How Long to Make Money Blogging | My First Income Reports 💸 | By Sophia Lee Blogging

today's blogging tips video is all about how long it took me to monetize my blog this is a hot topic that gets asked all the time and i don't think i've ever sat down i know i have never sat down and filmed a video about it and i just went deep in to my bank account and the archives of my income reports and did a little look back and it was actually super interesting so if i found it interesting i'm sure that you will also probably find it interesting and yes let's just get in to the money so i started my blog in 2017 and now it is 2022 so we are going on we're at four years so five years it's february right now and i started the blog in august of 2017. um blah blah blah i was a sophomore in college i did it in my dorm room if you've watched any of my other videos you don't already know all this so something that i did from extremely early on in my blogging life is that i would write income reports and now looking back it's so fun to see kind of the progression and that's what really we're really going to talk about in this video i did stop the income reports like two years ago because two years ago was when i like really really started making money like a lot of money and i just was not comfortable i don't know i don't know so now i give a little more like round numbers where before i would give really micro numbers and i do think the micro numbers are super helpful but the business is at a point where it's not really relatable to the everyday blogger in the beginning i was making money in a way that every single blogger can still make money from their blog and now we've really spread our eggs out and so there's stuff that we do and make money from that just aren't even like really applied to a blog anymore that we've been able to grow our income from so moral of all of that is i'll touch on how we make money now and like how the monetization process but really i think it's going to be the most interesting is to go back from the very beginning and look at year by year like okay this year this is what i focused on and really made money on the next year this is what i focused on then you know so that's what we're gonna do but i will say we'll link all of the income reports in the description of this video they're so interesting and i highly recommend that you take time reading them because i really think that you can get good information out of it so the first income report documented was in 2018 and i started my blog in august of 2017. so it was about a year later and i will say i remember i had like a really lucky break in the fall of 2017. so i started it in august and then i randomly had a post go viral that fall that earned me like 600 so that was a really good ego boost and i understand that that was luck in a sense i find the word luck hard i read a quote that was so good i wish i could find it but it basically was like people like the harder i work the luckier i get so that i think is actually the exact quote but i thought that was so good because i was like well no like of course if you work harder things are gonna you know okay so anyways um i think i did get lucky in that sense and it gave me like a good confidence boost to keep on going where i know for a lot of people starting blogs it's a slow process starting a blog and thinking that you're going to earn money from it within the first year is wishful thinking you you're going to spend hours on your website before making money and that's i think what people don't understand and then they give up i also say literally all the time it's the people that can stick it through and spend the hours and hours and hours of having your blog that end up being successful having a blog is not hard it's just a lot of work and people don't want to put work into things so that's my little uh ted talk for the day let's get back to the real good stuff of this video so basically i had a good break started august 2017 ended up making like 600 in um that fall of 2017. i didn't write an income report for it so the first income report that i did write was in july of 2018 it's still on the website so you can go check it out we'll have the link in the description um but i made 788.88 which was a year after almost a year after i started my blog and that was like oh my gosh i thought i was rolling in it because at that time i was a college student and so i was working a nannying job and i was making not a lot of money and so i would like calculate my time because i was like very focused on roi so i would be like i was insane i still am a little crazy but basically i would know like exactly how many hours i was spending on it and i was making so much more money on the blog hourly if i divided everything out then i was like babysitting so i was like this is awesome so in july of 2018 i made 788 in august i went to 249 in september i went to 2553 and then in october i made 3168 that was as a full-time college student so that's what i mean when i say that like it's a really really really slow incline to start earning money on your blog but once you figure it out and figure out like your strategies and what works you figured it out so you can really like replicate it on multiple of your different posts or whatever it is and what was interesting after reading all of those income reports is that majority of that money that i was making that year came from ads and that is why i harp so much on pinterest is crucial in the beginning of your blog because pinterest can get you a ton of views it's the easiest way to get views seo takes a while to have google trust you and catch on to your stuff and so that's like will usually something after like if you're if you're posting very consistently that's something that google start picking up on like two years after you start your blog but pinterest picks up a lot earlier so the first year the one thing i focused on and i remember this and now looking back i really can tell that it paid off was strictly to get eyes on my post because the more eyes i could get on my on my posts and my contents the faster i could get into an ad agency and the more money i could make from ads when i was in an ad agency so when i first started my blog i was with google ads and it was a lot easier to get into google ads where now i think it's harder i just hear people complaining through the blogging world that it's a lot harder i pers i don't know i haven't done it in like years so i can't really give you advice on that but i started with google ads and then i went to mediavine and mediavine mediavine paid a lot more than google ads and so that was interesting so 2018 is when i really saw the income start paying off from ads which is directly correlated with the amount of people that are looking at your website 2019 okay this is what's interesting about 2019 2019 was the year that i learned about affiliate marketing so 2018 i learned how to get people to my blog and i knew that i was doing it in a way that was effective because i had a lot of views but i also was like i should be making more money with the amount of views that i'm getting i should be making more money so in 2019 i spent almost all of my time figuring out how to convert sales for affiliates so um that's where i really came up with that strategy and this is super interesting so this is where the income like starts going insane and at this point i was a junior in college january of 2019 i made nine thousand three hundred forty nine dollars that's still insane february i made six thousand fifty three dollars april i made seven thousand eight hundred fourteen dollars and in may i made twelve thousand three hundred seventy nine dollars so blogging is essentially like on commission like you're on commission based on when people buy things so like even to this day we'll have lower months and then we have really high months and so like you can see how it was like a little bit of a roller coaster it's still that way that's just how the blogging world is but that is where i really combined the well i got the affiliate marketing going okay 2020 income this is where the income went like crazy and so this is where i brought together my knowledge of affiliate marketing and my knowledge of getting people to the website and it was like chef's kiss so this is where things really exploded in 2020 everyone knows what happened in 2020. i thought that i was okay i think you can understand what i was saying i think everyone thought they were i remember in march i was like it's over it's over everything i've done i'm gonna have to go find another job like blah blah blah because i wasn't i was a senior in college now and so i thought that like i was planning on doing bsl after college so i was freaking out like the rest of the world was but what was so interesting is we had about two weeks where everything crashed because everyone was freaking out no one cared about anything they just cared about you know what um but then we started getting more and more and more views and more things selling and it was wild especially with our niche of um like focusing a lot on college and apartments i just assumed that i don't know i just wasn't expecting it i will say 2020 is also the year that i started my social medias so i think that is a correlation too that's when people i was like kind of an i wasn't fully anonymous first year i was fully anonymous and then i started like kind of like you know showing myself a little more but for the first time in 2020 people could actually put a face the name i had a youtube channel that did really well i had my instagram and so i think that also helped is just gain that like more of a connection um but that is really where i put that affiliate marketing put both of those together the 2018 strategy the 2019 strategy and then it just was like explosion and so in 2020 i made over um 50 000 i think that was the highest month that i had which was unbelievable obviously i will say i also started hiring people in 2020 and so that's another reason why i just feel like these income reports are like not i don't know i know some bloggers and i still love reading them so maybe other people would like reading them but other bloggers that have like a whole team under them and then they do income reports and i'm like but that's like with the whole team like obviously of you more manpower you're gonna make more money at least you should be making more money um so in that fifty thousand dollars i did have people working for me so it wasn't just a one-man show anymore as it was in 2017 2018 and 2019 yeah so 2020 was huge 2020 was really really huge and with that growth of money we started realizing that okay we are really making money now and so we have to figure out ways to distribute the income all around because we were pretty focused on ads and affiliate marketing specifically ads through pinterest and then specifically affiliate marketing through amazon and amazon did another thing in 2020 where they slashed affiliate um percentages down from eight percent to three percent so this literally ruined some businesses like some blogs because think about it eight percent to three percent that's like ginormous luckily for us it was big but it was a really really good wake-up call that you gotta you can't just have two streams of income you need to have like eight streams of income which is what we do now and we always we're like we're literally running eight different businesses so then 2020 is when we really started brainstorming you know how are we going to do the other income streams then 2021 is when we actually implemented those so we brought in a planner line our first tangible product which was really really big and successful it sold out right away and so now like this year we even increased it we bought a lot more so hopefully we can sell all of those and then also we bought a house so we're expanding it and this is so interesting is that this is my plan all along has kind of been working out in college when i started this blog i was like i want to have a big design firm and i kind of like worked backwards and was like okay what do i need to do to get to that big design firm and i was like right now in this moment i am a college student and i knew that when i went to college like all the other people i knew who were excited about partying about maybe the classes and i don't know the only freaking thing that i cared about was the way that my dorm looked and so in my head i was like i know that if i cared about about the way my dorm looked i would like fall asleep at night literally thinking about how i was gonna decorate my dorm room there'd be a lot of other girls that were or boys you know target niche so you have to we want to we want to be inclusive to everyone but also it's a business and so you have to think of your target niche just for the sake of more girls are looking at dorm stuff than boys and that's just a fact of course we welcome anyone who wants to look at it but i was like if someone is interested in decorating their dorm room there's going to be a lot of other girls interested in decorating their dorm rooms i really didn't realize how hot of a topic it was and we were the first ones really to start i was the first one to really start a blog specifically about that but if you are interested in decorating dorm you're going to be interested in decorating your apartment and then eventually you're going to be interested in decorating your home so i was like if i can grab them young i always say that and shelby's like you can't say that that sounds so bad but i'm like if i can crap i'm young and then i can have them for the rest of their life and so that was kind of my strategy on what i was looking at when i was starting that that was my mindset so that was a lot of babbling for not important information to you but basically i don't want to be known for being a blogger and so that's where we've been really trying to get into other things now we're at the point where the business is making a lot of money and our overhead is really low and so we were able to save a ton of money i make very normal like we're all salaried or paid hourly or salaried the team and so i make very normal money i make the same amount of money that ben makes versus like you know how much we're making on you know like we made 100 over a hundred thousand dollars we made 140 000 last month but i'm taking like literally percent like very small percent of that but we're reinvesting it all into the business because i have i want to grow the business and invest it you know you get what i'm saying i needed to shut up at this point but that's kind of where the blog is right now and then in 2022 we're basically just growing those even more that's kind of how i monetize i don't even know if i answered that correctly but hopefully you got something out of that probably my income reports are going to be a lot more helpful but that's basically the progression i had from 2017 when i started the blog to 2018 when i started earning money from it from ads and pinterest get on pinterest to 2018 or 2019 when i started focusing on affiliate marketing 2020 is when i got into social medias and really put the affiliate marketing and the readers to get or the views together and then 2021 is when we started diversifying our income to different businesses that weren't fully reliant on the internet and other people's businesses we want to start our own things because also you can scale that a lot better and make a lot more money on those and then 2022 is where we're focusing on growing those even bigger and like 2021 we had no idea what we're doing at all so 2022 is the year of being a little more prepared with stuff that we're doing so you know there's a lot of learning that goes on but hopefully that was helpful for you you can't start a blog or even be in the beginning stages of your blog and when i say beginning stages of your blog i'm literally meeting like the first two years which seems like a really long time but in the grand scheme of things it's like not long at all you cannot expect to earn a lot of money and you have to put in like when i was earning that money it's really easy for me just to say it out loud right now but i was putting in hours literally hours and hours and hours when my friends were going out to the bars i was working on my blog i was getting about 5 a.m which who does that at a college student like there's a lot of things that i think the police are coming for me it's just easier said than done but work hard on it i'm serious like if you work hard the harder you work the luckier you get so i'm gonna end the video with that make sure to subscribe to my blogging channel check out my blogging courses if you want to know like the nitty gritty on how i actually did it those blogging courses go over everything we just spent a week in arizona we did a workation and we wrote um we're not fully done yet but we wrote a huge chunk of an email course that we should be launching in a few weeks that one's like really good that's the most intense out of our courses by far i was like my brain was like i know it no one could talk to me after that because my brain was so dead um but make sure to look at that and that is the end of the video so i'll see you at next week's blogging video you

Channel: Perfecting Blogging | By Sophia Lee Blogging

Views: 107,220

Keywords: blogging tips, how to start a blog, how to start a blog and make money, how to make money blogging, how long to make money blogging, how long to monetize blog, how long does it take to make money blogging, making money blogging, blogging income, blogging income report, income report blog, income report bloggers, my blog income report, by sophia lee, by sophia lee blogging, blogging, blogging for beginners, blogging tips and tricks, sophia lee, sophia lee blogger

Id: C9mk8M6y2LE

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022