This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Let's talk today about a classic old school blogging success story. Now I realize the irony of saying that something like blogging is old school or traditional, but in a lot of ways it really is because the world is just moving so quickly. And here on "Side Hustle School" we are relentlessly focused every single day helping people make more money without quitting their job by using the skills they already have. And usually by doing it in a pretty quick period of time. So to even mention blogging as a primary means of doing that, I guess the first question is can you still actually make money as a blogger?
Well, the answer is not surprisingly, yes. We've had many episodes of many people doing it in different ways. Most of them, however, have transitioned from blogging for ad dollars. So a lot of people who use a blog as their primary medium for their side hustle, what they're trying to monetize, they have either stepped away entirely from advertising or they have complimented it with other products and services, as I said. Now here's what's interesting, today's blogger, I don't wanna say she's old school or traditional, but she's earning $2,000 a month in 2018 using the same method that people were using well over a decade ago.
So once again, 2018, this is not 2008. I'm gonna tell you about a blogger who makes real money by posting content and getting paid through ads. And at the end of the episode I'll include some free blogging tips you can use to pursue this method yourself or also why you might wanna consider something different. So stay tuned to hear about a high cholesterol health scare that turns into a lifestyle change and a profitable project. [Music]
When Liz Thompson found out she had high cholesterol, she resolved to make a change.
It was time for a healthy new lifestyle with diet and exercise at the heart of it. Liz opted to try a vegan diet for the next six months and hopes it would give her more energy, better health and bring that cholesterol number right down. She was determined she wouldn't just endure this new diet but thrive on it. Two months into the journey, Liz felt the itch to write about what she was doing. Being a marketer in her day job, she thought a blog could be a cool place to share what she was learning and experiencing.
So she headed over to WordPress and started a free website called Liz Living Vegan. For the next four months, she shared everything she could on this new blog. She usually published a few times a week, adding anything that was exciting or interesting. When she got her cholesterol tested at the end of her six month experiment, unfortunately it wasn't good news. Her number hadn't budged and the doctor decided the only treatment for it was medical and it couldn't be changed by diet and exercise.
Liz walked away from the experience feeling a little sad and quickly returned to a less restrictive vegetarian diet but she didn't feel it was all for nothing. Along the way, she'd found a passion for blogging, sharing recipes and creating a community around the cause. She'd had a taste for it and she wanted more. This led Liz to start a new blog, I Heart Vegetables, where she was gonna blog about her new but old life as a vegetarian. Even though she was no longer vegan, she was still committed to healthy living and wanted to share it with anyone who was interested.
Like many blogs, this was just a fun project she worked on whenever she had time. She didn't have dreams of becoming a paid blogger and her eyes weren't set on a book deal. Liz just wanted to create something that mattered to people who cared. But as her blog began to grow in popularity, she saw more of its potential. She began to receive offers from companies to feature their products in exchange for free samples.
This eventually grew into talks of a sponsored blog post, the first of which she was paid a fee of $200. It was at this point Liz began to treat the blog as less of a hobby and more of a business. She invested the money she'd earned into making the site look more professional with high quality headshots and designs. She also invested some of her own money in getting her own camera to take more professional shots for her recipes. Although the sponsored posts were great, Liz wanted an income stream she had more control over.
She'd heard that banner ads could be a way to make money and she was getting a good amount of page views so she began to explore her options. She discovered that many services like AdSense paid poorly for the exposure they got, but she stumbled across one called Mediavine which paid a much better rate. So she signed up for their program. This almost immediately increased the income of the blog to around $1,000 a month, but she knew there was still more potential. So Liz began to get tactical with how she created content.
She believes every post she writes should solve a problem and serve her audience. This means every post needs to be something that a would-be healthy vegetarian is gonna search for in Google. If it's not valuable to someone who finds your page, it doesn't make the cut. This has been her main marketing strategy and she invests most of her time finding keywords and content ideas which are underserved. She then uses those ideas to create helpful content for her audience.
These articles have been matched up with ads from Mediavine and the more people who see them and click on them, the more Liz gets paid. This simple old school strategy has allowed her to generate around $2,000 a month from the iHeart Vegetables blog. It's also helped her land a book deal and publish the truly healthy vegetarian cookbook. Looking to the future, Liz wants to continue growing the business. She hopes to optimize the website to ensure she can help more people live a happy and healthy lifestyle.
But for the moment, she's enjoying getting her life back on track after the intense process of writing her book. All right, some free blogging tips as promised. So first of all, there's a couple of different methods. And if you're using this method, the one that Liz has followed, it's really all about matching your articles to those ads and then building traffic. It is essentially a numbers game.
And it really, really helps to have the right topic. It really helps to have a topic that can be connected to companies that are advertising products and services relevant to that topic. Which is why choosing something that is tightly focused, that has a clear target market like iHeart Vegetables or whatever her first vegan blog was, is usually the right way to go. Now in our production notes, our team was talking about this earlier. One of the earlier versions of the story said something about banner ads being a lucrative way to make money.
And when I read that, I was like, man, when I first started working online, like not even thinking about when I first started a blog 10 years ago, but 20 years ago, when I first started working online, perhaps then banner ads were a lucrative way to make money, but not for much longer after that. So those kinds of ads are not really the first thing that I think of when people talk about making money online or what's a good strategy to pursue. But this story goes to show that it is still possible. And again, it's all about being targeted. So if you wanna pursue this method, again, it would be good if you have a targeted topic and you feel confident that you can attract a lot of visitors.
Because even with the right topic, you have to have a substantial amount of traffic to be able to make a substantial amount of money. Otherwise, it's just gonna be pennies or a handful of dollars each month, not in the thousands of dollars a month like Liz is seeing. The alternative is to focus more on creating your own products and services. And as I said, this is more common these days. Speaking of things from long ago, long ago I wrote a manifesto called "279 Days to Overnight Success." And that chronicled my journey as a blogger way back in I think 2009, 2010, 2011, those years.
And I chose that alternative at the time. I didn't want advertising in my blog and I wanted to create my own solutions for the readers, the growing community that was engaging with my work. And so in that manifesto, which I think is like 80 pages, I did a whole case study of what I had figured out and what I'd learned and how much money I made through various products and projects in that first year of blogging. So if you'd like to check that out, it's completely free on my website. We'll include a link in the show notes page.
And also it doesn't mean that you can just do one of these strategies. You can do both. In this story, Liz also got a book deal and then published that book. So it wasn't all ads, but there's usually a focus one way or another. There's a focus on whether you're gonna have an ad driven blog or one that is more focused on creating products and services.
And if you're not sure which one to do, I might recommend you consider that second option first, creating your own products and services. But hey, like we saw in this story, some people can make it work good for Liz and good for anybody else out there doing it. So more power to you. And thank you, Liz, for letting us share your story with our community. I'm also a vegetarian, so I will go and check out IHeartVegetables.com.
Listeners, thank you for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed this one. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/595. Episode 595, how about that?
We are almost at 600 episodes. I'll be back tomorrow, and then three days later, it will be number 600. Do come back tomorrow. Do make sure you're subscribed. So much more is on the way.
My name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is Side Hustle School.
