Over the last few months I have shared with you that I have been writing, but my writing looks much different. I do still plan to write books, but currently I have been building up a passive income by creating blogs.
I love writing and creating. My current website portfolio is a combination of the two with some being more toward the physical product creation, and others are blogs.
Why Blogging?
Blogging offered me an opportunity to write about multiple subjects without feeling burned out. I have always had a desire to write a nonfiction book, but learning the style needed was something that I didn’t have perfected. Fiction writing seemed simpler. Creating stories was something that I had done since a child. I wrote stories. I told stories. Nonfiction? My experience with that was only through research papers written in high school and college.
Tackling the topics that I wanted to write about still involved research, but blogging gave me an opportunity to do things that I was already good at: writing and teaching. I could easily research the topics that I wanted to write about and utilize my knowledge of teaching to break those down and put them into articles for others to understand clearly.
Also, blogging gave me a chance to earn income on those blogs where I was not focused on an E-commerce business that required me to create the products. For me, it was a huge win with a benefit coming from both.
The Blogging Business
Blogging in itself is not a business. If you are choosing to simply share details about your life, you may or may not make money with it. Instead, blogging needs to be more specific to become a business. For instance, my blog about food. On it I share recipes and entertaining ideas with a few stories thrown in, but it is mostly about the food and the equipment I use to prepare that food.
To make money through my blog, I utilize affiliate links to generate income. For example, I use ShareASale to find affiliate programs and products that are marketed towards my readers. I then place the links in my blog text and send my readers to the company for whom I am an affiliate so that they may purchase a product or join. By doing this, I earn a small commission for each sale.
I also utilize ads on my blogs to generate income. Not everything makes money instantly, but ads do provide a way to add income through a site that may not be generating as much money. For each blog, there are several streams of income that are working for me.
My goal has been to have all of my sites up and running by June. This would put me at having 10 websites in my portfolio with 4 being E-commerce sites (all 4 of those are linked with each one focused on a separate niche) and 6 being strictly blogs. Three of those websites are set to reach the maturity state by March with one following along in its footsteps every month after.
What is a maturity state? It’s the point where a website or blog has been fully picked up by the search engine and its blogs/articles have reached their highest rank in the search engine. On average, it takes about 8 months for a blog article to reach its full potential. Because of this, many give up on their blog business before they have even had a chance to see what their blog can do. After all, creating content and not seeing any immediate rewards makes the business of blogging difficult to sustain. You have to have patience to wait it out, and you have to do a lot of work while still maintaining your day job. It’s one of the reasons why I write in my free time and use my weekends to promote and work my business.
Overall, the benefits- if you have the patience- can be great. You can turn a blog into a passive money maker for yourself, and while one is becoming a money maker, you can work on another. I didn’t just jump into having 10. I already had the 4 E-commerce sites. The six blogs that I’m adding are things that I am doing while not working on the E-commerce sites.
If you’d like to follow along on my journey to Blogging as a Business, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter.
