Today marks my one year anniversary of blogging and let me tell you, it’s been a crazy but incredibly rewarding ride.
A year ago, I was a new mom to a 3-month-old. I was living in Tennessee and we had gone from being DINK’s (Dual Income No Kids) to a single income family with a baby.
I was making some supplemental income online, but I wanted to find a way to make a full time income from home.I’ve always loved writing and helping people, and after reading multiple online income reports, I was inspired to start my own blog.
Fast forward to today and a lot has changed. Obviously, my little prince is now 15-months-old and does an amazing job of keeping me on my toes. We have moved from Tennessee to North Carolina and we’re loving being Tar Heels.
And when it comes to this little blog of mine – well, I now make a full time income blogging (in fact, I make more money blogging than I ever made working full time for an employer.) And that is pretty freaking awesome.
The freedom that comes with blogging for a living is incredible. I can work from my couch in my pajamas if I want. If I want to take some time off, I can. I don’t have to put in for leave and hope it gets accepted.
I don’t have to pay for childcare, I’m contributing to the household income and thus, taking a lot of financial strain off of my husband. And I’m able to do this from anywhere in the world – all I need is a laptop and an internet connection.
If it sounds like I’m raving on and on about blogging, then it’s probably because I am. I’m incredibly passionate about blogging and internet marketing – I live and breathe this stuff. And now, after a year of blogging, I want to share with you how I made a full time income blogging in one year.
I want to start off by saying that blogging is not a “get-rich-quick” thing. It’s highly (highly) unlikely that you’re going to start a blog and be making a full-time income (or anything at all) a month or two later.
But I know for a fact that you can make a full time income blogging in one year, because I’ve done it myself. (You can see the progression of my online earnings here, if you’re interested.)
How I Made a Full Time Income Blogging In One Year
1) I Had a Business Mentality
From the very beginning, I didn’t view my blog as an online journal or diary. I viewed it as a business.
Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with blogging solely as an outlet or a way to keep your family and friends updated on your life. That’s the great thing about blogging – it’s whatever you want it to be.
But for me, personally, I knew I wanted my blog to become a business and as such, I treated it like a business from day one.
This means that I bought my own domain name and hosting. (I didn’t use a free platform like blogger or wordpress.com.)
I purchased a paid theme from Studiopress.
I invested in education from people who had been there, and done that. (Like this course on affiliate marketing.)
2) I Worked My Butt Off
While I’m now able to take time off when I need to, in the beginning I kept my nose to the grindstone.
I spent upwards of 50 hours a week working on my blog.That included everything from writing blog posts, tweaking my theme, promoting my blog on social media, taking online courses, listening to podcasts, creating Pinterest images…
I didn’t go out with friends, I didn’t binge-watch reality TV, I didn’t spend the entire day at the mall. I worked on my blog.
Today, the amount of work I do on this blog varies, but on average I’d say it’s about 20 hours a week.
3) I Knew My Why
I believe that knowing your why is one of the keys to success in all aspects of life. Your why needs to be bigger than your why not, otherwise you’re going to quit when the going gets hard (and it will get hard.)
I’ll give you an example of the going getting hard for me in relation to this blog.
I was about two months into my blogging journey and had just spent a couple of hours writing a long post. I pressed “publish” on wordpress and for some reason, it took me to my login screen instead of publishing the blog post. That’s weird, I thought to myself. Oh well, I’ll just log back in and hit publish again.
So I logged back in, went back to my draft and the whole entire thing was gone. I guess there must have been a glitch in wordpress or something and for some reason, it didn’t save anything. Two hours of work, completely vanished.
I was so frustrated, I felt like throwing in the towel. But instead, I decided take a few hours off and get back into in later on that night.
Fast forward to about 10pm and I was back at it. After rewriting my post, I decided to do a bit of “cowboy coding” and tweak a few things on the back end of my site. What I mean by cowboy coding is that I was going into the functions.php and stylesheet.css of my live site and just changing things up as I felt like it.
As a blogging newbie, I didn’t see any problem with this. That was until I obviously made a typo in my functions.php file and crashed my entire site. On the same day that I lost a post that took me 2 hours to write.
It was almost enough to make me give up completely. But I didn’t.
And you know why I didn’t?
Because my WHY was much bigger than my WHY NOT.
If you want to start a profitable blog, you need to come up with your why. Because trust me, even if you don’t crash your site or lose your work, things are going to happen that will make you want to give up.
Having a HUGE why is the only thing that will keep you going when the going gets tough.
And honestly, that’s it.
Those are, I believe, the 3 most important steps towards building a profitable blog.
Treat it like a business from the get go. Invest your time and money into learning everything you can about blogging. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars but you DO need to be willing to invest some money.
Read this post to find out how I made money to invest in my blog.
Commit to working on your blog as much as you can for a year.
If you need to stay up until 2am working on your blog every night to make it successful, then that’s what you need to do. If you have to say no to going out to dinner with friends so you can listen to a blogging podcast, then so be it. If you have to spend hours doing online surveys so you can make some cash to buy a blogging course, then do it.
Les Brown, motivational speaker said that to be successful, you need to be willing to do what won’t, so you can live a life that others can’t.
And ultimately, THAT is probably the number one rule to live by when it comes to creating a profitable blog.
