more individual communication with a blog owner. And the best advice to you about growing your blog income above anything you could ever make with your day job, is to focus first on something that will give you the fastest results in terms of income.

In my case, it was advertising. When you have some income from your blog month after month, and you feel it's more or less stable but at the same time it's hard to scale, then it's time for diversification. I'm sure you look back through this video and you will find lots of ideas of how you can adapt at least some of the monetization strategies I mentioned here for your blog it was a long one and it will still take me triple the time for the video post-production so I hope it was worth it and I hope you liked it.

So if you liked, give me the THUMB UP, follow my channel and click that BELL button to get the notifications about my next videos.