hello welcome back to my youtube channel I hope you're having a fantastic day I
am so excited you're here today because today I am going to be sharing with you
my entire blogging journey and how I've come from knowing nothing about blogging
to making money blogging and helping pay off my student loans from my blog income
okay so it all started in 2011 when I graduated law school with two hundred
and six thousand dollars in student loan debt take that in for a minute that is
an insane amount of debt and I had no idea at the time that I had that much
debt you know for a number of reasons I went to undergrad then I
went to law school figured I would be fine paying off my debt if I was an
attorney that was wrong I ended up taking a job as an attorney and you know
paying my student loans back but feeling like every single paycheck was just
going straight to my loans and I just had no idea how I had made it to that
point knowing absolutely literally nothing about personal finance I had never
taken a class about it never really talked about it in my home life nothing
like I knew nothing so being the type a person that I am I decided to start
learning about personal finance I started reading books I started
listening to podcasts and I soon found out that I was even more ignorant than I
had ever even imagined so knowing absolutely nothing about blogging I
decided that I would start a blog and you know take it from there my thinking
was that if I knew nothing about money I could share my experiences with my debt
and whatever else I learned about money and help other people do this obviously
there were other blogs already doing this but I was clueless I just thought
well I'm gonna start along so I did it wasn't long
after I started my blog that I realized there's this entire online world out
there where people are friends with each other they go to conferences together
they make money online like it was so crazy to learn all this stuff because I
was clueless before this and then I started realizing how much I really
loved personal finance and I loved learning about it and at the same time
in my law career I was like hating it like I was just hating law firm life it
was really really stressful the hours were nuts like sunup to
sundown all seven days of the week like I just and I didn't see that ending even
as I progressed in my career so I decided to pursue a career as a
financial planner I had already had my blog up and running
so I decided to apply for jobs as a financial planner and pursue a career in
that field I ended up getting a job as a financial planner and sitting and
eventually passing the certified financial planner examination however
during that time I continued to blog and I continue to make money blogging so the
first year I blogged I was a lawyer the second year I blogged I was a financial
planner and then this year the third year I was also a financial planner so
all of my success with making money blogging and blogging in general has
been done while I work full time this is like very different than a lot of other
bloggers out there who end up quitting their jobs and are just blogging
full-time or they have a full-time job but their blog is just sort of a hobby
that they're not interested in monetizing so I've found a way that
works for me to work full time and make money blogging the first year that I
blogged I made a total of five thousand dollars from my blog this included money
from advertisements affiliate marketing and maybe like one or two sponsored
posts but mostly freelance writing as well now with freelance writing I wasn't
actually making money from my blog but I was writing for other blogs and getting
paid for it this is like one of the best ways to make money blogging at first
because when I say blogging in quotes because it's not really from my blog but
it is an online form of making money the reason that I love this is because it
gives you an income stream that you can use to put towards blog expenses because
what a lot of people don't realize is that if you really want to turn your
blog into like a successful business it costs money and you will have to pay for
things and you sort of get back what you put in and if you're not willing to do
that it's gonna be really really hard to monetize and then scale your blog up
fast forward to my second year blogging and I made just shy of a thirty thousand
dollars blogging and this was while I was working full time and studying to
sit for the certified financial planner examination so it was a lot I had a ton
of stuff going on but I still did it I was able to do it and the way that I did
it was just having a very structured schedule you know putting in time slots
in my calendar when I was going to be studying versus when I was gonna be
blogging around my work schedule and it really paid off and part way through
that second year I stopped freelance writing and shifted my focus to just on
affiliate marketing and ads now I forgot to mention that I also did sell digital
products for a little bit in the very beginning but that was before I knew
anything about the online world and I I definitely did it way too soon I plan to
do this again in the future I just took six-figure blogger which is
a course that shows you actually how to monetize with digital products but when
I did it I knew nothing about marketing nothing about sales and like I was just
not ready at all for it so that and it wasn't a significant
amount of my income at all so second year blogging mostly ads and affiliate
marketing my third year blogging is this year and I'm so excited
right now it's August I don't know how much money
make this year but I can tell already that it will be more than $30,000 and
that is while I'm working full-time again it's from display advertising of
an affiliate marketing only and I'm hoping that next year I will
incorporate digital products and then I'll make even more money but this year
I just spent really focused on fine-tuning my blog how it looks the
design of it and then my strategy for monetization and most of that is what I
learned from the six-figure blogger course and from making sense of
affiliate marketing so with those two courses again I had to pay for them and
that you know that's money that some people hesitate to spend but it's like
that's how I learned how to make more money on my blog and I use this money
for my student loan payments when I shifted from being a corporate attorney
to being a financial planner I took a 50% pay cut which was really
hard on the budget because of my student loans the biggest expense in my budget
for sure is my student loans so I had to find a way to continue to pay those off
as quick as possible while working in my dream career which is with personal
finance and helping people with their money so the way that I do this is with
my blog and if I if I did not have my blog 100% I would not be able to stay on
a standard repayment plan and pay more on my loans instead I would probably
have to go on an income driven plan and because my debt is so high I would
unlikely even be able to pay for the interest every month so my blog is truly
a life saver I pay a minimum of fifteen hundred dollars a month onto my student
loans and sometimes more like last month I paid $2,700 but that was a little
unusual although I hope it continues to grow and I hope that I
can continue to pay that much on my debt I still have just over $100,000 in
student loans to repay my goal is to repay that in the next two years but
that only works if I can exponentially increase my blog income and so far I've
been able to do that I went you know from 5k my first year to 30k my second
year and you know verdicts still out on my third year but it will be more than
30k so if I can just keep this up and repay my debt in the next two years life
will be good so that's my blogging story so far a lot of people ask me how do I
do it how do I get so much done and a lot of it has to do with how much I plan
so at night I plan for the following day and I make sure I have in my gcalendar
and my productivity planner what I'm going to do the next day so I'm so good
at time management because I use these tools that I actually increase my
productivity significantly and it sort of takes away the idea that I can choose
when to do things because I've thought about it ahead of time I won't just act
on how I feel that day I'll actually follow my plan I highly recommend this
if you're trying to blog and work full-time or balance all of that and for
me what works is to often blog in the morning before work like you know I I'd
get up at 4:30 a lot of times if not 5:00 and then I blog before work and
sometimes I blog after work or on the weekends but I'll look at my week ahead
of time and make sure that I've allotted enough time for me to do it and all of
this is to say obviously I love blogging like if I didn't this would be way too
much time spent on it so if you're thinking about starting a blog only do
it if you really love it yes you can make money blogging and I'll link to
some resources for you in the notes below but really only do it if you think
you can really find a passion that I think you have to put in too much
time if it's not something you're gonna fall in love with so that's all I wanted
to share with you today it's my personal story of blogging if you guys have any
questions please share them in the comments below I love talking with
people about blogging and a link to a few of my resources my how to start a
blog post and my five-day blogging bootcamp they're both free and you can
sign up for them and learn how to start a blog right now that's it for this week
thanks for tuning in and I hope you have a great week bye bye
No comments:
Post a Comment