Blogging… Who knew?
I definitely didn’t when I started my Pregnancy and Parenting blog back in October 2016. I started my blog because I wanted a way to challenge myself while staying home (aside from the endless duties that come as a new mom) and I definitely wanted to contribute to the household income (we had just gone from 2 incomes to ONE!) So I started researching and planning and educating myself and working my little tail off to launch a blog. I worked HARD in those first few weeks and months (heck, I STILL DO!) in order to build Swaddles n’ Bottles. The blog was brand new, I had no previous following and had never blogged before in my life.
Within 30 days of launch, I had 95,000 pageviews. By 6 months, I had clocked in over 1 million pageviews. How were all those people finding my brand new blog? PINTEREST! You can get my full Pinterest strategy that led to all those pageviews here.
With all those pageviews came a full-time income! While there are a ton of ways to make money from a blog I focus on 2 main areas: Affiliate Marketing and Ads. We’ll go into details for each on here in a bit, but first here’s a quick look at my income for the first 6 months:
Ads: $7,126.95
Amazon Affiliates: $12,837.67
Other Affiliates: $1,608.13
Grand total: $21,572.75
Note: You may be wondering why the dip in March and April… I found out I was expecting baby #2 mid-March and took a 35-day blogging hiatus… blame the morning sickness!
Affiliate Marketing
So many bloggers disregard affiliate marketing because they think the small commission percentages won’t add up to any amount of income that is worth their time. Well, my pregnancy and parenting blog is proof that isn’t true!
Affiliate marketing has HUGE potential!
The majority of my affiliate income comes from Amazon. They are one of the world’s largest retailers and with that comes a ton of opportunities to make money.
A vast majority of the products that I am promoting on my site are products I was already using in my home on a daily basis. And the fact that I am making a small kick back from each sale never effects the buyers price!
If you would like to apply my strategy to your blog, I’d love to share it with you. I sat down and outlined everything in Master Affiliate Marketing, a 30 page eBook that explains everything I do to earn money through affiliate marketing. You can download it here.
Ads
Ads are such a great way to make money from your site, but only if used properly. Certain type of ads can actually HURT your blog more than help. If you are going to sign up with an ad network, make sure it is a reputable one. The Mastering Affiliate Marketing eBook has an entire bonus section on ads, including which ad networks pay the most and how to strategically place the ads on your page to optimize income!
If you are ready to start monetizing your site, I highly suggest taking some time to educate yourself on how it can be done effectively. Like I said, I make thousands of dollars every month from my blog using the exact strategy lined out in the Master Affiliate Marketing eBook.
Excellent resources! I am sure I would be shocked at how much money I could make if I actually tried 🙂
This is super helpful and a really good read, thank you so much!
Thanks Stacey! Love your blog!
This is incredible! Thank you for the super helpful post. I’m still new at this whole blogging thing, but hopefully some day I can get to this point! Great post & blog!
You can totally get to this point! You just have to start thinking in a Business type mindset!
Wow! In six months, that’s amazing. I’ve only started blogging but I’m hoping I also get to where you are someday. def. need to up my goal smashing game. thanks for the encouragement
You can do it! If you’ve just started, that’s the perfect time to start putting some solid strategies in place to make sure you start making money ASAP! Be sure to check out the eBooks!
This is so helpful! I definitely see the power of affiliate marketing – I am getting started with Amazon, so let’s hope it pays off!
xoxo
Paige | http://www.thedailypaigeblog.com
Very helpful! Congrats on your success!
wow! thank you for sharing your income chart. I would love to have these kinds of results. I have started with amazon, hope to make it work for me.
Thanks for the insight. There is so much hype out there, but it is great to see what your own results have been. Also great to know that it is from your parenting blog. I’m sure that topic gets tons of page views. Are over saturated markets still worth exploring? (So long as I keep it all business minded). I’ve blogged for 10 years on my photography blog & haven’t monetized, however I have started a second blog with all my prior web knowledge and geared toward a passive income stream… http://parallaxlife.com
I just checked out both of your blogs- great work! I would guess that parenting would be considered an oversaturated market, yet I still see income. I think there is an abundant amount of people out there searching for information and not all of them are going to find a connection with existing blogs. A few things already come to mind with how you could monetize and I would absolutely encourage you to take the plunge to do so if you are truly passionate about the subjects you will be blogging about!
Shoot me an email if you want to chat more about it! But I think your second website is onto something good when it comes to monetizing.
This is truly amazing. Although I use Pinterest actively, I’ve never been able to achieve so many page views for my nearly one-year-old website. I suppose you must have a good Pinterest and blogging strategy. I hope you elaborate on this in a future post.☺
Cheers!