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Category: Money Making Blogger Interviews

How blogger Your Money Geek makes money blogging

Posted on 1:55pm Tuesday 25th Jun 2019

Welcome to my Money Making Blogger Interview series where I interview bloggers from around the globe who make money by being a blogger. Scroll down for the interview if you've been here before, or read the introduction to see what this series is all about.

Introduction to my money making bloggers interview series

If you're wondering is it possible to make money blogging? Then yes, it really is possible to earn a living as a blogger!

It's what me and many others are able to call our full-time income, but many people don't understand how it is possible, so this interview series will show exactly how bloggers are making an online income from a blog.

There are lots of different ways to monetize a blog and they will all be revealed in this series.

I share lots of tips on how I make money blogging in my Make Money Blogging section, but it's also great to learn from other bloggers too. One thing I love about the blogging community is how friendly and open it is. There's room for everyone and we all like to help each other grow and learn from one another.

Learn how bloggers make money

Read on to discover how my next interviewee makes money from blogging and the steps they took to monetize their blog. I hope you feel inspired and learn something new from this series.

Learn how many hours they spend on their blogs per week, what sort of income this provides and if there are any cons to blogging for an income.

I've been a full-time blogger since January 2017 and I started blogging in April 2013. It still amazes me that I can make money from home as a blogger.

BUT, it’s not without a lot of hard work, so don’t be fooled into thinking you simply set up a website and voila, income starts rolling in. If only! I've work more hours per week than I did in any full-time employed job - my blog is my life!

I'm hoping it won't always be that way and there are lots of passive ways to make an income from blogging, but you have to set up the foundation first which can take lots of hard work and patience.

In this series I am going to interview other bloggers who also make money from their blogs to hopefully inspire people to start a blog if they wish or to make that leap to monetizing content. I also find it so interesting to learn what other bloggers are up to. Even us full-time bloggers can learn from each other and inspire one another.

Enjoy.

Learn how Michael from Your Money Geek makes money blogging

Tell us all about you and introduce your blog. What inspired you to start your blog?

Hello, I’m Michael and I run the blog Your Money Geek. My blog surprisingly enough started as an accident and prior to interview creation I no experience with blogging.

My day job as an advisor led me to hiring a marketing firm who said I need a blog to promote myself online. They wrote a few blog posts and I was not happy with the content, so I took over.

I wrote my first blog post and no one showed up. I went searching for the magic pill for traffic and fell into the rabbit hole that’s is the blogosphere.

Once I saw people were making nice incomes of their blogs, I decided to turn my failed marketing experiment into a legitimate side hustle.

Since I am a bit of an outsider to the industry I try to do things a bit differently. Many of the posts on the site try to address some of the common misinformation online.

Additionally, I want to make personal finance fun and accessible. So we mash-up pop culture and personal finance to reach people who may not normally read personal finance blogs.

How long have you been blogging and when did you begin to make money from your blog?

I have been blogging a little over a year. The blog started generating a modest amount of money after about 3 months. It wasn’t until about 9 months in that the site started making a respectable amount of money.

How much money do you make each month from blogging?

Currently the site is making a few thousand a month. March (2019) is on track to be our best month yet and should double that amount.

Your Money Geek doesn’t fit the mould of traditional personal finance sites so it has taken some time to figure out how to monetize. I tested a few different ads networks to find one that understood our audience.

Additionally, it has taken time to educate potential sponsors about what we are doing.

How do you make money blogging?

We are with the ad network Adthrive, who has been wonderful about working with me and leaning about the Your Money Geek audience.
A portion of the revenue comes from traditional ads.
Another portion comes from email sponsorship. Each daily email has a sponsor offer.
Several blog posts contain affiliate links for either Amazon or products that I routinely recommend.
Lastly, we collaborate with brands on sponsored posts and social media promotion.

How did you prep your blog to make money? Has it been easy?

When I started, Google was not ranking any of my posts. I knew enough about SEO that it was going to take a long time to rank, so I focused on social media. I worked feverishly for the last year building up all the blogs social media profiles.

In the early months these channels represented 90% of my traffic or more. Now that Google has started to rank my posts, social media traffic as a percentage has declined.

However, the robust social media following has been great for networking with brands. In many cases I am able to negotiate better terms because of my social media.

So while I did not realise it when I started, social media has indirectly set the blog up to make more money.

What are your aims for your blog in the future?

I want to get to 10k a month! I believe it’s possible.

If you know any brand looking to partner with an up and coming brand with an engaged and active social media following send them my way. ;)

If someone is brand new to blogging, what are the most important things to focus on?

I’d tell a new blogger to focus on social media and blogger outreach.

Your first months of blogging you get so little traffic, you’re almost better off just focusing on writing guest posts to build up your backlinks early on.

Social media is critical to launch a new blog and get traffic early on. Focus on Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. These three alone can get most aspiring bloggers into a premium ad network.

Can you think of 3 pros and 3 cons of blogging as a career choice?

The 3 things I love the most about blogging is being creative, networking with interesting people, and the thrill of the hunt. Looking for creative ways to grow the blog and find new traffic is exciting.

There are a few negatives to blogging:

1. Everyone can do it, which is double edged sword. Since it’s easy to launch a blog there is a ton of competition and it’s hard to stand out.

2. It’s way more work than most people will lead you to believe. I wouldn’t consider it a side hustle as much as a second full time job.

3. Guard your wallet! Plenty of people in the blogging industry give sham reviews of blogging miracle cures to solve blogging traffic woes. Some eBook or eCourse most likely is not going to triple your traffic.

What inspires you to blog and what is the best thing about blogging?

The readers inspire me, I love when people who are not normally into personal finance tell me one of my posts helped them.

Would you still blog even if you couldn’t make money doing it?

Sadly no, as much as I love the creative aspects of blogging it’s a lot of work to write the posts, network, and promote the blog.

Do you think blogging is here to stay?

I think blogging will be around for some time. The landscape will change and evolve and making money blogging will become progressively harder. It’s the life cycle that every industry experiences; easy profits and low barriers to entry eventually reduce profits.

Discover Your Money Geek here: https://yourmoneygeek.com/

Thank you so much for taking part in my Money Making Blogger interview series and best of luck with your blog!