How To Start a Blog | How I Make Over $75,000 A Month Blogging

today's video is all about how to start a blog that makes money and it is my most requested video ever so i'm really really excited to film it i started my website four years ago and we are now consistently making over 75 dollars a month on it and we are a team of six of us working on it so it is now a full-fledged business which is awesome however when i started my website four years ago i was a sophomore in college i was doing it out of my dorm room while juggling being a full-time student i just graduated last year so for the first three years of my blog i was a full-time student and working full-time on my blog and through that i have a ton of strategies and tips that i use to skyrocket my blogging business into earning money and when i say strategy i'm telling you i was so strategic about every single thing that i did on my website and so i'm telling you the things that i did what i focus on every single year and i know it's going to be insanely helpful for you because these are the things that i wish that i would have known when i was first starting and it would have saved me a lot of time [Music] so what i think is so cool that i have done is that i actually filmed a similar video to this for the last two years so i have one that's how i started a blog that makes nine thousand dollars a month last year i filmed the one that was how i started a blog that makes thirty thousand dollars a month and then this year is how i started a blog that makes seventy five thousand dollars a month and all of those videos including this one are jam packed with information i highly highly recommend that you go watch all of those after you watch this one and the reason is is that it is so interesting to see my progression and the tips that i'm giving out some of them are exactly the same the things that i strongly believe that you need to do that are like crucial to starting a successful money making blog the things that have changed how technology has changed everything's changing so to be able to see that progression is extremely interesting and helpful and then also on my website i have a blog post that goes step by step through exactly how i started my website so what website host i'm on um how i design my website literally everything is on that post so i'm gonna link that in the description it's one of my most popular posts on my website and will be extremely helpful for you if you are starting from ground zero and are wanting to start a blog that makes money not a lot of people know how strategic you need to be in actually starting a website because there's a difference between a hobby blog and a blog that wants to make money so this is definitely the video for you if you're looking to for it not to be a hobby blog for it to actually be a blog that makes you money that is can be successful you know etc etc so how i'm going to make this video different is the last two videos we're really giving my tips on how to start a money making blog this video is going to be going through exactly what i focused on year one and then year two and then year three and then year four so for me i am a planner and i also am a person that likes to stay on track which i think is so important with the blog because your mind is going a million different places on what you need to do so something that helped me like an insane amount is that every single year i would pick one or two or three things that i would focus on and i would dive hard into those things and those were all surrounded around different ways that i could grow my blog into making money and it has been extremely successful for me so i am going to like i said go year by year on what you should be focusing on this will be helpful for the new brand new blogger that hasn't even started i'm telling you if i would have known these things when i first started it would have made my life a whole lot easier so i know it will for you too and then it will be helpful for even the person that has a more successful blog because i'm going to be talking about you know all that in between stuff and then what i do now first up you need to actually get your blog up and running and that is easier said than done and there are crucial things that you need to know that you have to do if you are starting a serious blog that you want to make money on first up is you need to start a self-hosted wordpress blog this is insanely insanely insanely important and i did a really really good job of explaining why this is so important in my last video so how i made 30 000 a month blogging so if you want a more in-depth description on why this is so important then go check that out but i'm gonna keep this short and simple so basically you have a self-hosted blog and then you have a hosted blog a hosted blog is places like blogspot squarespace wix basically anything that would be like by sophia lee.blogspot.com whereas a self-hosted website is where you would have like by sophia lee.com you know whatever your website is name.com the reason why you don't want to have a hosted website is because two reasons you don't own that website so technically they could shut it down at any moment all of your work could be lost that would be devastating but more importantly is that when you are applying for brand partnerships or ad agencies ad agencies are the biggest thing in the future they will specifically ask you if you have a self-hosted wordpress blog it's so important it makes you look way more legit and professional and it's extremely easy to do so what i did to start my self-hosted wordpress website is that i use the host called bluehost and the reason i use them is because they were dirt cheap and it was like three dollars a month i was a broke college student so i needed something that was extremely extremely inexpensive but would be what really really helped me so now that i've used bluehost i use bluehost for the first like two and a half years i highly recommend them i'll have a link in the description that you can go and take you can go like see what it's all about um and how it works but they are awesome i wouldn't message them all of the time they were probably so sick of me but their customer service is amazing and they're basically like i always explain it like bluehost is like the walmart version of hosting so it's really really inexpensive it does the job when i started getting a lot more views so like after i started getting 200 000 views a month which will take a hot second for you to get to then i went to big scouts or big scoots i don't know which one it is um the reason that i don't recommend them right away is because let me tell you i pay hundreds of dollars a month for them whereas the bluehost was three dollars a month now i'm paying hundreds of dollars a month which it makes sense now because i'm making so much more money but in the beginning don't do it go with bluehost and that will get you started on a wordpress blog that is so important the next thing that is so important and i especially think that this is important is that your website needs to look professional how do you get a professional website if you are not a website designer it is so easy this is a trick that bloggers use all the time website owners and that is to buy a theme you obviously you can buy really really expensive themes or you could buy really cheap themes so obviously like i said i was broke and a college student so i needed a very very cheap theme i end up getting my first website theme on 17th avenue designs that will also be linked in the description actually like every single thing that i recommend for blogging once you're done with this video i just have like a buy sofia lead.com blogging page that has everything with like free printables how i make money on my website um my top or like 75 different blog post title ideas literally everything so definitely go check that out um but i used 17th avenue designs for my first website theme i paid a little bit of extra money for them to set it up for me and i used that wordpress theme for like three and a half years so i ended up just last fall getting a custom design website that cost thousands of dollars which is why i recommend that you go through 17th avenue designs or etsy has a ton of very very cheap themes for like ten dollars so um i know that if you go to etsy and then you search wordpress themes a lot of different options will come up there's feminine ones there's more i don't want to say guy-ish ones because they're not but you know anyone can use anything but there's just a ton of different options for you to get the look that you want for your website i know for me if i go to a website and it looks like it was put together by a three-year-old i am not going to take it seriously where if i go to a website that looks professionally designed it looks a lot more legit to me and so i take it a lot more serious i look at the content more importantly not more wordily but you know what you mean like it is just a big deal to have a website that looks legit and that's the easiest way by far of getting there can you now understand what i mean by how it is very hard to start to get your blog up and running but just do it go for it i promise you it'll pay off in the future if you put the work into it the second thing that i focused on that first year of blogging was blogging courses and i truly believe that me taking blogging courses that first year was one of the biggest things that i did to grow my website and i always go back to the quote don't reinvent the wheel just make it your own or it's like something like that i definitely said that wrong but like you get the idea and so i saved myself months of work by taking other bloggers courses that were already seeing extreme success in whatever i was trying to learn whether it was a pinterest strategy or how to write blog posts or email lists every every single thing that i wanted to learn for my blog i took a blogging course and this was a tip that i learned from another blogger and basically she said and what i said too like now that i've done it is that when you're trying to learn something for your website it takes months of trial and error of testing things out whereas you can go spend a little bit of money and obviously there are cheaper courses and more expensive courses and i started out taking the cheaper courses as my blog started getting money i would reinvest in the more expensive courses but instead of spending those months trying to learn how to do something that i wanted to do i would take this course which would show me exactly how i could do it i would copy the strategy with my own content i would make it my own and then i would see success and that saved me so much time i'm telling you i would still probably be learning things if i was trying to do it on my own so invest the money in the courses it'll pay off big time in the future i have a whole list of courses that i personally have taken that will also be in the description box basically everything will be there or on my website um so you can see what i've done but that will be i mean that saved me so much time and lastly can you tell that the first year is just a very long process but the last thing that i focused on that first year of blogging is getting in to an ad agency and i knew if i could get into an ad agency that's when i would really start actually making money and to get into an ad agency you need to get page views so there's ad agencies like google ads that is pretty easy to get into when i was starting my blog it was extremely easy to get into now i've learned that it's harder and that you have to get accepted into the program but i know for like it's the easiest one you can get into but you really don't make that much money on it the ad agencies that you want to get into is like mediavine and ad thrives so those are what i'm i'm in mediavine and i make really good money off of media fine like tens of thousands of dollars um but to get into mediavine you need to have a certain number of page views so when i was doing it was 25 000 now it's 50 000 page views a month i actually get sessions but they're like very similar um and to get page views you have to get people on your website this is something that i did that i majorly harp on and you can get page views a lot of different ways i'm telling you the absolute best way to get people on your website is to get your content on pinterest pinterest is the only social media that i had for the first three and a half years of my blog which is insane i didn't have instagram i didn't have youtube i just launched my instagram and youtube last year when i was already making thirty thousand dollars a month on my website so that just tells you well one that shows how strategic i was because instagram and youtube youtube actually helps me get more page views instagram barely gets me any page views to my website but now that i'm on instagram i spend 25 of my time focus a week on instagram which is in saying i'm gonna get to this later in year three because that's when i did it so i'm just gonna kind of stop talking about this right now but moral of this all is that pinterest is the only social media that people go to to specifically go to someone's website and so we want to capitalize on that and there's specific things that you can do to get your pins ranking on pinterest how you design your pins how you make them look how you write just everything there is so much strategy behind it i wrote a pinterest course on exactly my pinterest strategy i now get like hundreds and thousands like literally like 600 000 page views a month from pinterest that you know so pinterest makes me a lot of money and i have a course that tells you every single thing that i do for it you can also google it self research if you don't want to spend money on a course um but more of it all get on pinterest it is the easiest way in the beginning to get those page views so then you can go and apply to an ad agency to actually start making money we're now on to year two and if you can get to year two you will start seeing the benefits so year one you i mean i worked on my i treated it like a full-time job i would get up i was insane i don't even know how i did it but i would get up at like 5 30 a.m in the morning i would work on my blog until i had classes i would go to my actual job because i needed to make money i was paying for college by myself and then i would come home at night and i would work on my blog even more and i did that for months and months and months which when you say a year it seems like a short amount of time but when you're actually in it and you're not making money from it and it seems like you're doing all this for nothing it can be really really tough so kudos to you if you get to year two that is huge so year two is a little simpler i'm gonna try to keep it shorter um and i focused on two things so two things in year two the first thing that i focused on was affiliate marketing so affiliate marketing is when you go and link something in your blog post and then if someone goes and purchases it you get a small commission for example if i link a set of sheaths that i love and use on my website from amazon and then someone goes to amazon in the next 24 hours if they buy anything on amazon i get a small commission of that and it is very very very small but when you are getting thousands of page views that can really really add up so i put a huge focus into affiliate marketing i hardcore studied the posts that were picking up that first year so i would go into my google analytics and i would see what is the most popular post that i wrote and then i would figure out okay if that one's popular then i'm sure this is a similar post so that's going to be similar how can i make this work for affiliate marketing which leads me to my next thing let me tell you that people are not stupid you are not stupid i am not stupid and one thing that i learned very very very quickly were the posts that were all about the reader did a million times better than the posts that were about me and it's very easy to make a post about you and do a post about them and it will convert a million times better so i always always always say nobody cares about you they only care about them so when i was writing these posts and i was focusing on affiliate marketing i continually said that in my brain 24 7 because like i said we're not stupid and if you are on a website you can tell if they are writing a post strictly to make money and they won't buy it i know i don't want to buy stuff when i look at a post that i can tell someone is doing or a blog that someone's doing strictly to make money you need to make your post more helpful than any other post on that topic on the internet if you go to our blog post i and my team make sure that what we are putting out there is the absolute best post for that topic on the internet so we have free printables we offer oodles and oodles of information we test products we go into every post making it as helpful as possible which then in turn makes our affiliate marketing not salesy which is what you want because that's what we get people buying things and then the second thing that we focus on is seo so seo is search engine optimization and search engine optimization is the strategic things that you do in your blog post so that you can rank on google for example if you're searching healthy dinner ideas on google you want to be one of those first websites shown and something that i didn't know when i was first starting my website or getting into this blogging world is that everything that you do on your website you need to do for seo so like literally every single thing from the pictures you choose how you write your titles the amount of words in your post everything you do needs to be written for seo and that will help with pinterest too so a little plug i do have i have two courses the pinterest course that i already talked about and then block it's called perfecting blogging and that shows how i do my seo and how i pick my blog posts and everything that entails for seo i have that written out the reason why i wanted to focus on seo is because all of my eggs were in pinterest well what happens if pinterest decides to blog me one day i would have been screwed so i needed to start distributing out my content so that knock on wood like i'm literally not going with that never happens but if it was to happen i would be fine and so now i am so happy to say that our traffic is almost exactly 50 on google and 50 on pinterest which is the goal and is awesome um so yeah that second year i focused on affiliate marketing and then getting my posts on google and just figuring out how to write all of those year three was a big one for me and my blog it was my senior year of college i was making really good money especially as a college student my posts were ranking on google and pinterest extremely well and people were starting to care more about me so like i said when you first started your blog no one gives two rips about you they only care about themselves whereas now people have started to become more interested in me which is like where you'll see that happening uh it just i don't know it just happens um so during year three i focused a ton on my email list and growing that i also launched my instagram and youtube and year three was the year that i started hiring on employees for bsl so i'll start with the email list and what we're doing for that so for i just knew from researching other big bloggers that having an email list is extremely important to having a successful blog and the reason for that is that you own your email list and so instead of someone coming to your website one time if you can get someone on your website to then opt into your email list then you can continue emailing them your content sales etc for years so you know one versus every week for years and as you know probably being on an email list can be really really annoying so we took the approach just like we do with everything else on our website that if someone is joining our email list we have to make it worth your while when they see an email pop up from us from me and their email list then they know it's going to be helpful and that they want to click on it and we also knew that to get someone on our email list we had to give them something so if you are trying to start an email list and you're just putting on your website click here to join our newsletter i'm telling you no one will join it or maybe like your mom and your sister no one else will join it there is no incentive for them to go on someone's email list if that's how they're doing it so what we do is we offer free printables free guides you know like even if you go to our website or my website and go to i'll www.www.buysofialee.com that linked below you will be able to see all of the free stuff that we offer when you join our email list and any post you have like my one thing i should have probably said earlier is that my blog isn't about blogging i just created a few videos where i was like trying to help people out because i would get a million emails a day and so now i have more stuff on blogging but my blog is about decorating organizing cleaning not about blogging and so if you go to my other posts you'll be able to see that we have free printables that people can opt into and they get put on our email list another thing i will say all of our content all of our free printables are fully copyrighted don't copy that it is so annoying can you imagine if you work extremely extremely hard on your website and then you go see someone copying them it's like the most annoying feeling ever and we will contact our lawyers i don't want to sound like a b word but that's happened a few times and it is it's just so frustrating so anyways but you'll be able to see the different free printables that we have how we use them um i think the blogging one obviously will be most applicable for you but uh yeah we have been growing our email list we started out i think in year three we started out like fifteen thousand and now we're on year four and we're at 120 000. so we're very steadily growing it's awesome um and it is so intense but our email host is convertkit and we are planning on switching from them because it is so dang expensive it costs us a thousand dollars a month just to have our emails there which is insane and there's cheaper ones that we can do so we're actually working on switching right now because our email list is so large and it is so intense what we do our sequences that we have set up are incredibly intense and complicated we have to be very careful with this whole switching the email because if something goes wrong that is the big part of our business so that would just not be a good thing at all um but i will update you on the website with what email hosts we decide to go with if we're liking them if we wish we didn't switch you know all the things another thing we did during year three which was a huge thing was we launched social media so i launched my instagram and my youtube on the same day reason that i launched my instagram and my youtube and why it depends on what you want to do with your blog whether you have to launch social medias or not is because my niche is home decor and i knew that for my career i want to be known as an interior designer i want to be designing homes i needed to form a connection with my readers to get people to like me and want to watch my stuff where that is really really hard to do if you are behind the screen so when i was in college and i was writing a lot about college dorm decor and stuff it was easy for me to just be on pinterest and i was so successful just being on pinterest but now that we're growing the business and expanding into it it was important that i also got on instagram and social media or instagram and youtube plus even to this day we barely work with brands but in the future we hope to work with brands a lot more and you need to have social medias for that so i just launched last year both of those on the same day like i said we and one year i was able to grow my instagram to almost 20 000 followers and then youtube is at 75 000 followers so that is awesome however i put 25 i probably spend 25 or more a week focused on instagram and youtube which has been kind of a hard transition just because i already was working full-time hours even more than full-time hours before when i was just on pinterest so to add that in has been difficult which is where like employees come in because they can do things like i have to be the one that does the instagram and youtube because i'm the face of it and so then like the other team members can do more of the behind the scenes stuff that i don't actually have to do but it's still been a hard transition so i have been very strategic just like everything else with how i've been able to grow the youtube and instagram i'm still so new at it that i don't feel like i am qualified enough yet to speak about it but when i do which i think will be sooner than later i will do a video or a course or something on how i grow my instagram and how i growed how i grew how i'm growing my youtube account but those have been what i have found is that instagram brings no traffic to my website it really doesn't like the traffic that it brings to my website is so minimal but people i form such an intense connection with my followers i story every day every single day i show up on instagram which is exhausting but you have to do it you cannot be willy-nilly with it you have to show up every single day and then youtube we get at least one video up a week at least usually two um so it's just staying consistent and making sure i don't know consistency is key with blogging and year four okay this is like the longest video ever but year four is the year that we're currently in right now and this year has been intense it has been an amazing year for our business um we are really really growing it and it has been so much fun but also it's been scary very very scary we got an office so we're now in an office which is so exciting um and well let me just tell you what we did okay so the beginning of the first half of year four i spent 95 of my time okay well i just said 25 you get it 75 of my time writing courses i wrote courses for two reasons one i was getting 100 emails a day on blogging and how i do my blog my pinterest strategy how i do my seo i could not keep up and i literally couldn't keep up so i wrote a course on all those things so i have a course on perfecting pinterest which is my pinterest strategy it is everything i break down everything that i do on pinterest to have i get over 10 million impressions a month i get over 600 000 page views a month from pinterest i do everything so specifically on pinterest and it goes over every single thing and then i have perfecting blogging which is the blogging side of things so exactly how i keyword in my website how i write my posts how i choose what posts to write how i get how i write titles that are that people will click on like it's so strategic i know i keep saying that it's annoying but if you're in blogging you understand how strategic it really is and so i go over everything these courses were a b i t c h to write i mean to get all the information down on it is super super hard i hated my life for those four months that i was doing it but they are doing so well and so i'm so happy about that the feedback that we get is unreal i honestly can't believe how amazing people have taken on to the courses like you should just see the reviews they're so nice and exciting um but that also gave us passive income and so passive income is huge because passive income is money that you can make you put blogging is a lot of passive income it's like basically all passive income but it's that upfront work that you do to then go make money in the fut like in the future so during those four months that i was writing the courses it's all i did 24 7. but now that those courses are written i really just have to go in every once in a while and update them whenever we change anything which they're always updated people ask me i they always always always updated whenever i change something the course is the first one to know um but that makes us a lot of money and now that it's done i really don't have to do too much with it which is nice because we got into the design part of our business which is the main part of our business and we're starting to invest in homes we have a production crew filming us for the homes it is just a lot more intense so the first three years the my overhead expenses were so low now this year especially i'm being risky i'm betting a lot on myself i'm spending a lot of money we got our first tangible products i'm looking over i mean i should just show you we um are doing a college planner we're like really it's a planner for anyone but it's our first tangible actual product we designed every single thing on it so like literally from the page weight to the front cover to the gold color on the binding every single thing all the pages we did basically year four i'm kind of like i mean i'm still in here for so like everything's still up in the air and figuring it out but year four has been the year of learning i am learning every single day most days i feel like an idiot because i'm learning so much and i just don't know things which is why google and youtube are your best friend if you have any questions on blogging google or youtube it for these planners i googled youtube everything we bought like i said we bought the house um that we're flipping i am googling everything like seriously every single thing i'm youtubing and googling it and yeah so i'm gonna need to update you on year four like i said we're being risky and so i'm kind of going into the mindset of it uh like if i don't do these things i am going to look back and think why didn't i do those things but i'm also like not that i think i'm gonna fail because i know i'm not gonna fail i know that this is gonna be successful but i'm trying to be easier on myself just because i don't know you'll understand and if you're in blogging you understand it's hard you're putting yourself out there on the internet people give you feedback every single day and so it's just learning so i'll have to re-update you but basically year four has all has been all about courses tangible products and getting into investment properties with the home flip so um that's really it which when i say that's it this is probably gonna be like an hour long video i hope not i hope we can get it down to like 30 minutes but i hope that that was really really helpful for you like i said i have the courses that goes through every single thing that you need to know to start a successful blog success successful blog i have the step-by-step guide that is free on my website that shows you like literally step by step on how i legitimately started my website and got it up and running i have free guides i have all those other courses that i've taken from other people every single thing will be in the description box in on my website it is supposed to be as helpful for you as possible and so i really hope it was helpful for you if you have any blogging questions send them to blogging by sofia lee.com i'll try to get back to them as soon as possible and then oh i should probably finish up on this last thing so i started this new channel which is by sophia lee blogging whereas before i put the other videos on my old channel that was because i hated like i've said this a million times but our niche is decorating and so to have the two different niches on that channel was very confusing for youtube analytics and so now that we have this youtube blogging now i am going to be a lot more comfortable posting more about blogging because it doesn't interrupt our other videos which was like a major concern of mine so i'm gonna come up here every single month post a new video about blogging so subscribe to this channel if you're interested in blogging i try to keep everything as helpful as possible i really do and just things that i wish i would have known when i was first starting out because it's scary it's intimidating and it's hard so anything that i can do to make your life easier i hope it is and i'm trying make sure to subscribe to this channel go check out the website and i hope you have a great day

Channel: By Sophia Lee Blogging

Views: 158,760

Keywords: how to start a blog, by sophia lee blogging, how to start a blog and make money, by sophia lee pinterest strategy, how to start a blog step by step, blogging tips, blogging

Id: aZDvDHxeP8k

Length: 37min 54sec (2274 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021