How to Start a Blog That Makes Money | How I Make $120,000 a Month Blogging

today's video is one of my most requested videos ever and it's all about how to start a blog that makes money I'm now five years over five years into my blogging journey and my business now consistently makes over a hundred twenty thousand dollars a month which is insane but I started from my college dorm room I was a sophomore in college and I started really from ground zero and there's so much that I have learned in the past five years that I wish I could go back and tell myself and so I know that this

is going to be really helpful for you because I'm going through all of those things that I wish I would have known when I first started my blog and it would have helped me make money a lot faster um and times money that is one thing I've learned so this video is really going into everything I wish I would have known everything that I've learned and what I focused on for each year of the past five years it is so helpful and is really going to help anyone who is looking to start a blog that

makes money like I said every single year since I started my blog so for the last like five-ish six this year six ish years I've had like a main focus for that specific year and I haven't filmed a video like this in a year and a half so I'm excited to go over what we've been focusing on in the last year but every single year things change however I know if you've watched my other videos I'm a broken record about this but the most there's two things that I am just like Dead Fast set on

that you need to do when you start a blog and these are two things that I did actually there's so many things I did wrong but these are two things that I did and I thank myself every single day because I'm like this saved me so much time and oh my God it would have just caused me like a lot of unnecessary stress and money to get things all switched over so those two things are one you need to start on a self-hosted WordPress blog I have a blog post on my website that goes over

exactly how to do this I'm a visual person so I like to read through and like follow directions otherwise you can listen to me talk or you can go research it on your own but I highly highly highly recommend you not starting off on a Squarespace website on a Blogspot website um on a I'm trying to think of like other ones basically those are hosted websites so you want a self-hosted website and that essentially means that you own your website versus renting it when you start applying to affiliate networks and sponsorships that's something that they're

going to ask you right away is what is your website hosted on and is it a self-hosted website and a lot of times people will go on the hosted website because it's really geared towards beginners and then when they start getting more serious about it they have to switch over which takes so much time you usually have to pay someone like behind the scenes to switch things over and it's just a pain in the butt so I personally started my self-hosted website on Bluehost and I always say that it's like tears so Bluehost is the

Walmart version then you have big scoots which is what I'm on right now which is like the target version and then you have the Nordstrom version which is your own database essentially which costs so much money so I started on the Walmart version because I was absolutely broke and it was what a lot of bloggers recommend and that's exactly what I recommend to you as a new blogger is for you to start on that as well I'm like is my lighting going crazy I'm sorry if it is going crazy um I hope it's not annoying

but the reason I say to start on the Bluehost version like the cheapest version is because it's like three dollars a month so something insane and I am a huge proponent on spending the least amount of money as possible in the beginning until you know that you're actually going to stick with it so I use Bluehost for the first two years it was great their customer service is amazing and then I moved on to Big scoots that is what we're currently on right now so I've been on big scoots for the last three years they

are also amazing but it's like way way more money like we spend thousands of dollars a year on hosting which now makes sense to us because we are making money where that can make sense to do and also we have so much traffic but that would have been a complete waste of money if I would have done that in like the beginning faces of my blog um so like I said I have a whole blog post going over exactly like step by step on how I set it up but that is one thing that I'm

super keen on that you start on a self-hosted WordPress website I can promise you you will thank yourself in the future the only reason I did it that way is because I had other successful bloggers that I was watching who told me basically the same exact thing and now I'm like thank you because that would have been just a pain in the butt to switch over the next thing we live in a world where good and bad people judge you by the way things look and the easiest way to get a good looking website is

to buy a WordPress theme you can get themes and like even I'm not I do not if you're going off of what I'm saying do not get a hosted website but there are so many things out there so there's self-hosted WordPress themes there's hosted themes I mean you can get them in so many different varieties and a website theme is basically like a pre-made template for you where you can go put in your information but it looks really really professional there's all different price ranges for this you can get free ones and you can get

them all the way up to ones that cost hundreds and thousands of dollars um when I first started I spent like 65 on my website theme I'll have the one that I used in the description as well so you can see it we've now moved on to custom themes but do not spend the money in my opinion getting a custom theme because you want to make sure you're going to stick with blogging and two there's so many great options out there that's another blog post I have is like some of my favorite themes that you

can choose from there are specific things that I recommend in the theme so definitely check out that blog post um and then slight plug for my blogging course but I go like really into detail on the things that I think should be in your theme in that course but those are the two things that I'm absolute sticklers about and we'll just make a huge difference in people taking you seriously whether it's brands or whether it's actual readers I forgot to say this in my whole theme tangent do not try to unless you're a website designer

obviously that's completely different do not try to design your own theme it will not look as good you're going to spend so much time trying to figure it out and you can be spending that time on a way better thing that can help you earn money faster so that's my little tangent on the things that I think are like absolutely non-negotiables for starting a blog now let's get into what I focused on for each year of my blog so far the first year-ish of my blog I focused on two main things the first thing that

I focused on was getting into an ad agency I knew that from like my research that getting into an ad agency and like getting making money from ads would be the fastest way that I basically start making money on my blog from people that were very very successful in the industry and so after a lot of research I learned that the way to get into an ad agency you had to have a certain number of page views every single month on your blog so the fastest way to get page views is by getting on Pinterest

Pinterest is the only social media that is specifically geared at people people going to someone's website think about it like Instagram stories or Instagram in general I know for me as a user I probably click on a link like what once every four days maybe but on Pinterest I am constantly clicking on a picture and going to someone's website and reading more you have to be a really really specific about how you use Pinterest Pinterest can be a pain in the butt I feel like I've said that a million times but it's so true and

they do a ton of algorithm changes I have really learned how to be successful on Pinterest but I'm Uber Uber specific I'm not just going around and being like oh this feels good to upload this pin today like no we have an exact strategy behind how we handle our Pinterest how we upload our pins how we write our captions how we write our titles how we make our pins look um the days we pin the time sweep in our Pinterest schedule I mean everything is so specific and strategy based so I go over all of

that in my perfecting Pinterest course my courses I know I'm like biased but read the comments in my videos they're like the nicest ever and they'll just show you that they are very Nitty Gritty I'd not play around otherwise YouTube videos are such a great reference so if you don't have the money to spend on a course then research YouTube videos on Pinterest because it will help you out so much but spend the time on getting your Pinterest Pinterest views I think that's even better than SEO the first year because Pinterest is just the fastest

way to get page views and then with those pages you can then apply into the ad agencies get into one and start making money that way the next thing I focused on year one was taking blogging courses this is something that I also learn from a blogger that I looked up to that was making hundreds of thousand dollars a month in her blog she basically said she was like I could spend months and months and months trying to figure something out or I could invest a hundred dollars two hundred dollars whatever it is and in

two weeks learn someone's strategy who is successful in that exact thing and then by the time that I would have been done teaching myself I'm already making money from that and so I really like honed in on that and focused on it and when I was 19 years old starting my blog I mean I was like treating this blog like a full-time job and I was also a full-time college student and I was also Nanny and so all of that Nanny and money I would put directly back into courses and I swear to you that

taking courses is one of the main reasons why I think I was able to grow my blog so fast so basically how I handled it is I would know like okay this year I'm focusing on Pinterest this year I'm focusing on SEO this year I'm focusing on email this year I'm focusing on whatever it is and I would research and find like the most qualified person in that area who is successful and I would take their course and what I would do is I would follow their course to a t for the first few months

and then once I actually knew what I was doing then I would start adjusting it to work with my actual Niche so at this point I still really use a lot of the basic strategies that I was taught in the courses that I took however I've now like adjusted them to work with the times that we're in right now and then also work with my Niche and just what I think is best I'm still taking courses constantly like I am always taking a course my team is always taking courses I just think that they are

game changing in your business and can help you grow so much faster year two I focused on I have my notes pulled up so year two are focused on affiliate marketing and then SEO so affiliate marketing is for example if I was to go and Link a sheet set on Amazon if someone wants to click on that link and buy anything within the next 24 hours I would get a small percentage it's a really small percentage but as you get more and more views that starts like adding up majorly um so I knew that this

was a huge Money Maker in my business and it's also just really really helpful for readers like you're not going to want to go brag about a sheet set that you like so much and then not like it like that's annoying and so it's just a very natural way to start earning money so I put a huge focus into affiliate marketing getting into Affiliates my main affiliate to this day is Amazon Associates um I I have to say Amazon has been testing bloggers lately because they will just like slash commission rates which is really frustrating

but so many people buy things on Amazon that our conversion rate is like way way higher than any of the other Affiliates that we're in um we use a lot of other Affiliates as well basically any store that you can shop at has Affiliates associate with it and that is a huge way that we earn money I didn't focus on this on year one and I wouldn't recommend you focusing on this on year one because to earn money with Affiliates you have to get page views and you have to get readers on your website which

is why I still think that you should be focusing on Pinterest and getting those readers to your website first the next thing I focused on is SEO so SEO stands for search engine optimization and this will literally rule your world and Rule your mind when I learned about SEO I didn't know anything about it when I was first started researching it and now my brain literally cannot think of things without thinking of SEO so in a super basic sense you will structure your blog post your content the things you're putting out on social media in

a way that Google and like whatever is happening behind the scenes can understand what you're showing someone and then can show it to them faster so this is another thing that we are like uber strategic on and you have to be super strategic on plug for my perfecting blogging course if we go over everything that we do from an SEO perspective but you really have to set up things in a way that Google will read and it's Google and like I say Google as an overall name for a database or whatever you would consider Google

Libby but there's like a million of them Google's just obviously the most known one but we set everything up so that we know that Google can easily read this and then they'll know that our post is extremely helpful and then they'll go and show our post first so when someone searches how long to cook a chicken breast which is a weird example but that's an example on Google we want to be the first blog post that comes up when they search that and those blog posts don't just magically show up at the top of a

page there are things that the bloggers are doing behind the scenes to get them to show up there so definitely definitely focus on SEO like I said once you learn SEO you will not be able to get it out of your head and I literally focused on SEO for every single part of my business once you get on Google's good side in the beginning it takes a while to build up but once they begin trusting you then they start ranking your things way faster like at first it can take like six months for them to

rank your things now we're at a point where Google will start ranking our things within like two weeks a month which is so much faster and so great so year two we focused on affiliate marketing and SEO year three we focused on three things so we focused on email list email list is one of the only things that you will actually own in your business and I had no idea how important an email list was until I started doing all this research which seems to be a common theme with all this but an email list

is crucial and you can form such a great relationship with your readers through an email list and you can earn so much more money so think about it when a reader comes to your blog one time maybe they'll come back maybe they won't but if you can get them on your email list then you can send them content every single week this is another thing we're super strategic about because I know as a consumer it's really annoying when I get a million emails sent to me and I find that 99 of the time they're not

help full so when we send out an email list I want it to be extremely helpful and I want when our email hits someone's inbox they're like well we need to click on this I know this is going to be helpful because it came from Sophia so we focused on that I learned the behind the scenes of it sequencing newsletters how to transition our readers from the opt-in to the email list to how long they're in the first transition period a second one so on and so forth how to talk to them how to not

come off to salesy I mean so many different things so that's what I spent the first year on we also have a course for that we have three courses so the perfecting blogging perfecting Pinterest and then perfecting email do not take perfecting email if you are at the beginning stages of your blog it is so intense so high level and I honestly don't even know how I was able to figure it out so it would just be super overwhelming if you are in the beginning stages but it's so detailed so if you are at the

point where you're ready to learn about email lists definitely recommend taking that and that was game changing in our business the next thing I focused on year three was I launched my social medias so at this point I didn't have any social medias I was Anonymous like in a sense I mean I didn't have my name anywhere like someone would have to dive deep to figure out who I actually was which was what I wanted to do at that point because I was a college student I was kind of embarrassed about having a Blog and

um I knew that if I was to start the social medias in the beginning it would have been way too overwhelming for me and I would have been very add about what I should be focusing on so year three is the year that I launched my Instagram and my YouTube channel when I focused on something I focus on things hard like I don't dilly dally in it I don't do it for two weeks and then give up on it I mean I really really focus on it and I took my YouTube and Instagram very seriously

that first year two years I was on Instagram stories every single day I posted on my Instagram that first year every single day and that is not easy to do like you do not want to show up literally 365 days a year without a break and also it was the first time obviously when you're on the internet and on your blog you are getting comments but it was the first time that I was truly getting like multiple comments and multiple messages from from people most of the time being really nice but other times not being

so nice and then YouTube too like I was posting on YouTube once a week we were doing all of our own editing all of our own like SEO behind the scenes I mean I took it super super seriously and in that year year three was the biggest Community Building year that I think I have had thus far it was really like the I mean it changed my entire business because now people were starting to really know me whereas before and this is my number one saying is no one cares about you they only care about

themselves which is how we really focus all of our content um for example you're not watching this video because you care about my life you're watching this video because you want to know how you can make money faster and there's a shift once you get to a certain point where people then do start caring about you and no one gave two rips about me in the beginning at all but it's once I started showing my life on social media that people started caring a little bit more about me which is a really cool period in

the business so that is what I did year three and that is insanely time consuming like I cannot tell you how time consuming that is to get on social media I mean it's like people have no idea how much time it takes or I I never I always say it's like not necessarily hard work it's just a lot of work and then year three we started hiring and I had to start hiring because the social media was taking me so long so at this point I really really knew what I was doing on the blogging

side and I was at a point where I was able to kind of take a step back and hire people that could do the things that I didn't necessarily have to be doing I read the 10 hour work week which like changed my whole entire mindset on hiring and it really allowed me to know like okay what are the things that I absolutely have to do and then what are the things that I don't have to do that I can hire out to do instead so then I can focus on the things that really make

money and that I have to do so that was a learning curve in itself I mean I was like 21 years old I have no idea what hiring involved or anything like that and so that was a huge learning curve but that really was able I was able to focus on the things that made money in the business and transition off some of the tasks to things that I didn't necessarily have to do okay here four this is such a long video but this is just like there's so many good pieces in here so year

four there are three things that I started doing I started creating courses I was at the point where I really really knew what I was doing and I was getting emails every single day about how to start a blog and how I did things and I also knew how important courses were for me and I knew that they were passive income I was a college student at the time and I was like okay there's education or there is money and education blogging is such a great way of passive income courses are such a great way

of passive income so I really put a focus on that in year four and I knew I was at a point where I was knowledgeable enough to do this and I could make really freaking good courses that I wish I would have had when I first started blogging so I did that um and it allowed me to really get that passive income so then I couldn't reinvest that money into other sides of the business which you know to start a course you really don't need a lot of money but for the other parts of the

business that I wanted to start I needed a lot of cash flow and so that gave me the cash flow to start these other parts of the business those businesses being homes and design so I started this Vlog from day one being like I want to start it into your design firm and I knew that by gaining a following in the home design Niche that it would be a supernatural transition for me to start a design firm and it wouldn't be something completely random where I just like popped up one day and was like I'm

gonna start a design firm this is why I had a following behind me I had people that were interested in already and I had credibility built up so that year year four is when I started my design firm and I was in such a great spot because I already had that following who was interested in my life and um it just really helped skyrocketed that business this is another example that I think might just be easier to understand is that like let's say you want to start a dog food business well if you were to

start a blog all about dogs you're gonna start getting credibility in the dog industry and so when you eventually go to launch the dog food that is such a natural progression and it makes complete sense for you to start a dog food line you have the people behind you that are your readers they trust you they're gonna be like well I trust him or her with all my other dog stuff like obviously they're gonna have the best dog food in the world and you're gonna have connections in the industry and that just makes complete sense

so I basically did that same thing with my interior design firm and then year four was one of my toughest years because I was being so risky like for the first time I mean for your blog like all you really need is money for your theme money for your self-hosted WordPress which is like really nothing and then a laptop and this was the first year that I like was really risky and investing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and um everything was new and it was really freaking scary but I was at a good

point where like I had employees and they were all like part-time employees at this point besides Sarah who is a full-time employee but they were able to take on the behind the scenes stuff so that I was able to focus on all this new stuff but oh my God it was like terrifying and then year five which like okay we're almost done with this I hope this video was interesting and not boring but year five I focus majorly on Tick Tock and Tick Tock I would have never imagined in a million years how impactful Tick

Tock would be on my website I mean three weeks ago I was invited to the tick tock headquarters to speak there with a ton of different brands which was such a pinchery moment I put off starting Tick Tock for so long so so long but you were just like versus YouTube and Instagram I mean you can get your face in front of so many people on Tick Tock but like I did with Instagram and YouTube my new one starting this that I was going to take it very very seriously and go hard on it um

so that's what I did year five and then year five also I started new business venture so we had the interior design firm which like at this point I started taking on actual clients which was a completely new thing and then also we created planners which was like a very natural business from my blog so like perfect example with what I was saying with the dog food is I was creating plan like digital planners people were asking from them for them in tangible form and so we created a planner business now that is like sells

out so fast and that's like a whole other business that I would have never started if it wasn't for my blog and that's a seven figure business in itself which is like literally insane so I focused on that and then um number three is hiring full-time employees and just getting the business a lot more legit um I mean I'm So Young that like I am constantly learning things and now we're at a point where we have like lawyers that we can constantly refer to and we're making everything like right and tight but in the beginning

I mean my biggest quote that I say is like I don't know the things that I don't know and there's been so many instances like where I with taxes or with hiring and contracts and so many things that like something will come up and I'll be like I had no idea like I wasn't trying to do anything wrong like I literally had no idea that this was a thing I and so um I focused a lot in the past year on just making sure that everything was right and tight in the business and that we

were getting full-time employees part-time employees are really tricky because they obviously have like other parts of their life going on and you're not their number one concern to put it bluntly where as a full-time employee like you are their livelihood and you're with them that was gross I'm like burping what is wrong with me you're with them every single day and they're really able to be so much more involved in your business and I'm able to trust them so much more now it's like terrifying because you're like I'm supporting their entire livelihood um which like

luckily not not luckily but in this sense luckily none of my team members have kids yet but I'm gonna freak out even more because I'm like oh my God like I'm supporting families but um it really is such an exciting point and it's not so much of like a solo thing at this point where in the beginning like I was doing everything completely alone and now I can kind of like be like no like I have a full team backing me up on things and it's not just me making a decision it's like all of

these people making a decision with me and giving their best knowledge and that's been really crazy um in just like my confidence really has gone up so much so that's the past five years wow I'm like I'm going through my notes and making sure that like I didn't forget anything else but that was like so huge and so huge why did I even say this I don't even know why I said that I think I've been talking for the last hour basically so I'm like my brain is gone um but I hope that video was

really helpful make sure to check out my courses I promise you they're so good like I said read the comments um and I stand behind taking courses like no one's business I hope this video was helpful we get all of our YouTube video ideas from the comments so please if you have any suggestions or any questions put them in the comments um but I will see you at the next video