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How much money can someone make blogging? Would you believe a monthly profit of up to $50,000? For today's side hustler, Sharon Gourlay of Australia, that figure is real. Granted, $50,000 was her best month, and it came from growing several blogs over several years. But her story shows what's possible if you focus on the right things.
In 2013, Sharon was a part-time graduate teacher and full-time mother to a one-year-old and a three-year-old. She was stressed, busy, and watching every cent her family spent. She decided an online business could solve many of those problems. She had been reading family travel blogs and noticed that some seemed to work well. If they could do it, she thought, so could she.
So she set out to monetize her blog, WheresSharon.com. She had started it eight years earlier while traveling on a break from work, but by her own admission it was poorly written. It was more of an online journal, and page views had dwindled to zero. She researched what to do with it. Startup costs were minimal, about $60 for hosting and a domain name. She also started Digital Nomad Wannabe to track her journey from "having no idea" to building a successful online business.
By mid-year, Sharon had convinced her husband that the family should become digital nomads, and they left Australia on December 31, 2014. Her two blogs and her husband's online product were bringing in roughly $1,000 a month.
About 18 months after getting serious with her sites, Sharon gave birth to her third child. By then, online income could support a higher cost of living, and they moved back home. Even during four months of maternity leave away from blogging, her income kept growing. She was making $8,000 to $15,000 a month from affiliate links on her travel site alone, with expenses under $100 a month. Her best month, $50,000 in profit, came when she started selling a course on DigitalNomadWannabe.com.
Toward the end of 2017, Sharon sold her travel blog and a couple of smaller sites she had started in 2014. Thanks to SEO and affiliate marketing, the sites generated passive income, which is exactly what buyers want. She sold the travel blog for more than three times its annual profit. With the proceeds, the family bought a house in Melbourne in 2018.
She says: "It gives me immense pride that I have been able to build this business out of nothing. I love that we now get to live a life structured how and where we want and not held back by money or traditional jobs. Both my husband and I are at home full-time with the kids. We travel when we want, and the kids go to the school we want."
Sharon continues to launch new sites. Her latest is Dive Into Malaysia, which is small for now but could become her biggest project yet.
Her lesson: it's better to concentrate on one thing and get it working than to be everywhere. Sharon's one thing is SEO, which she sees as market research. Understand what people want and need, then use SEO to give it to them.
