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I think we can all agree:
Starting a blog is hard work.
And it gets worse:
Because starting a blog that actually makes money is even harder!
But you are not the only one! Many struggle to build a profitable blog.
However, it’s not impossible and many people have been able to do it – including me!
That’s why I wrote this post:
I am going to show you how I launched my blog and made $73,334.09
And not only that:
The blog also won 5 major awards!
So I invite you to continue reading and join me on my journey to learn how to start a blog and make money over my shoulder.
Table Of Contents
- How To Start A Blog And Make Money With Your Passion
- Work Harder Try harder
- How To Start A Successful Blog
- Setting Up The Blog To Extract The Most Value
- Making A Bang!
- Let The Games Begin!
- August 2012 – $605.28 Profit / 2,125 Visitors
- September 2012 – $4,006.88 Profit / 4,518 Visitors
- October 2012 – $6,907.60 Profit / 6,240 Visitors
- November 2012 – $9,315.59 Profit / 5,008 Visitors
- December 2012 – $5,796.03 Profit / 5,477 Visitors
- January 2013 – $9,511.93 Profit / 9,485 Visitors
- February 2013 – $3,245.59 Profit / 9,938 Visitors
- March 2013 – $5,953.23 Profit / 13,487 Visitors
- April 2013 – $6,060.41 Profit / 16,017 Visitors
- May 2013 – $5,432.24 Profit / 19,248 Visitors
- June 2013 – $9,366.19 Profit / 16,444 Visitors
- July 2013 – $6,758.07 Profit / 18,654 Visitors
- So What Are You Waiting For?
- Crunching The Annual Numbers
- Income Report
- But Money Is Not The Biggest Reward
- Have My Tutorials Helped You?
- What’s Next?
What You Will Learn
While this post is a look back at the previous year, I’m going to show you precisely what I did and how I did it from day 1 to the current day.
You’re going to see ‘behind the curtains’ of how I planned the blog and promoted it, along with everything I have done to get it where it is today.
- How to start a blog and make money
- How I grew the blog from day 1 to now step by step
- Why I started the blog
- How I setup the blog
- How I produced content
- How I promoted content
- How to start a successful blog
How To Start A Blog And Make Money With Your Passion
I started the blog for a few reasons…
But behind each of these reasons is the passion for what I do.
I’ve had a love for websites, marketing, business & sales for more than half of my life.
Last year I had a eureka moment.
The blogosphere used to have some really good internet marketing & SEO blogs but over the past few years these have decayed.
What popped up in their place were a bunch of sites that just posted guest posts in the great guest post link building gold rush.
All that was getting published were regurgitated rehashed low quality no meat on the bone posts over and over and over.
Even market leading blogs like ProBlogger and John Chow fell into this trap!
This spilt out into forums as well when people would ask for help and were just offered general flakey advice that didn’t actually help anyone.
I then came to realise I was not leveraging my most valuable asset…
My own personal internet marketing knowledge and experience.
And so the idea of my blog was born, my own digital playground where I could share my passion with the world.
It is that passion that has led to the success of the blog.
If the only reason you are reading this to learn how to start a blog and make money…
I guarantee you are going to fail.
I see it time and time again, people learn how to start a blog and make money and after a couple of months when there is no money – they quit.
So whatever you do, forget about the money and focus on helping other people that share your passion.
Work Harder Try harder
This doesn’t really flow or fit in with the post but it’s an important point so I’m making it.
I’ve spoken to a lot of old geezers in pubs and I always ask them what 1 piece of advice they have for a younger guy.
You usually get the same advice from most old men – fuck everything while you still can.
But the best advice I have ever had was simple – try harder.
Try harder at everything. So I did.
Don’t Be Fooled
For anyone that has followed the blogs growth it is very easy to be dazzled with the illusion of the blogging lifestyle.
On the surface it appears that I make a bunch of money, travelling the world having a jolly ole time!
That is not the reality.
The reality is starting work at 6am and finishing at 10pm.
By a Wednesday lunch time I’ve already knocked out a standard full time 40 hour week.
It’s physically & mentally impossible for me to keep that pace everyday (trust me I tried) but an average working week consists of 70-80 hours across 7 days.
Quite often I’ll snap out of work mode a starving quivering mess about to piss my pants. Just seem to get locked in and forget about the real world!
While I have managed to travel a lot this year and hit a different country each month, let me tell you – they are the most stressful times for me.
Every day I don’t work around 3-4 hours work builds up. So if I go away for a week, I’ve got around 25 hours work to catch up on when I return. On top of the existing work load.
So don’t be fooled the illusion of the blogging lifestyle it might look like ‘the life’ on the surface but the reality is gruelling hard work with great personal sacrifice.
How To Start A Successful Blog
Before launching the blog I put thought into the execution. Lot’s of people want to learn how to start a successful blog but not many people are willing to spend time preparing it.
Having passion is all well & good…
But there’s got to be some sort of method to the madness!
What Is The Point?
- What was the purpose of the blog?
- What did I want it to offer?
- Where did I want it to go?
However I soon changed the purpose to be…
‘When people ask for help on a forum, my tutorials will be shared to help’.
That is a much more developed purpose over and above just publishing stuff.
Achieving that would be pretty tough; I would have to become highly visible in what is considered a competitive niche.
But we all need a purpose and goal to work towards right?
An Experiment Was Born
To spice things up a little and introduce a bit of a challenge, I decided I would attack this goal by not using one of my strongest areas of knowledge.
I have spent a lot of time experimenting with the technical side of SEO and link building is something I’m very comfortable with on large scales.
But I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and see if I could achieve my goal without link building.
So the SEO without link building challenge was born.
Was it possible to rank an SEO blog without using SEO?
Not only would that develop my skills in other areas I also knew that had the potential to be a great post in the future if I pulled it off.
I guess writing this annual report means I managed to pull it off?
You Will Remember Me
To make sure people remember me I put a strong emphasis on branding. I spent a bunch of time playing with colour combinations to see what worked best.
I eventually settled on the black, blue & pink combination that you see today.
It was bright, didn’t really go together but sort of did and stuck in my mind throughout the day when choosing the brand colours.
With the colours in mind I then started to create a logo. I didn’t want an anonymous business corporatey type logo – I wanted it to represent me, be personal, friendly & inviting.
So I decided to go with a smiley cartoon version of me which looked like this-
At this stage it is important to note that I suck at design and have since hired a pro!
Anyway I had a purpose, a brand and a logo!
Content Strategy
When it came to the content I knew it needed to be something special.
Especially given my overall goal and the fact I had forced myself down the zero link building avenue.
That Matt Cutt’s bloke has always said the best way to get links is by creating great content.
In this video he explains what great content is-
- Create a blog and establish yourself as an authority
- Do something that is unique/different/original
- Create content that is useful/helpful to the community
- Answers common questions in your niche
- Publish original research
- Create videos
- Publish how to guides and tutorials
- Create lists of helpful resources
So that’s what I did – I started to browse forums/blogs looking for peoples problems and making notes every time there was something I could help with.
After doing that for a day I saw the same common problems coming up over and over.
With my notes in hand I created possible tutorial titles and then bullet pointed the areas each tutorial should include.
So I knew what my audience wanted and how I could help them.
I also had the mindset that each piece of content I produced would be the best piece of content on that topic period.
The content strategy was born!
Pro tips: I particularly like writing listicles because not only they are easy and fast to write but they also are very popular and can break down complicated topics into easy to digest information!
Want to speed up your content production process? Check out my Frase review to see how you can use it to write high-quality content quickly.
Start Your Blog For Just $2.99 Today!
Setting A Tone Of Voice
Quite often you will see bloggers say you need to set a tone of voice with your writing. But what does that actually mean?
I have had a lot of great feedback about my style of writing and straight to the point approach and that is because I set a tone of voice.
I know for the most part the internet marketing niche is full of false claims, glitzy sales pitches, rehashed advice & general bull shit to separate you from your money.
On top of that I also know internet marketers are busy people and time is not on our side!
All of that creates a great opportunity not just with the content I create but also to set a tone of voice that cuts through the bullshit.
So I decided my tone of voice would-
- Tell it like it is – straight & to the point
- Fake business etiquette bullshit can go fuck itself
- Like I’m talking to a friend in the pub
- No more than 3 sentences in a paragraph
- Short & punchy
- Keep it simple
After writing a post I always go back through it and shorten sentences where possible.
If you want to get a better idea of how that looks in the real world take a look at this post about Amys Baking Company or this one!
Traffic Generation & Promotion Strategy
When I was planning how to drive traffic to the blog and promote it things started getting a bit complicated.
In the end, I decided to sack it all off and just keep things simple.
Quite literally as simple as finding people that need help on forums/social media and helping them.
I made a list of popular internet marketing forums and my plan was to just help people out, linking to my tutorials where relevant.
I also set up some Google Alerts for a range of terms that would alert me to other conversations online where people needed help.
That was it – nothing more.
- No PPC
- No link building
- No SEO
- No media buys
- No spending money
There are real people behind metrics & usernames don’t ya know!
Planning Takes Time
That plan probably took you 10 minutes to read. But let me be clear, that was the culmination of months of passive thinking and mulling things over.
I eventually put it all on paper in less than a day but I had spent months thinking about the best way to skin the cat so to speak.
This planning was critical to the success of the blog. It is amazing how many people do not plan out how they are going to attack something.
Keyword research is not planning.
I didn’t do ANY keyword research until 6 months after the blog launched.
What are you waiting for? Learn how to start a blog today!
Setting Up The Blog To Extract The Most Value
So I had a purpose, a brand, I knew what my audience wanted & was ready to create great content.
Setting up the blog itself though was a whole different kettle of fish!
One of the biggest mistakes a lot of internet marketers make is not taking care of the user experience and the overall ‘flow’ of things.
I spent a lot of time working out the best way to setup the blog to not only deliver the most value, but extract the most value from visitors as well.
So I started to think about what ‘value’ actually is and what ‘value’ each and every visitor can actually offer me.
This is what I came up with-
- Affiliate sales
- Affiliate link clicks
- Social shares (Google+/Twitter etc)
- A full time subscription
- User generated content (comment/forum post/post ideas)
- New traffic by sharing the content with others
- New traffic from telling their friends in the pub
This is the goal of every internet marketer right?
But when you think about it, that is not actually the most important goal and that’s a very backwards way to look at things.
So I decided to shift the focus in this order of priority and setup the blog based on that-
- A full time subscription
- Social shares (Google+/Twitter etc)
- User generated content (comment/forum post/post ideas)
- New traffic by sharing your content with others
- New traffic from telling their friends in the pub
- Affiliate link clicks
- Affiliate sales
Not everyone is going to agree with that. But no one agrees that the primary purpose of an ecommerce site isn’t to sell things either.
There is method to the madness though and it relies on the basics of human relationships rather than the constant quest to separate people from their money.
Relationships make it easier to separate more people from more of their money and be happy about it.
Choosing A Theme
Having a great design can make or break a blog. If it is too busy and cluttered it will turn users off and convert badly.
So I wanted a theme that was clean, simple & easy to read.
I found a free theme and I spent the next week tinkering with it and customising it to meet the goals above.
As you can probably see, it looks very different than the original.
HOWEVER: In hindsight this was one of my biggest mistakes and I highly recommend reading this post about choosing the best Wordpress theme.
You can also download a copy of my blogs theme here.
Forming The Ultimate Relationship
The ultimate relationship online comes in the form of a full time subscription.
They are explicitly stating I want to hear more of what you have to say. I give you permission to invade my personal life with an email or status update.
Each and every subscriber is a real person that has built trust with you.
Treat them like a real person & do not abuse that trust for a quick buck.
The blog makes it really easy for people to subscribe-
As you can see – it’s pretty hard not to subscribe which aligns with the primary goal of the blog!
Social Shares
As I couldn’t build links and was aware of Google’s shift to introduce social signals into the ranking algorithm I thought about how I could take advantage of that.
I did the usual tried and tested technique of adding social share buttons to the end of my posts, but I added a big ugly arrow to make it OBVIOUS!
But that is pretty boring right?
So I started to look at other ways I could encourage social signals.
I came across a sweet plugin that would hide content until the user shared the page on a social network.
So with each tutorial I created I tried to put together an exclusive pack of resources or make the video downloadable in exchange for a social share which used to look like this-
I have since upgraded to the OnePress Social Locker which is much more robust and compatible with caching systems.
I also decided to try and drive a social following by asking people to connect with me on Twitter & Google+ in key conversion areas.
So when someone submits a comment for the first time, they get taken to a page like this asking them to subscribe and follow me on Twitter-
That is a really effective page and really helps to drive subscribers.
Equally when someone subscribes they get taken to a page which asks them to circle me on Google+
What all of this creates is a self-supporting eco system of social signals.
It offers multiple opportunities to extract value from users over and above affiliate clicks and sales.
User Generated Content
User generated content is a great way to keep the blog fresh and people engaged.
When the blog first launched the only form of user generated content on the site came in the form of comments.
I encouraged comments by just telling people to post if they had any questions or problems that I could help with.
Later on I used BBPress which was a huge success and helped drive the blog forward in a number of ways, but more on that later :)
When I started out I was just focused on blog comments themselves which I knew would help me not only create relationships with people but also please the search engines with new and fresh content with natural long tail keywords.
Getting More Traffic
I also figured that every visitor had the potential to bring more visitors.
I found the most effective way to make that happen is by asking people. At the end of emails/tutorials/posts I simply ask people to share them with their friends.
Over 80,000 visitors came to the blog via referrals from other people & sites in the past 12 months.
Looking back this was particularly effective because of the huge amount of value my content provided upfront – people were more than happy to share it with others!
Although I did get a complaint that is was too good to share in case competitors saw it =/
This also aligned with my overall goal and purpose of the blog to get people sharing and talking about the tutorials in forums.
One of the best examples is with the controversial Ahrefs vs Majestic post which says-
Next time you see this topic in a forum – feel free to use this post to instantly win the argument.
It’s amazing to see how many people use that post every time the which is best Ahrefs or Majestic question comes up.
Affiliate Clicks & Sales
So with everything else taken care of…
How was I going to drive affiliate clicks and sales?
Well it turns out you don’t actually have to do anything. With everything else put in place this area takes care of itself for the most part.
Keeping my problem solving high quality content strategy in mind, affiliate sales just happen naturally without any sneaky tricks.
However some tutorials do lend themselves to affiliate promotions more than others.
One example of this is when I was trying to track & manage huge volumes of backlinks; spreadsheets just weren’t cutting it anymore.
It turned out a lot of people had this problem and there wasn’t really a publicised solution. I eventually came across Inspyder Backlink Monitor and after trialling it for a few weeks it became an essential tool in my arsenal.
That gave me the opportunity to create a tutorial that teaches people how to organise and manage their backlinks properly. It showed people how I was doing it and the problems that created.
It then introduced Inspyder Backlink Monitor and taught people how to use it properly to make things really easy saving a bunch of time & money.
You could break it down like this-
- Identify a problem the target audience faces
- Explore the problem & its drawbacks
- Solve the problem with a 1 click solution
- Teach them how they can do it as well
In this specific example I also went the extra step to haggle a $10 discount for my readers to sweeten the deal.
It takes a bit more effort and sometimes you take a hit on commission but then again you get emails like this-
Learn how to start your own blog with my step by step tutorial
Making A Bang!
So I had a solid plan, I spent time setting up the blog and put some thought into the overall user experience.
But what good is a blog with no content or traffic!
I decided that my first few posts needed to make the biggest bang possible that would hopefully set off an avalanche.
I looked though my content strategy and quickly decided that link building and more specifically tiered link building was an area that had a lot of misinformation.
There were no real nitty gritty detailed tutorials…
And just so happened to be an area I excelled in.
The tiered link building series took a total of 100-120 hours to produce. Then I gave away all of the hard work free of charge to anyone that would watch it!
In the past 12 months that series has had a total of 99,882 visitors watching them for a total of 284,253 minutes generating nearly $15,000 in affiliate commission.
I have had so many people tell me I was stupid to give them away and if I launched the videos as a product I would of made a lot more money.
That is probably true but what you can’t measure is the bang and impact these videos made as people began to watch and share them.
As people watched and learnt, they formed a relationship with me – you cannot put a monetary value on that.
Creating The Videos
When I was younger I edited gaming videos and created animations in Adobe After Effects so I was pretty comfortable with that side of things.
What I wasn’t comfortable with though was teaching others or even having the confidence to record myself speak.
So with a cheap Sennheisser headset in hand I started to plan out the videos and how I would give them a bang!
I also wanted to ensure the videos were branded, memorable and gave people a reason to stick around quickly.
So I created a set of ‘video resources’ that I could use throughout my videos-
- Introduction
I used Adobe After Effects to render a quick branded animation. - Fly In Banners
I also used Adobe After Effects to render some fly in banners that I could use to get people’s attention and take action. - PowerPoint Template
I created a branded PowerPoint template that I could use to explain things in the tutorials. - Watermark
Just my logo on a transparent background that I could use to watermark the videos where necessary. - Closing Slide
A closing slide asking people to subscribe to my blog and share my tutorials with others.
With all of those resources created I used Camtasia Studio to record and edit everything!
Publishing The Videos
When it came to publishing the videos on the blog I put some thought into the best way to present them.
Videos offer a couple of problems from an internet marketing stand point.
Firstly, Google bots can’t understand video so how will these tutorials attract search traffic?
Secondly, how do I get people to ‘convert’ after watching a video, whether that is subscribing to the blog, sharing the tutorial on a social network or clicking an affiliate link?
The first problem I solved by publishing a transcript under each video that could be shown/hidden by the user.
It turns out that these are actually very helpful to readers with disabilities or struggle to understand my voice and I get a lot of praise for providing them.
The second problem I solved with a plugin that would show a custom HTML splash screen at the end of the video and let me make certain parts of the video clickable which looked like this-
I have since ditched that plugin and moved over to the much more robust LeadPlayer to drive video conversion.
Then I needed a mechanic to drive social sharing to bring more traffic and better rankings.
By using a social locker plugin I was able to offer the videos for download along with exclusive resources.
Finally I tried to keep the posts brief and to the point, internet marketers are busy people so I quickly tell people what they will learn and present the video.
So that’s great content, that offers multiple points of conversion through email sign up/affiliate clicks, set up to drive social sharing & user engagement taken care of.
Promoting The Videos
Promoting the videos was actually the easiest bit
And it all started with a little forum called TrafficPlanet.
I updated my signature to include a link to the videos with a catchy call to action driving initial trickles of traffic.
Then I created this thread to share them with everyone and answer peoples questions.
I also updated my signature on forums like DigitalPoint, BlackHatWorld & WarriorForum and started to take part in conversations helping people out.
Not all forums like you sharing your own stuff and I have had my fair share of bans but even 1 year later, this is still a key method of promotion and driving traffic to the blog along with BuzzBundle.
Because I have put so much time and thought into the user journey, the value each user can offer and how to extract that while providing consistent quality – all of the cogs are turning in my direction.
Each and every visitor becomes a planted seed in one way or another.
This is something I feel a lot of people overlook that are purely focused on keyword research, link building and affiliate clicks.
Let The Games Begin!
At this point I have launched the blog and it is starting to get initial trickles of traffic, nothing fancy just growing from 20-30 a day to 40-50 a day in less than a week.
I spent considerable time laying down the basic foundations for the blog to be a success.
But what did I do next?
I publish a series of income reports that details what I’ve done each month so lets take a look at the best bits month by month!
August 2012 – $605.28 Profit / 2,125 Visitors
I officially launched the blog, the first 4 parts of the tiered link building tutorial & wrote about my zero link building case study experiment.
I published a video conversion rate case study based on my research when creating the blog and launched my very first competition.
The First Competition
The tiered link building series featured a piece of software called Kontent Machine. Those guys were so impressed with it they sent me an email and we got to talking.
They agreed to give me a lifetime license worth $37 per month in exchange for creating a dedicated video tutorial about the product.
I decided to turn this into a competition with the goals of-
- Increasing traffic to the blog
- Capturing new subscribers
- Driving affiliate sales
Competitions & giveaways quickly became a core part of the blogs strategy moving forward.
Traffic & Promotion
I didn’t do anything special to promote the blog. All I did was post regularly on forums with links to my tutorials in my signature.
I focused on DigitalPoint, TrafficPlanet & WarriorForum making a total of 927 posts.
I also had a few web monitoring tools setup to monitor link building related keywords so I could engage people with my tutorials where possible.
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 2,125
- Subscribers: 288
- Profit: $605.28
September 2012 – $4,006.88 Profit / 4,518 Visitors
With a great start in August and some fantastic feedback coming in I really pushed forward in September.
I finished up the tiered link building series & showed you how to do guest posting the right way.
Reaching Out
To try and shine some light on the blog I decided to create a guest post which ended up getting published on SearchEngineJournal.com.
That post was shared over 800 times and was one of the most popular posts on SearchEngineJournal.com in 2012.
It was great to see my tutorial be so well received on one of the biggest search engine blogs on the planet.
Sunday SEO With Terry Kyle
For those that don’t know who Terry Kyle is, he runs TrafficPlanet.com and created one of the most popular forum based SEO experiments we have ever seen.
He had a weekly video series called SundaySEO and he invited me to produce a video for his audience last minute.
I jumped at the opportunity and created a tutorial that taught people how to manage their backlinks and hooked up an exclusive discount for the featured software.
That opportunity brought me 467 visitors, a whole bunch of new subscribers & delivered $675.46 in affiliate commission.
Thanks to Terry for the opportunity at such an early stage. In fact he has helped me a bunch of times as you’ll see throughout this post!
Feeling The Pain
As the blog became more popular I was getting more and more emails and private messages.
This started to become a problem with the sheer volume of them coming in. However answering them was critical as it allowed me to form relationships with people that might just return the favour by sharing my tutorials.
So previously when time was purely spent on content creation and promotion, I now had to factor in the increasing volume of messages from people.
The main problem was I was putting so much time into answering all of these messages, the answers were just getting locked away in someone’s private inbox somewhere.
So I knew something needed to change and I started to think about a possible solution that would allow me to extract more value from the time invested.
Google Starts To Show Some Love
This was the first month where Google started to pay attention to the blog.
It had moved onto the front page for the term ‘Buy SEO’ completely by accident.
I hadn’t targeted the term or even tried to rank for it, but Google decided it was worthy of the front page for a competitive term.
Google was also kind enough to move me up to the #1 spot when you searched for my name-
It was great to see the zero link building experiment slowly start to pay off!
Traffic & Promotion
Again I didn’t do anything special here however I did start to post on Blackhatworld alongside TrafficPlanet, WarriorForum & DigitalPoint.
I made a total of 456 posts across the 4 forums which in turn sent me 3,929 unique visitors.
Although I did get banned from DigitalPoint ^^
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 4,518
- Subscribers: 696
- Profit: $4,006.88
October 2012 – $6,907.60 Profit / 6,240 Visitors
The blog quickly went from not earning much, to earning quite a lot in a short amount of time.
I published a bunch of helpful tutorials my google penalty checker tutorial and shared my blogs traffic strategy with the how to find & engage your target audience for profit post.
Oddly that is one of the least popular posts on the blog but is the post that offers the most value in my opinion.
Took A Shot At Disavow
Google had just announced the Disavow tool which caused a bit of the stir in the SEO world.
I took a stab at it and highlighted why the Disavow Tool is bad news for SEO and not the saving grace everyone thought it would be.
This post ended up going viral (see the big spike in the graph above) to a degree and sparked discussions in a few places including this post which has nearly 5,000 views.
John Chow vs Search Engine Journal
When I was trying to get my guest post published I sent it to both Search Engine Journal & John Chow. After not hearing back from John Chow, it was published on Search Engine Journal.
6 weeks later it magically appeared on John Chows blog, he still hadn’t replied to my email to even acknowledge receipt never mind let me know it was going live.
Either way this not only exposed me to his audience but also gave me the opportunity to create the John Chow vs Search Engine Journal case study.
The Second Competition
I also launched the second competition, this time it was for the Inspyder team offering up prizes worth a total of $715.
I actually cheated a little bit here and repurposed the video from last month’s Sunday SEO and posted it on the blog.
Although it didn’t quite perform as well as the previous competition, it still helped to bring $654.38 in affiliate commission.
Solving The Email Problem
In the previous month I was having a hard time keeping up with emails and messages from readers.
I was getting overloaded and I spent a lot of time replying which ended up just been hidden away in someones inbox.
So my solution to this was to install a Wordpress forum plugin into the site and get people to post questions there.
This had a number of benefits-
- Anyone that joined the forum, became an email subscriber
- The questions & answers were publically viewable for everyone’s benefit
- It introduced a new form of user generated content to the site
- It increased visibility in the search engines ranking for long tail keywords
Self-Serve Banner Advertising
I also introduced the OIOPublisher plugin to the blog that would allow banner and text link adverting across the blog.
The plugin makes things really easy and allows advertisers to buy advertising, check statistics and so on.
It is a fully automated setup – all I have to do is approve or reject ads as they come in. The plugin handles everything else automatically.
OIOPublisher costs $47 but has earnt $2,931 in advertising revenue serving over 2,985,328 banner views since its introduction.
Discovered A Secret Weapon
I was already pretty organised but I was introduced to The Secret Weapon GTD system by Malcolm Simmonds who is the master of all things productivity by the way.
It took less than an hour for me to learn and integrate & across the past year this is one of changes I have made that has had the biggest impact on my business.
If you don’t use any kind of GTD or organisation system check it out. Its a small change with huge benefits for anyone.
Won My 1st Award
Remember that guest post I published on SearchEngineJournal last month?
Well it was so well received it ended up winning…
The Best Of SearchEngineJournal.com 2012 award!
The post attracted huge amounts of social shares and comments making it one of the most popular posts of the year.
Traffic & Promotion
I continued with my mantra of posting on forums, still banned from DigitalPoint my focus was purely on TrafficPlanet, WarriorForum & Blackhatworld.
This brought a total of 4,521 visitors from just 328 posts across the 3 forums.
I’m not going to include the traffic & promotion section again because well, you get the jist – this is what I did every month. I’ll detail anything I did differently :)
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 6,240
- Subscribers: 1,145
- Profit: $6,907.60
November 2012 – $9,315.59 Profit / 5,008 Visitors
In the previous month I hadn’t published an awful lot of content so I put a huge focus on this in November.
I posted a grand total of 8 posts including a look at The Best Spinner, how to add a forum to your site, how not to launch a website & the John Chow vs Search Engine Journal case study.
Regular Features
I also decided to introduce 2 regular features to the blog that would be posted every month.
What I Have Read This Month – Quite simply this is just a roundup of posts that I have found interesting across the last month.
Income Report Roundup – Quite a few blogs publish income reports, so I decided to round them up and rank them every month!
Both of these regular features were well received and have been a part of the blog every month ever since!
Resource Bottleneck
I was struggling to keep up with rendering and uploading tutorials. It was taking around 5-8 hours to render each one which made the computer unusable for long periods of time.
So I decided to upgrade my PC from a shoddy 2.5Ghz dual core/4GB ram to a 3.4Ghz quad core/16GB ram & an SSD drive.
This was a huge benefit and I was able to render tutorials in less than an hour and still be able to use the computer!
At the same time I upgraded my broadband line from 24MB ADSL to 76MB Fibre which helped with uploading tutorials often weighing in at ~500MB a piece.
Both changes combined saved me a bunch of time and helped me to get more done in less time!
John Chow & Terry Kyle Features
With the whole John Chow vs Search Engine Journal showdown, John followed up with a post on his own blog!
This sent a new wave of traffic and subscribers allowing me to squeeze even more value out of a guest post that got published on 2 major sites, allowed me to create a case study, get a dedicated feature from John Chow AND won an award.
Internet Marketing Magazine Feature
I also got invited to publish an article in the Internet Marketing Magazine which had a readership of 26,000 people around the world.
In an effort to squeeze even more value out of that one guest post, they republished it along with a pretty picture of me!
As you can probably tell – I like getting as much value out of things as possible, that guest post got abused hard.
The Third Competition
I also launched the 3rd competition on the blog – the biggest yet with a total prize fund worth $1,497.00!
Winners could win either an enterprise license ($999) or pro license ($399) of SEO Powersuite with a third winner choosing from any one of the standalone products worth $99.75.
Developed My Traffic Generation Strategy
I was invited to try the beta of a new piece of software at the time called BuzzBundle.
In essence it listened to forums, blogs, answer sites & social media for any keyword you wanted.
I started to use it to monitor keywords that were relevant to tutorials I had produced.
When it found a match, I could get involved with the conversation directly and introduce my tutorial all without leaving BuzzBundle.
So over the coming months my traffic strategy consisted of posting on TrafficPlanet, WarriorForum, BlackhatWorld along with using BuzzBundle for 1 hour each day.
#1 Ranking!
Traffic from Google had grown steadily since the start of August and this month saw the ‘Buy SEO’ keyword move up to the #1 spot.
Again I hadn’t targeted this keyword or even tried to rank for it, but for one reason or another Google thought my post was the most relevant result.
What this did show though was that Google was starting to trust the site and give it more and more weight in the search results.
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 5,008
- Subscribers: 1,571
- Profit: $9,315.59
December 2012 – $5,796.03 Profit / 5,477 Visitors
Already the blog had come along way and as I entered the 5th month I decided to take some time off.
I had spent the last 3 years developing my online business working stupid hour’s day in day out.
So I decided to try and take as much time off as possible in December and published just 1 post – free SEO tools.
Although I knew I would probably end up doing something.
Site Speed Optimisation
I launched the blog on cheap $1 a month hosting which was fine for a while but overtime the site became slower and slower.
Did you know a 1 second delay in load time causes 11% less page views and a 7% drop off in conversion.
Personally I don’t like burning money so I spent some of my time off improving site speed.
I managed to do this by moving my hosting over to WPEngine and a bunch of other things which made a huge difference to my website speed.
Fell In Love With BuzzBundle
During my ‘time off’ I started to use BuzzBundle more and more.
The software really aligned well with the blogs traffic strategy and allowed me to reach new audiences with ease.
I was previously hacking together a few services with a bit of manual processing to do this but BuzzBundle delivered a very clean solution.
It is available for a onetime fee and quickly became a key part of my traffic strategy.
#1 Affiliate
The Kontent Machine team got in touch with me to let me know that I was their #1 affiliate!
They had been so impressed with the performance of the competition they decided to give me a 50% bonus.
That was greatly appreciated and a nice pre-xmas bump during my month off!
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 5,477
- Subscribers: 1,808
- Profit: $5,796.03
January 2013 – $9,511.93 Profit / 9,485 Visitors
After taking a month off I was refreshed and ready to kick some blogging ass!
Well that was the plan – I actually spent the first couple of weeks playing catch up but once that was done… I kicked ass.
I published 5 posts including the successful people vs unsuccessful people poster (read the testimonials at the end of this post to see how that changed someones life o_O), website speed is money along with the regular income report roundup & what I have read this month features.
I took a look at the best backlink checker by comparing Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, SEOMoz, Raven Tools & SEO Spyglass which promoted this boss response from SEO Spyglass CEO Viktar Khamianok.
Increasing Email Subscribers
In January I decided to try and increase the amount of email subscribers I was getting by introducing an inline opt in form that I could place in blog posts.
Introduced An Email Engagement Sequence
While I had been collecting email subscribers since day 1 – I hadn’t written any kind of auto responder series to keep people engaged with the blog.
One of the main problems with blogs is that your best content often gets buried away.
So I decided to kill 2 birds with 1 stone and create an email engagement autoresponder series in Aweber breathing new life into old posts keeping new subscribers engaged on auto pilot!
This is the sequence I setup-
Take a look at my full Aweber review to learn more.
If you look closely messages number 2, 7 & 17 are actually designed to engage the user.
First off I ask new subscribers how I can help them in email number 2 which always gets some interesting replys.
In message number 7 I ask people which tutorial they would like to see me produce next – this provides a steady flow of content ideas.
And finally in message number 17 I ask people to tell me 1 thing they like about the blog, 1 thing they don’t like about the blog and 1 thing they would change immediately.
These 3 emails are critical and help me build relationships with people while getting critical feedback on how to drive the blog forward.
A lot of the tutorials and changes I have made to the site were born out of responses to these emails.
Made A Bunch Of Improvements
I made a bunch of improvements to the blog in January including-
Upgraded About Page – I changed the about me page to be more about you adding testimonials and opt in forms.
Income Reports Page – I added a page to display summaries of all of the income reports.
Advertise Page – Although I had setup the OIOPublisher plugin I hadn’t created a dedicated page with all the information advertisers needed.
Top Social Share Widget – I added this widget to the sidebar so people could see the most popular posts based on social shares.
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 9,485
- Subscribers: 2,196
- Profit: $9,511.93
February 2013 – $3,245.59 Profit / 9,938 Visitors
I completely stopped client work for a while as I wanted to focus on growing the blog. This came at the cost of upfront profits but was a good decision long term.
I shared my custom Google Analytics profile to increase traffic and created a full blown video tutorial showing you how to use BuzzBundle to increase traffic.
Choosing A New Logo
As the blog was becoming more popular I decided it was time to get a professional logo.
So I created a logo contest and was spoilt for choice!
I then setup a logo test to measure if having a professional logo actually made a difference or not!
Unfortunately it did which meant I had to go through a complete rebranding process across social media, PowerPoint templates, my video intro and more!
YouTube Optimisation
I had identified that YouTube was consistently sending the highest quality traffic in terms of subscriber conversion, time on site and pages per visit.
During the rebrand I decided to optimise all of my YouTube videos – but the problem is you can’t just make changes to a video. You have to upload it again which means you lose all your views, comments and ratings.
But it was totally worth it.
First of all I created a branded outro and edited this into every single tutorial. This means I can keep people moving around my videos instead of YouTube’s related recommendations.
I added watermarks throughout each video and also took advantage of the new option to upload custom thumbnails for your videos.
If you take a look at my YouTube channel you can see how eye catching they are!
The Fourth Competition
After a bit of a break from competitions I launched the 4th competition.
This time with 2 BuzzBundle licenses worth a total of $432.95.
Upgraded Income Reports
The income reports get published on the 1st of every month and are one of the most popular posts on the blog.
I started to look for ways to present the data better and integrated Google Charts.
You can see in action for yourself in this income report.
TrafficPlanet Sticky Status
Terry Kyle was kind enough to make my tiered link building tutorial thread a sticky in the SEO forum.
This means it is always stuck to the top of the forum no matter what so it gets maximum exposure!
Thanks again to Terry for hooking that up =D
My Second Award
I was also listed as one of ProBloggers One To Watch 2013.
I’ve been reading ProBlogger for longer than I can remember so to pick up an award from them is a huge honour!
Thanks to all of those that helped to make that possible!
Went To Amsterdam
I also took the opportunity to sly off to Amsterdam for a few days with a friend!
It would be rude not to given it’s an hour flight from the UK!
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 9,938
- Subscribers: 3,197
- Profit: $3,245.59
March 2013 – $5,953.23 Profit / 13,487 Visitors
I had slacked off on content the previous month so stepped it up a gear with a total of 8 posts.
I posted a full review of WPEngine, the logo split test case study along with the 2 regular features.
The Fifth Competition
I also launched the fifth competiton with WPEngine.
Although this competition had an added twist of combining a review, case study & competition into one massive orgy!
There was 12 months of hosting up for grabs worth a total of $348!
Added Thirsty Affiliates
I wanted a way to monetise the forum by automatically replacing keywords with affiliate links.
I tried a number of solutions and eventually came across the Thirsty Affiliates plugin.
The developer helped me out a bit with the integration to ensure it only replaced keywords with links on the forum and nowhere else on the blog.
I now use the plugin to create and track all of my affiliate links across the site and it has been a great help.
Keyword Optimisation
Jason Acidre published this awesome post teaching people how to increase traffic with a Google Analytics Keyword audit.
So I followed his tutorial to the letter and conducted my own audit on the blog making a bunch of changes!
Moved To The Cloud
As I was starting to travel a lot I wanted to make sure I had access to everything no matter where I was in the world using any device.
So I moved to the cloud setting up Google Apps to control email & calendar synchronisation and Google Drive to store key business files.
I also setup Google Chrome to sync all of my tabs, bookmarks, extensions and history between devices.
Password sync is handled by LastPass with an annual $12 subscription.
I setup remote access with no-ip.com and forwarded the remote desktop ports on my router and I also installed TeamViewer as a backup.
Music sync is taken care of by Google Music.
The end result is as long as I have access to a web browser I can run my entire business from anywhere in the world using any device that has a web browser and an internet connection.
I also bought an ultra-light powerful laptop to take with me on my travels.
I actually wrote a more detailed post about how to work and travel at the same time.
Met Terry Kyle
It turned out that Terry Kyle was in the UK for a while so I shot down to London to meet him.
We had some great views of London, fantastic food and were joined my Malcolm Simmonds & Chris Freville.
Traffic & Promotion
At this point I was still continuing with my back to basics traffic generation techniques.
I was still active on TrafficPlanet, Blackhatworld & WarriorForum as well as using BuzzBundle on a daily basis to build traffic gently.
Went To Iceland
I shot over to Iceland for a few days to see the Northern Lights, along with some close encounter whale watching, a look at the famous Geyser and hit the geothermal blue lagoon.
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 13,487
- Subscribers: 4,388
- Profit: $5,953.23
April 2013 – $6,060.41 Profit / 16,017 Visitors
With things progressing nicely on the blog I decided to push forward on content creation and promotion.
I created 6 posts including the monster Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO post, how to add banner advertising advertising to your blog and the results of 2 case studies about an email popup and video conversion rate.
Majestic SEO Got Their Knickers In A Twist
One of the best bits of this month was the publication of the Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO 1 million domain showdown.
Dixon Jones, the Majestic SEO marketing director had tried his best to blindly discredit my best backlink checker case study claiming bias and a bunch of other things without checking his facts first.
So you can be sure my follow up was more than entertaining to read putting him under the microscope – after checking my facts and backing up my test with a huge dataset drawn from Majestic themselves.
They posted this response clutching at straws saying the data size didn’t provide a realistic comparison even though they said the data set for my initial test was too small.
In short, Ahrefs knows more about Majestics top 1 million domains than Majestic does.
A big shout out to Dixon Jones for handing me this on a plate – I couldn’t of done it without you!
Added A Sweet Email Signature
In an effort to solidify branding and grow my social followings I upgraded my email signature with WiseStamp.
It even pulls in my latest post automagically!
My First Interview!
I have been a long time reader of Zac Johnson’s blog so I was pretty excited when asked if I would be willing to give an interview!
The problem is most interviews are really boring and after looking at what people like Pat Flynn and Chris Guthrie had done I knew I could do better.
So I decided to try and flip the interview model on his head and try to produce more of a tutorial than a review.
I wanted people to walk away from it feeling like they had learnt something they could implement immediately.
Check out the interview here – it took me a full day to write!
Got Invited To Costa Rica
At the start of the month an interesting email landed in my inbox.
You can probably guess what I chose to do :P
I didn’t know it at the time but that email was the start of something special that has had a fundamental impact on my life.
Went To Snowbombing
I went to the Snowbombing music festival which is set in the mountains of Mayrhofen, Austria.
The problem with this was I had to leave for Snowbombing on the 1st of April at 9:30am and I have to publish the income report on the 1st.
I can’t actually get the final numbers for the income report until 00:01am on the 1st.
So I had to work through the night to prepare the report and hit the publish button minutes before walking out the door into a 21 hour journey.
I didn’t have time to proof read it or check if links were working.
I even got to meet part of Rudimental & Breach!
I later found out that one of my readers was there and not only that – I had actually taken a picture of him in fancy dress!
We only realised this after we both got home – but I’ve already booked it again for next year so I’ll see you there!
The Brutal Return
Snowbombing was 7 days of skiing all day and partying all night into the early hours of the morning. After 7 days of that my schedule looked like this.
- Sun 7th 1pm – leave Austria
- Sun 7th 9pm – arrive home, start work
- Mon 8th 5am – stop work, sleeeeep!
- Mon 8th 9am-10pm – work
- Tue 9th 8am-10pm – work
- Wednesday 10th – mind, body, soul broken – client booked for 10am, didn’t wake up till 1pm. Start of chest infection, still not had time to go the doctors.
- Thursday – 7am-9pm work (catching up on the catching up now)
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 16,017
- Subscribers: 5,053
- Profit: $6,060.41
May 2013 – $5,432.24 Profit / 19,248 Visitors
May was a fairly plain sailing month still focused on content creation while working promotion daily across the 3 forums and BuzzBundle.
I created an Moz review (more on that fail in a moment), how to blog & work on the road (written from a plane), how to use social media to destroy your business (Epic lulz don’t miss this!) along with the 2 regular features.
My Big Fat SEOMoz Fail
The SEOMoz affiliate program was one of the best converting at 10%!
So I decided to send more traffic that way and create a dedicated tutorial showing people how to use the tools properly.
The only problems were-
- A couple of days after publishing, SEOMoz rebranded to Moz and changed the entire design/layout
- They had also closed down the affiliate program
So the tutorial was instantly out of date and even if it wasn’t, couldn’t have earnt any affiliate commission anyway.
I can see that I sent them 300 clicks and at previous conversion levels that was worth $750 to me!
You can’t win them all huh!
Updated Social Profile Designs
Now let me be 100% clear – I am not a designer, I suck at design.
However since I had launched the blog a number of social networks had updated layouts and changed things around.
Twitter introduced the header image, YouTube changed to the one channel and so forth.
So I decided to update them all in one clean sweep and added my pretty little award symbols where possible to add social proof.
So take a look at my Google+, Twitter, YouTube & Facebook profiles!
Prepare to envy my design skillz.
A Custom Phone Case
One of my readers got in touch and sent me a custom cover for my new phone!
Great quality case and an unexpected surprise!
The Sixth Competition
This month also saw the launch of the Licorne AIO competition giving readers a chance to win 1 of 5 lifetime licenses.
This was one of the most successful competition promotions generating $2,120.00 in affiliate commission!
Won My 3rd Award
The Unbounce team announced the Top 75 Internet Marketing Blogs and it was great to see me featured amongst them!
The only problem is they didn’t rank them in any particular order – hopefully they publish an update in the future with a more competitive spirit ^^
Went To Costa Rica
In the previous month a reader had invited me out to Costa Rica for a beer. So this month I went to Costa Rica for a beer to meet Andrea & Yeison.
We also spent a good few days working together and I shared my mind-set/approach to internet marketing and helped them out.
My visit to Costa Rica really opened my eyes to a lot of things, mostly to do with quality of life and the pura vida lifestyle.
Taught In A Costa Rican High School
While Andrea & Yeison was showing me around the neighbourhood Yeison grew up in, he decided to quickly drop into the local high school.
Long story short I ended up teaching internet marketing to an IT class with Yeisons help translating.
Certainly wasn’t expecting that to happen!
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 19,248
- Subscribers: 6,728
- Profit: $5,432.24
June 2013 – $9,366.19 Profit / 16,444 Visitors
June is always an awesome month, mostly because it is my birthday!
I had planned to have a wicked sick fun month but had to cancel most plans including my trip to the Download Festival as I was swamped with work.
I did create a bunch of content though including how to start a blog, how link color affects conversion, if the Google Alerts vs TalkWalker Alerts along with the 2 regular features.
Primary Hard Disk Failed
Half way through creating the how to start a blog tutorial I decided to take a quick break and grab a drink.
Upon returning I had blue screen of deaths all round and the lovely smell of burning electronics.
My primary hard disk which was an SSD drive had somehow overheated and died.
Luckily I had previously moved to working in the cloud so there was no data loss and I was back up and running in a couple of hours after swapping the drive out.
Increased Video Conversion
A lot of my tutorials are video based so I’m always looking for the best way to squeeze more value out of them.
I had previously created a case study on increasing video conversion but wanted to improve this further.
So I decided to try LeadPlayer out which allows you to place opt ins and call to actions at key points of the video.
I tested it with a couple of videos initially which saw 1,577 opt in displays and 64 email subscribers in 28 days.
Previously it had taken a few months to get 1,922 opt in displays and 111 email subscribers.
Based on that small test I rolled out LeadPlayer to every single video across the blog at the end of June.
Added A Sticky Sidebar
I always ask my readers for feedback and things they would like to see improve – Serge Marchuk took me up on that and introduced the Q2W3 fixed widget plugin.
If you look to your right hand side you will see a red opt in box that follows you down the page.
That is the plugin that I use to do that with =D
Squeezed More Value Out Of The Contact Form
Although I introduced a forum and changed the copy on the contact page to reduce the amount of email coming in, I knew there was more value to be had.
What I wanted to happen, is every time someone submit the contact form – they get added to the blogs newsletter.
I eventually found the solution with a simple Contact Form 7 addon!
The Seventh Competition
I also launched the Link Emperor competition this month which had the biggest single prize fund yet!
The prize was worth a total of $1,800 and was snapped up by one lucky reader!
BuzzBundle #1 Affiliate
The BuzzBundle team got in touch with me to let me know that I was their #1 affiliate and sent me this-
I had to laugh at the slogan when you consider the Kontent Machine team gave me a 50% bonus ^^
Yeison Blew My Mind
I went to Costa Rica and met Yeison at the start of May. When I met him he had no previous web knowledge, didn’t know how to bold text, how to setup a blog, very little money and poor written English skills.
We spent a few days together in Costa Rica and I was totally blown away to find out that 6 weeks later he had built a blog that had been featured in 2 newspapers, earning him 3 all expenses trips including staying in a $375/night hotel.
His blog is all about Costa Rica but take a look around and look at what he has achieved in such a short amount of time.
So if Yeison can do it with all of those challenges, you have no excuse! Start your blog now!
Met A Reader In Spain
Former competition winner Stuart Jewson invited me out to the south of spain for a few days!
We spent a few days forming a plan of attack for his new blog putting together target audience definitions and a solid content strategy!
Although we did spend most of our time working out of bars and on beaches we got an awful lot done!
But that’s why the planning stage is the best bit ^^
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 16,444
- Subscribers: 7,987
- Profit: $9,366.19
July 2013 – $6,758.07 Profit / 18,654 Visitors
We are now entering month 12 since I launched the blog and as you can see it has been a wild ride so far!
I slacked of a little bit on content creation this month but did publish a Google Analytics event tracking tutorial, my favourite TED marketing talks as well as the Blackhatworld vs TrafficPlanet vs Warriorforum case study along with the 2 regular features.
Personal Branding Google Results
One of the things I had been trying to do is dominate the Google search results for my own name.
A year on this is what the search results look like-
I even managed to hack them with a big red start button for a while ^^
Zero Link Building Experiment Update
I also felt like it was a good time to reveal how the recent Google update had affected my zero link building experiment.
Here is a graph showing organic search traffic with each algorithm update overlaid-
It’s pretty safe to conclude the experiment was a success!
Top 100 Business & Top 100 Small Business Blog Awards
I started the year with a bang and I’m finishing it with a bang!
Technorati are one of the biggest blog search engines in the world tracking millions of blogs and billions of links. They rank blogs in order of influence across a range of categories.
In July 2013 I picked up 2 Technorati Awards-
- Top 100 Business Blog
- Top 100 Small Business Blog
Expecting Kittens!
I had planned to spend the last few days of the month with Dave & Vicky from ACoupleTravelers.com in Poland but had to cancel it after finding out my cat was up the duff.
That’s when she was little & cute instead of the whore she is today though.
Even though I had to cancel the trip, I more than made up for it in August! But you’ll have to wait for next month’s income reports for that.
Key Statistics
- Unique Visitors: 18,654
- Subscribers: 8,949
- Profit: $6,758.07
So What Are You Waiting For?
If your still with me – you now know everything you need to know to start a blog & follow my success.
Whether its a blog about internet marketing, finance or travel you have all of the tools & knowledge you need to start your journey today.
Don’t know how to setup a blog? I’ve got you covered.
Start your journey today. You can do a lot in a year.
Crunching The Annual Numbers
Let’s take a look at all of the important numbers and metrics across the past year.
Visitor Statistics
My traffic strategy looks to have paid off throughout the year with BuzzBundle along with posting on forums like TrafficPlanet, WarriorForum & BlackHatWorld.
A grand total of 113,170 unique visitors (310/day) with a total of 632,452 page views!
In July 2013 the blog was pushing 601 unique visitors per day so it’s great to see that’s currently double the annual average.
Most Popular Content
I’ve published a whole lot of content across the year, a grand total of 82 posts made up of video and text based tutorials.
But what was the most popular content this year?
The tiered link building tutorial series, link building forum, backlink checkers compared posts take up the top spots!
Top Traffic Sources
Given my fairly basic traffic strategy the traffic sources below should come as no surprise!
Google sends the most traffic with the forums and social networks bringing up the rear!
Search Engine Traffic
As you probably know by now this blog is a zero backlink experiment so looking at how search traffic has performed across the year will be interesting!
As you can see traffic has increased steadily and Google has sent a total of 80,650 visitors across 7,463 keywords!
YouTube Views
YouTube has been a critical part of the blogs growth. Not only has it helped with the delivery of videos, it has also delivered the highest quality traffic consistently.
What is interesting though is that discovery of the videos only occurred 34.9% of the time on other websites (eg my blog) and 58.5% of the views happened directly on YouTube after a search or clicking on a related video.
Note: You can use a Youtube tracker tool to check the rankings of your Youtube videos.
Social Shares
The blog has seen a total of 16,559 shares across Facebook, Twitter and Google+
My Forum Statistics
The forum has seen steady growth since its introduction and claimed 2 of the top 10 spots in the most popular content category.
If you haven’t joined the forum yet, get involved!
I’ll personally answer any internet marketing questions you have!
- Users: 1,396
- Topics: 604
- Posts: 2,298
Subscribers
The most important metric on the entire blog – earning a subscription from someone is the ultimate form of commitment and conversion.
There are now a total of 8,949 subscribers across all of the different channels.
- E-mail – 4,031
- Twitter – 1,307
- YouTube – 1,396
- Facebook – 594
- Google+ – 1,156
- RSS – 465
Forum Promotion Posts
I made a total of 3,335 posts across 4 forums in the year which averages out to roughly 9-10 per day.
- TrafficPlanet – 1,488 posts (9,374 visits)
- WarriorForum – 864 posts (7,854 visits)
- BlackHatWorld – 781 posts (12,940 visits)
- DigitalPoint – 202 posts (752 visits)
Income Report
Here are the numbers you really want to see-
Affiliate Earnings
- 48HoursLogo – $165.00
- 99CentArticles – $975.79
- Ahrefs – $271.67
- AuthorHreview – $157.50 (my review)
- Blog Advertising – $2,931.00 (tutorial)
- BuyProxies – $718.45
- BuzzBundle – $2,513.63 (my tutorial)
- CaptchaSniper – $954.70
- GSA Captcha Breaker – $111.80
- GSA Search Engine Ranker – $1,104.64
- GSA SEO Indexer – $83.23
- HostGator – $50.00
- IBP – $158.32
- Inspyder Backlink Monitor – $3,329.47 (best backlink checker case study)
- JustHost – $420.00
- Kontent Machine – $9,005.27 (my tutorial)
- Licorne AIO – $2,467.50 (my tutorial)
- Link Assistant – $123.45 (guest posting tutorial)
- Market Samurai – $131.12
- PowerupHosting – $167.10
- Rank Tracker – $105.52
- SENuke – $176.40
- SEO Powersuite – $2,019.87 (my full SEO Powersuite review)
- SEO SpyGlass – $65.84
- SEOMoz – $1,300.00
- SESlingShot – $3,450.00 (my review/exclusive bonus)
- SimpleVideoPro – $117.49
- StableHost – $162.93
- TheBestSpinner – $3,104.95 (The Best Spinner review)
- Thirsty Affiliates – $98.50
- Ultimate Demon – $8,963.09 (my tutorial series)
- Website Auditor – $57.61
- WP Engine – $1,500.00
- WP Robot – $50.40
- WPEngine (hosting) – $391.60 (my review)
- LeadPlayer – $147.00
- OIOPublisher – $47.00
- OnePress Social Locker – $21.00
- Top Social Share Posts – $8.00
- Ninja Popups – $18.00 (case study)
- StableHost – $9.45 (original host)
- Blogging With John Chow – $37.00
- SponsoredTweets – $50.00
- SimpleVideoPro – $37.00
- BlackHatWorld Membership – $97.00
- BringMyBlogVisitorsBack – $37.00
- PC Upgrades – $596.06
- Facebook Sponsored Stories – $77.10
- Contact Form 7 Autoresponder – $14.97
I separate out my SEO consultant earnings from the affiliate earnings. The blog drives affiliate sales directly and whilst it does generate SEO consultation leads these are separate projects in their own right.
This year I generated $27,910.03 / £17,844.14 in consultation earnings.
Earnings Total
- Affiliate Income – $47,012.24
- Consultation Income – $27,910.03
- Expenses – $1,588.18
But Money Is Not The Biggest Reward
Over the past year I’ve collected feedback from people through emails, forum posts and so on.
Some of the feedback I get from people is truly staggering and I wanted to share some of that with you.
I never thought I would create something that could touch people’s lives in the ways you are about to read.
Tom Whettem
It’s been a few years since I have done any serious seo, but with your help I have doubled turnover month on month every month for the since October when I started promoting an ecommerce site I have a financial interest in. Feb already looks on trend to double Jan sales again.
I have not even really started any of the tiered link building but your blog has enabled me to get back up to speed with SEO and understand the fundamentals that work which have been a massive help.
Moody Blue
Take a look at our ecommerce SEO guide to see what they are talking about!
Matthew,
I watched this video a while back and really liked it.
I actually used this strategy on an SEO job interview. I applied for an entry level SEO job for an SEO division of a major corporation that was tasked with the SEO a large website (about a million pages). I had little experience but I decided to make up for it by doing a presentation.
So I analyzed the website the company was supporting using the techniques you discuss in this video. My interviewer absolutely loved it. I followed up this with “my link building strategy” where I basically walked them through your multi-tier link building strategy presentation. At this point my manager’s jaw dropped.
I went into the interview thinking that I would be super under-qualified for the job, but from what I saw the techniques you talk about are like 4-5 years ahead of what some SEO companies are doing. I won’t say the name of this company, but their SEO division has at least 75 people working to support one major website. Kind of crazy.
So thank you again, you have really made a difference for me.
Sincerely,
Moody Blue
Spookyloot
Hey Matthew
Few months ago i discussed some issues of Think and grow rich with you and how it opened my eyes about life and people in it.
Now it’s 6 months later and i started my own webdesign/marketing agency in Belgium.
We are serving clients (me and 2 other php, design, and engineers experts as my mastermind group, all three age 20-23).
One of our clients is who is a sales coach in europe who’s really succesfull with his self-help books. He contacted us to do his entire online marketing + webdesign and product branding.
We are launching him for a series of seminars in the U.S. (website under construction ). And we get payed over 150$ per sign-up for his 3 day seminar. The youngest of us is going with them so we can live stream webinars for his clients.
Another project he trusted us with is his . We can launch it in Dutch, English, and 6 other languages.
We also launched a exhibition . We launched his website 2 nights ago and currently i’m active as international relation manager and head-marketing for getting 5% commission on the annual turnover.
Other than that we already made 7 people happy with a website that’s locally ranked paying me for their SEO on a budget they can decide for themself.
This happened 6 months after reading Successful People Vs Unsuccessful People – Which One Are You? And after reading Think and Grow rich. I still got that image of successful vs unsuccessfull hanging above my computer screen.
So thanks!
Tom Blackshire
Hi Matt,
I know that your site serves as your income and you get financial reward through it, but I just wanted to say a sincere thank you for your content.
I’m currently an agency based SEO that specialises in technical SEO for large companies, typically the sites I am working with have massive authority (PR 7-8) and I just need to restructure and improve content to achieve rankings.
Your site has opened another side of SEO to me that I knew existed but looked down upon. Because of your content I have begun exploring and experimenting at ranking fresh sites. Through building links and creating fantastic unique content. I now have Adsense and Amazon focused sites that are supplementing my income nicely.
My plan is to keep this process going until I can work for myself full time. The best part is that I am helping people out as I go and this is even leading to out of hours consultation work and recommendations.
Thanks again, your website that I came across by chance and enabled me to build upon my technical knowledge gained through my career and given me the opportunity to work for myself.
Thanks
Paschalis Iliopoulos
Your videos. Your attitude. The fact that you respond.
The way you show you care.
You sir, you rock. Have a nice day
and I wish you the best.I dont want to ask anything right now, maybe in the future.
But right now I am just sending you and email to thank you and send you my wishes.
Keep up the fantastic work.
Really i mean it.
Bye :)
John Lefler
Hi Matthew,
I stumbled across one of your YouTube vids on back linking. Good grief! It was incredible! Thank you SO much for your kindness in sharing some of the most amazing training on the Internet. And free??? Amazing. For such a young guy your IQ is obviously through the roof and yet you have a heart that shares such genius. Bless you for that.
I am an old great grandfather (who loves technology) and have been working toward an online business for several years and it is so rare to find such generosity that I simply wanted to say thank you.
My only regret is I just found this site and am excited to dig into the wealth of knowledge here and my wife is calling me to come to bed. Drat. Oh well. I’ll be back first thing in the morning. Thank you so much for the kindness Matt. This is a wonderful gift you are providing.
With gratitude,
John Lefler
You can’t put a price on feedback like that!
Have My Tutorials Helped You?
If my tutorials have helped you like those above – then I want to know!
I have no idea what I will do with them but one thing is for sure – reading things like that is a great inspiration.
It makes all my gruelling hours’ worth it and provides great motivation to push forward.
Click Here To Submit Your Testimonial
What’s Next?
I’ve come a little long way in a little long time but really I feel like I’m only just scratching the surface.
There’s still an awful lot to explore and given the dynamic pace of the web it’s likely I’ll never explore it all.
But I’ve got a good idea of what I want to do over the next few months – if you have any suggestions, please let me know!
Taking A Chill Pill
It’s been a very hectic year to say the least. I’ve never worked so hard in my life and after a while that begins to catch up with you.
I had planned not to work at all in August but well, I kind of suck at not working and this post has taken around 30 hours to put together alone.
But I’m off to Costa Rica for nearly 3 weeks except this time it’s all pleasure.
Hopefully I can spend the next few days preparing some posts so I don’t have to do much while I’m there.
I’ll return refreshed & ready to rock – as long as the pura vida lifestyle hasn’t set in too hard.
Complete Site Audit
As the blog has grown it has started to become a little bit messy.
So I’m going to give it an annual spring clean going through the entire blog fixing & improving things where necessary.
I suspect there’s a lot of internal linking opportunity I’m missing out on and a bunch of stuff that doesn’t work as it should anymore.
Upgrades Ahoy
I’ve also got a few upgrades for the blog planned that should help make it more useful to people in general.
I’m going to improve the navigation and also change the category/structure of the site which currently sucks.
I will also be adding a few things to keep you guys coming back but that’s more of a master plan that will turn into a case study at some point ^^
The theme also needs some work, I have hacked it an awful lot so I would like someone to rewrite it from the ground up so it’s fast, agile & responsive.
If that sounds like something you can do – get in touch.
As I complete the site audit I’m sure some other ideas will spring up along the way, either way the blog will be much better than it is right now.
If you have any ideas then please let me know. A few on the list have come directly from readers!
Free Product Launch
About 10 months ago I started to tease people with a free piece of software in the income reports.
This all started by me trying to automate a manual process, which turned into a product I could give away to my readers.
Which then needed a squeeze page, which needed a video, then the software needed to be upgradable & a bunch of other stuff.
Along with pushing the blog forward & creating content this has dragged out an awful lot.
So I know I suck and it’s taken a whole lot longer than anticipated but all the pieces of the puzzle are now done!
AND I’ve nearly finished putting all the pieces together.
Trust me the wait will be worth it – you will have a robust reliable piece of SEO software that will stand the test of time.
It takes one of the most aged SEO tactics that has survived 15 years of updates & automates it.
I could easily sell it for $97 a pop but I’m just going to give ya’ll for free! It’s what I do.
My Biggest Tutorial Series Yet
I will take $100 and show you how to build a business online from the ground up.
I get lots of tutorial requests for very specific tutorials focusing on different parts of the internet marketing puzzle.
So instead of creating tutorials about individual pieces of the puzzle – I’m just going to create the entire puzzle step by step over my shoulder.
I will publish a highly detailed video tutorial every week documenting everything I’ve done that week and everything I intend to do the following week.
You will be able to create your own site and follow along week by week.
Explore New Types Of Media
One of the main pieces of feedback I get is you guys want more content, more often.
After reading this post I hope you can see why that is a problem.
But every problem has a solution so I’m going to explore new types of media & ways I can deliver content.
I’ve already got a good idea of how I’ll do that – whether its technically possible or not is a different question.
Wrapping It Up
When I started writing this post I wanted to give people all of the information & knowledge they need to succeed online or improve their current position.
So I’m hoping the 30 hours I have put into this post over the weekend will help you in some way!
Looking back it’s been a crazy year and the next year is looking to be just as crazy if all goes to plan ^^
I would like to personally thank every single reader that has helped to support the blog from day 1 – without you guys I wouldn’t be writing this post, so THANK YOU!
If you want to say thanks & help me out, then I only ask one thing.
Please share this post with others. On forums, on your blog, with your email list – anywhere & everywhere you can post it =D
If it helped you – it will help others, share the love folks!
Learn how to start your very own blog with my step by step tutorial
1,474 Responses
Very nice and easy tutorial for making full time income on a blog. Thankyou. It is very informative and worth reading and implementing too. These steps helped me so much.
Glad it was helpful. Good luck!
what is the connection between SEO and blog can you give some tips?
If have a blog and want to generate search traffic and rank for keywords, then you’ll need SEO.
Please, read this post to help you understand- https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/what-is-seo/
I like that. The content is awesome!
Thanks, Titus!
The way you share is very good and useful. thannks
Cheers, Ram :)
Lots of good tips here, thank you for sharing :) Off to share!
Cheers :)
This stuff should be shared among new people like me.
I really appreciate your work!
THANK YOU
PEACE!!!
Thank you. I really appreciate it!
I’m totally impressed by your effort to put up such a gigantic post! Wow, your Blogging success really inspiring me.
Thanks, Nomy- I really appreciate it!
I’m totally impressed by your effort to put up such a gigantic post! Wow, your Blogging success really inspiring me.
Thank you! Glad it was helpful!
Holy crap! It’s a good thing that I work for myself: saving this as a pdf and will read it at the coffee shop. Thank you for taking the time to write this!
No problem, Matt! Hope it helps :)
Good advice for beginners, intermediate and advanced bloggers. who wants to start a blog to generate an extra income from them.
Beautiful post, it was helpful.
Happy to hear that- thanks!
You just motivated me to be myself when am writing and not try to conform to “the standard tone” b.s. Very informative and encouraging post. 30 hours definitely not gone to waste. Thank you.
Always happy to help! Wish you luck!
Thanks for the blog. Much thanks again. Really Great.
Thank you for reading!
Looks Good But Most Of These Are 2012, This Is Now 2021 With Many Many, FACEBOOK, Bing, Yahoo, Google & YouTube Rule Changers Since 2012.
Hey David! Here is an up to date article about starting a blog in 2021- https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/how-to-start-a-blog/
Great Work Guys Amezing
Thank you!
Thanks for sharing some good blogging sites that I can comment. Can you help me in finding more links for seo backlinks for my website.
There you go https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/link-building/backlink-analysis/
Great article ,Thanks for sharing this valuable and informative piece of content. I like this very much.
No problem!
This is the really very helpful content for all visitor because its your unique struggle and each every content line is very helpful for us thanks for sharing with this hard struggle and keep writing more.
No problem Sandy. Happy to help!
Thanks for all the Advice, really looking forward to it!
No problem! Good luck!
I wanted to start my blog but was not aware of how can it help me to earn. But by reading your insights I am at ease and have now made up my mind to start my own blogging channel as soon as possible.
Great! Wish you well.
And remember, if you need help, my blog is here to help!
Thanks for sharing The Awesome content. I will also share with my friends. Great Content thanks a lot.
No problem & thanks for sharing!
Thanks for this wonderful post. I found it very informative and knowledgeable and also I am waiting for your next post.
Thank you for reading my blog, Pooja!
What a brilliant post! Than You For Sharing.
Thanks for reading! ;)
Thanks for sharing The Awesome content. I will also share with my friends. Great Content thanks a lot.
Please do. Thank you, Abdul!
Great Blog
Thank you!
Blogging is all about content. Rehashed stupidity is no longer needed by people and thus if you can attract people with content, then you will be able to monetize your blog to an awesome level. Amazing article man.
You’re so right! Thank you for your comment, Mohammed.
Nice post. Thanks for sharing the valuable information. I found it very useful knowledge. Keep sharing good information.
Thank you! I’ll do – more articles are coming!
great site with great content. thanks for sharing
Always happy to help!
Great Info in This Blog Thanks For SHaring this
No worries!
This is a good blog to those people who is starting to earn money using making blog. And finally “Google Starts To Show Some Love to those blog we are making”. Thank you so much this article is really good.
Thank you Bill. I’m glad you found my article useful.
Wonderful Info in This Blog
Thank you! I hope it has helped you with your blog!
site très original, merci
Merci :)
Thanks Matt, this is like the bible to me as I’ve just started my own blog.
Brilliant news – you’ll find this section helpful too – https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/
This is All In One package for all your readers :) Thanks
You’re welcome!
How to build good content? coz is too many content Id like search in google search engine
https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/on-page/seo-copywriting/
thanks for sharing your article
Happy to help Kamal.
Thanks Matthew for sharing this. Its a great help for me to try earning from my blog.
Best of luck Santosh
Hey Mattew, is this long content post very helpful to readers who are looking for something regarding newbie.
Hey Alena – I certainly hope it is helpful.
I am surprised after reading your content, You are ready to prove you are so professional. I loved to read your post. Thank you.
Thanks Pritam
Very inspirational information. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Glad I could help.
I have been blogging since 3 years ago, but the blog has not shown good traffic, please give tips so that my blog has a large traffic. Do you have SEO optimization for each article?
You’ll find everything you need on my blog to learn how to increase traffic
Long form quality content is key
Yes as long as every line adds value and not just fluffed up to get the word count.
Thank so much.
Happy to help.
This will be helpful article. Great tips you have shared here.
Cheers Aira! Best of luck with your blog.
Thanks for sharing such a nice information. Really Helpful.
Happy to :)
I am very glad to read this nice article
I am glad you read it too
It is a very interesting and informative article with a lot of good quality facts in it. Keep it up!
Hey Morgan, thanks very much. Best of luck with your blog.
Really amazing post with much helpful information. Thank you very much for writing great stuff about Successful Blog And Make Money for us.
Happy to help Jerry
Thank you for this great article I can apply this kind of idea for my website. Really useful.
No worries Mike
As a Newbie, I am constantly searching online for articles that can be of assistance to me. This is amazing information regarding blogs and given ideas on how to earn money through blogger on different topics. Thanks for sharing nice information. please keep posting articles like this…
Welcome to the online world – everything you need to know is only a few clicks away!
What’s Going down i am new to this, I stumbled upon this I
have discovered It absolutely useful and it
has helped me out loads. I am hoping to contribute &
help other customers like its helped me. Great job.
So glad you found my guide and was able to make use of the content. Thanks :)
I am looking for some good blog sites for studying. I was searching over search engines and found your blog site.
Glad you found my blog!
Yeah! Great info Thank you
No worries – happy to help!
this was a great read, thanks a lot for posting
No problem Max. Happy to help!
Thank you for sharing.
No worries, hope you found the post helpful.
Good information about the e commerce store. You have shared your success story. Good work. Good step. Keep it up.
Thanks a lot and I certainly will do.
Wow, That’s impressive, firstly, I thought of ignoring this post as it looked so big to read through, but after completing, its motivational. It would definitely help me through my blog. Looking forward to reading more similar blog that will help me.
Thanks Lisa, I’m glad you stuck with it!
nice
Thanks
Starting a Blog in Five Steps:
Choose a blogging platform, domain name, and hosting option.
Design your blog using a simple theme.
Modify your blog to get your desired look and feel.
Select the best plugins for your blog.
Write compelling content that adds value to readers.
Those are the basics.
Building e-commerce store is not that difficult if you know little basics in html and php coding. Many cms provides built templates which can be used to build an e-commerce store. Difficult part is to make the website reach people and bring in sales.
But you need to ensure you have built it with strong foundations, I write about it in this post https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/ecommerce/
nice blog
Cheers!
Very great blog. You have explained the points so well.. Will made a blog soon by keeping these points in my mind. Thanks for the share.. :)
No problem, you may also find this post useful https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/how-to-start-a-blog/
thanks for the actionable article, most of my friends are approaching me to create a blog, but the fact is I don’t have a knowledge in creating a blog, now I got some idea and I going to create a website for them, keep doing this great work, keep sharing with us.
Thanks Harish, good luck creating your first blog!
What’s up, I read your blogs on a regular basis.
Your story-telling style is witty, keep it up!
Thanks and I certainly will ;)
I pay a quick visit every day a few websites and websites to
read content, however this webpage provides feature based content.
Glad you found my blog :)
Hi there, I enjoy reading all of your article. I like to write a
little comment to support you.
Thanks for the support it is much apreciated
Hi Matt, I came across this post from Google and this is the first time I read an article from you. I must say that I’m totally impressed by your effort to put up such a gigantic post!
And I must admit that I read through the article word-by-word until the income reports part. And I’m amazed by how much you have made, although those reports are from many years ago.
After reading this post, I’m convinced that building a successful blog requires hard work and a lot of dedication to help others by creating great quality content. More importantly, I’m totally inspired and driven to do better. Thanks for that.
It hit me hard that you were able to make 4 figures income from 10k-20k visitors per month. My blog receives about 20k-30k visits per month, but I’m not making as much. This is something I need to think about. Hmm.
Anyway, I love this article and this is why I’m leaving my comment here. Thank you so much. Cheers :)
Hi Shawn! Thanks very much for taking the time to leave this comment! I am pleased you feel inspired after reading this post :)
Wow, your Blogging success really inspiring me to work like that on my blog :)
Theres no substitute for hard work!
yes this is helpful for me..
Good news
Great Post !!
Thank You Mathew, for making me understand about the How to Make money through Blog.
Understanding is key, now action it :)
Very good this page I recommend it for its good content
Thanks for the recommendation
hello matt
yr post is very nice for beginners as well as existing bloggers it gave me so much information
thanks friend
Awesome news friend
I’ve only recently come across your blog Matthew and it’s a great resource, so thank you very much! I’m far from being at the point where I can start earning from my blog but because I’ve managed to write a couple guides that were applicable to my community (contemporary musicians in the UK) I’ve managed to receive a high google ranking for my target keywords. All I’ve done so far to promote my content is to publish it to relevant Facebook groups and the response has been really encouraging.
What I’m liking most about your style of writing is that you’re writing useful guides without sounding like a robotic salesman. Honestly makes me find it so much more engaging instead of gagging and moving swiftly on!
Will be subscribing to your newsletter.
Cheers mate.
Oh no I definitely don’t aim to make people gag! haha thanks for the feedback Tom
I was checking out the true meaning of the word “motivation”, and you name popped up.
That was simply a ‘hype’ kinda
Just when I was about giving up on my blogging struggle, I stumbled post accidentally (ofcos, I couldn’t figure how I got here).
I salute your writing skills Matt. You were able to catch a lazy a** reader like me to reading such a lengthy article. You are an inspiration and a BOSS. This helped me.. I know a whole lot this article would definitely help. So apologies if I’m not asking for permission before sharing to hundreds of friends via your “share link”.
My first time on your blog I believe. Great work Sir!!!
Thanks for the shares Fakanlu, keep blogging!
Thank you for sharing great article for SEO. i am Regular reader to read your blog, you should update very useful article and latest news.
Thanks Manchun
This no BS guide to how to build a top 100 blog in 12 months. I like the honesty and I love how easy it is to understand this.
Great article.
That’s what I’m about Tilak, no BS
Hi, You have done a wonderful job. I am going to surely digg it and actually suggest to our friends. Most likely they would be benefited from this great site.
Aww thankyou Maryjo, hope your friends can benefit too
Perseverance is also key, I think! Sometimes people give up too early because they don’t see results, especially in terms of readership. Great article btw!
Very true Ida
Thank you for this article.
There are some tips i’ll definitely try out
Glad to hear it Steven
Hello
Ist nice post and thanks for sharing this post
I hope it has helped you out Nishant
Hello
Its too good and fantastic ! I’m really impressed of this post and thanks for sharing for this information
You are welcome Shobhit
hi, Matthew Sir
I agree with you and about your post because earning money is not so easy.
But if we give our most of the time, passion and Intrest on the work, one day we will be successful.I have started just before a week and I have learned many ideas about blogging.And One day I will also be like you.
Thanks for sharing your experience and hard work.
Hey Prem, keep with that attitude and I am sure you will be successful
Amazing post, Matt. I’m going to read through it and take notes tonight.
Sounds good to me
Nice Article The Information on This Blog always Helped me Improving my Little Blog
Thanks Dear
Thanks Jacob, maybe your little blog will become your big blog
hi matt…thanks for your shar…god job
Cheers!
This was very interesting to read, thank you for sharing
No problem Darryl
i read this article/post, and found awesome things from this post
Thank you for sharing
Glad you found out some useful things
Oops!… Endless journey! Need a day to read this post. Really interesting. Lot of things can learn from this post… Great!
Thanks!
Glad you liked it and feel you can learn from it
For newest information you have to pay a quick visit web and on world-wide-web I found this
site as a finest web page for latest updates.
Thanks
This is such a great article, I Need to try it Out Thank you for using your time to write this awesome post for us
No worries, I am glad you liked it
Thank you so much for the information you have shared with us ! I am impressed , and I would recommend this blog to my friends.
Thanks for the recommendations Jual
Wow, so much useful content in this article. I’m currently just using my blog to help get local traffic to my website for Personal Training enquires, but would like it to grow more national.
I think adding lots of subscribe options is definitely something I need to work on amongst other things.
Glad you found the post useful Oliver, now it’s down to you
Nice Informative Article, Learned a lot from this. Yes, i will implement and get best result.
Hope you put what you learnt to good use Sandeep, thanks
Hi,
Nice article trying to follow these tips. I am working on providing tutorials over a language so is there any extra tip you want to share
Theres no difference
Hi,
Well this was great to read & gain more idea from this blog. Thank you sharing this blog.
No worrys Nishant
Hi,
This epistle looks like- I’m missing something out.
I don’t spend too much time preparing to start a new blog though.
But I think I got what works. I started a blog December 2016, and to date I can tell you I’ve had over 150,000 real human traffic without advert.
Cool right?
But you can’t believe what I make from it?
Almost nothing to cent. Just gathering traffic with limited return. The blog is monetized with Adsense though and of course it’s my default source on income.
Don’t really know what next to increase income.
What do you think about this?
You should look at integrating affiliate products throughout
first, to thanks Matthew for sharing this amazing post with us.
Really Matthew, it’s too informative and helpful post for me and finally now i have completely undestand about how to Start a successful blog and make money online……………………..thanks again Matthew
Glad to be of service!
Thanks for sharing the information. I will surely follow your guidelines to move forward in my blogging career.
All the best Sailesh!
This post is mindblowing and it is exactly what I was looking for. I was actually thinking earlier today, “Is it possible to launch a successful site without link building? I really don’t want to waste my time building links.” Then I opened my e-mail and a link to this post was in-box. Now I am sharing it absolutely!
Hahaha now you know :)
Hi Matt
well your blog very interesting I learn to blog from your site and here always I get new and fresh content thanks for sharing this useful post with us
No problem Manish!
The information you provide is very complete.. thanks for sharing
No problem Feriza!
Awesome tricks and tips ! Somehow I find these less confusing than the other websites I’ve gone through.
Thats my plan :)
Thank you so much for the step by step instruction. I will follow them in my blog.
No worrys
hi. It’s useful article. your blog is great .Thanks Matthew.
Thanks :)
Thanks Mattew….nice article…
No worrys Nikki!
Thank Matthew. It’s great article. I have nothing to say, your blog is awsome
Thanks Henry!
good informations . thank you for writing and sharing this article !
No worrys!
Wow Mat. I can see you spent tons of time creating this content. This is like an eBook in itself on making money from a blog. It may be too much to digest in one reading; this is really valuable stuff.
No worrys Brian glad you enjoyed it!
Hey Matthew
It’s really amazing , i mean you really worked hard because it takes a lot of time to achieve that level of blogging and you achieved it within a year.
i know some of the other top bloggers but as per my knowledge they took more than 3-4 years to get the position which you achieved within 12 months.
apart from this, article was really amazing and i loved it .
thanks for sharing your experience.
Best Regards
Aditya VS
Well, there is no substitute for hard work!
Just the other day someone was asking in a Facebook group why would someone who’s making money out of blogging or any another skill teach others how it works, implying those who teach don’t really have the skill. This article is a perfect example to prove this kind of thinking wrong. And also to make them realise even after you know what you have to do, you still have to put in a lot of work. Forever grateful for those who share what they know.
People pass skills on to others in every job role in the world from cleaners to cage fighters
How did you write all that content?
I think most of my sites don’t have that much!
Just get it done
How long have you been in affiliate marketing and blogging for?
Nearly 20 years
New to blogging and this article looks like bible for bloggers ;) Thanks for the article.
No worrys!
your article is very useful for earning money from blogs and you mention everything in detail thanks for sharing it with us
No problem!
Very good your tips, thank you for sharing this information
No worrys Andre
great content thanks a lot bro
Thanks!
Woohoo!!!
Matthew – That was amazing. When I started blogging, there were nearly hundred blogs and articles from all over the net that I bookmarked so that I could read them again again to learn the whole thing.
It eventually became very confusing. This Article of yours is so systematic and incorporates so much of information in itself that anyone who is new to blogging doesn’t need to go anywhere else.
I have learned blogging the hard way, its been quite some time now that I have been into this field, still I found some great info here that will help me now.
Kudos Mate!!! Keep up the Good work.
Thanks Steve, glad you enjoyed it :)
I want to start a Tech niche Blog. your article really helpful for thnaks matthew
No problem Shaliesh :)
I have never seen such informative article only Brian from backlinko has inspired me before, Great article Matt.
Well I hope that turns into action for you :)
Nice illustrations. How do you find enough time to write such long posts? How long did it take to write this one? Looks like a whole week
Yeah this was a weekend but I just get stuck in and get it done
well explained… amazing… briefly explained..
Haha thanks!
A tone of value in this article thank you
No worrys!
iam very agree with you. How its hard to bloggin, but if grow big all pay off
It does indeed :)
your article is very useful for earning money from blogs and you mention everything in detail thanks for sharing it with us
No problem :)
Great exposure! Bookmarked this page, I think this post will assist me in my blogging life, thanks for taking time to write this guide.
I hope it does Sheye!
Thanks for the nice information. Can you please write on Press Release. It will be a great help. Thanks
I will add it to my post ideas list :)
Hi Matthew!
We are in May of 2017. Is this strategy just as relevant today as it was in 2013 when you wrote it? Is there an update or anything you suggest today?
Well people haven’t really changed and the core of this strategy is to provide value to people
Hey Matthew!
It’s extremely awesome to be here on your blog. :) Such an awesome blog you got running man!
You have spared no limiting efforts at all at sharing all of the best strategies, even the ones you took to getting to the place you are now.
I am sure of a blogger can take their time to follow your well presented thoughts here, he/she would have successfully build a blog that people will have no choice than to reckon with.
Thanks for sharing these process with us man!
Anil
I highly suggest that you build a product as a priority :)
wow sir It is a amazing journey of your blogging career and now you are successfull blogger and thanks for sharing your story.
Glad you enjoyed it Lrers :)
What a fantastic Long Blog Post you’ve written !
Amazing job Matthew !
Got some new tips,that I am going to Implement straight away !
Thanks Matthew !
No problem Abhishek
I want to earn 1000 dollars on my blog. How to do this?
Follow this tutorial
It’s Really Awesome Article And This Website also Awesome for All Readers
Thanks Ravi!
Thank you very much to share and to give free advice. It will benefit us a lot
No problem :)
Great post. I found a lot information relevant and hands on to my projects. Thanks for that!
No worrys Diego!
Great, great post. This could be an ebook. One of the first points you made was, it’s about the money, but about how many people you’ve helped. If you help people they will want to to talk to you and of course buy from you, because the product is solving a problem. Congratulations on a successful blog, Matthew.
That is true, but i don’t think many people really take that on board
Very informative, I must say
Thanks Salman
It was a great writing. thank you
No problem!
Hi Mathew, Great post.
I am shocked by seeing the comment threads. Happy to know that you are getting so many visitors on your website. Nie work, keep it up.
Thanks, but what is shocking about the comment threads?
Many thanks for sharing this great content.
No problem Ricardo :)
Hi Matthew,
Im the first time on your blog and Im blown away. This post has more than 1k comments. This shows you are serious in good relationship with your visitors :) I will keep following you…
Thanks Tim, yeah the comments are getting out of hand on this one haha
Hi!
I have chance upon on your website & really amaze by the content. I m new to internet marketing and i decided to start blogging about my interest.
I watched your video on how to start a blog. But i do not know which plan should i go for “blue host”. There re basic, plus and prime plans. Should i go for basic as a starter? Will i be able or needed to upgrade the plans in the future?
Thank you!
The basic plan will be perfect for you!
Thank you!
At the webmaster tools for google, i failed to verify it.
At the google search console, there’s a recommended way. “HTML file upload”
1) Download their html verification file
2) Upload to my website. ( Which part..??)
3)….etc etc
I do not know which part of my website i should upload the verification file :(
Just upload it to the root directory, usually public_html
Ok thanks!
Is it possible for you to do a How to start wordpress for 2017? There’s some settings like “sitewide meta settings,clean uo the heads, taxomies” which i couldn’t find in the latest wordpress
Did you install the Yoast SEO plugin?
“Did you install the Yoast SEO plugin?”
Yes! It took me awhile to figure it out thanks! Sorry there’s no reply button so i reply here. I have done most of it now & authenticate my site with google. Do they take sometime to authenticate google analytic & for my site to appear on google website when i search?
Hey Matthew! I just listened to your interview on Cody Lister’s Content Promotion Summit. Some great knowledge and stories in there!
In full disclosure, I’m commenting here in hopes of peeking at your custom page for first time commenters that you mentioned in hopes of emulating your flow there – love this idea.
Thanks for all you do!
Hahaha thanks Tyler, did you get to see it?
i choose hosting niche and working with CJ . Thank you for your post . This changed my life . Now i can make money at home . tks tks
That is great to hear!! Keep up the great work!
Last update and its depiction are awesome!! :) :)
Thanks :)
Great job with this article Matthew! Couldn’t agree more with your tips! I particularly like when you said, it’s all about human interaction after all. I was wondering though, how do you personally reach out to your audience and other experts like you? directly through email or social media?
Yes just through email generally
Aha. Thanks Matthew :)
Nice tactics..
Thanks!
First of all congratulations on your success.
There’s so much affiliate marketing hype out there on the riches to be made and the easy part-time hours to do it. Particularly those associated with selling their “blue print”
As I suspected, it is a viable proposition provided that you know what you are doing and you are passionate about doing it.
Yeah there is nothing easy about starting a business, whether that is offline or online!
Your articles are double dose of Fun and Knowledge ;) Brilliant
Haha thanks Shahzaib!
Hello Mathew,
You site rocks, so much good stuff so little time, can see I will be here for awhile!
Thanks Robert :)
I would be interested to hear your personal opinion on success percentage among bloggers. I think it is pretty low, around 1-2%. It would not matter what kind of blogging it is. SEO, busineess, travel or any other. There are tonns of bloogers, but only small amount makes money that is enough for living
Why are you interested in that metric? Don’t measure your own success against others
Great post Matt,Thank you for sharing :)
No worrys :)
Huuuge Reading with huuugggeee benifits. This is awesome. A journey of a growing man with his growing business is awesome.
Thanks Matthew for sharing your Awesome journey with us
Thanks for joining me on the journey :)
A successful blog can be extremely beneficial for businesses. It can play a big role in their lead nurturing and conversion process. Thanks for sharing another great post Matthew!
No problem Nick!
Thanks for sharing Matthew! You are one of the best SEO expert I’ve ever met.
Thanks Albert :)
Whatever you said above is really informative i must say this blog will inspire lot of people like me i would like to thanks Matthew Woodward for this wonderful blog.
Thanks Stacey :)
Wow, That is a fantastic article. You inspired me!!!
I hope that translates into action and hard work :)
Inspiring post metthew. this article is like a complete book to be success in blogging.
I hope it translates into success for you!
Hey,
thank you for the detailed recap of your own blog story. First question that popped into my mind when I started reading was: Who is more succesful, the person who starts a blog because he is ambitious about delivering good content or is it the person who seeks to make the blog as profitable as possible.
Which part comes first in your opinion?
Ambition and passion beats everything else
Really amazing article …. very nice …. Thanks for this!! :) :)
No problem :)
Thank you for the easy to follow information and clear explanations. The sample disclosures will be quite helpful thank you matth
Glad to be of service :)
Thanks for sharing this post, Matthe Woodward , This is such an awesome content from You. It inspires me a lot and I hope other bloggers will be inspired too after reading these valuable and effective lessons on How I Built A Top 100 Blog In 12 Months. The lessons given are practical and are delivered wisely.
Thanks :)
Hi Matthew,
I have been following you for a long time and i have learned many things from your tips. It is true that quality and consistency beats even huge websites. I have targeted trending topics which are shared in social media and guess what almost 42% of my articles have been shared 100 times. It’s easy to get traffic from social media and i think that is the best source until my blog ranks on Google.
Sounds like you are doing all the right things :)
hew Mathew, i just checked all stuff in this article. You are just amazing. Keep on updating such great stuff for us.
Thanks Nish :)
We wish we could have read this blog when we started blogging and article writings.
Well you have it now :)
Thanks for sharing such a fabulous artcile.. will help us to improve our blogging strategies
I sure hope so!
I’ve been following your SEO No Link Building challenge for quite some time and it’s a great guide.What’s the next challenge? Do you have something for your community readers?
I’m open to suggestions :)
Great post Matt,Thank you for sharing such a informative post..
Glad to be of service :)
The best guide on the internet surely for opening a new blog.
Thanks Clay!
Amazing post Matt, really inspiring as from last couple of years I am also focusing on helping people and solving their problems through my blog.
Then you will succeed :)
Jeez, that must be like the bible or holy grail of blogging… Thank you so much, think I gotta study this in detail (will take me a good 2 weeks I suppose ). U just gave me back my confidence that it’s possible to pull this blogging thing off!!!
One little remark, hope u dont mind: commenting at the end was a real hassle as I haf to scroll down an endless forrest… Might find some solution for that otherwise keep going!!! Btw, I’ll be honoured if I can link to your page later on… U think we could arrange that? Many thanks again! Domokos Chef Dumas
Glad to be of service and I appreciate any sharing/linking of course :)
Hi there Matthew,
Now I can see why you leave this blog post as a pinned one, because it rare between all your blogs right?
I wish I could have read this blog when I started my blogging career, this is the best guide for newbies, but can also other people learn from it.
Regards,
Clay Smith.
Yes I think this post helps people the most!
Hello Matthew,
It’s always a please to revisit this blog post for guidelines.
Emenike
I’m glad to have you as a reader :)
Otimo contéudo :)
Con gusto!
Really long article but truly informative. You have the capability of holding your readers through all these information. My time was worth spending on this post. Keep up this good work. Hope for more.
Thanks Zeel, I try my best!
Great post, I’m going to follow your advices!I think I need to start making money just to have you as my mentor:)
Thanks
Hahaha you just need hard work and determination :)
very nice article and useful information
Thanks Jual!
Thanks again, i love your making style that is shared to you as long as nice journey awaiting to you.
World needs you ,i usually feels so high to your style of high spirit!
So very good luck and God bless!
Thanks for your kind words Bilguun!
This is a great article. It really is challenging but if you follow these tips, as its essential that all these elements work together, you can be successful.The number of blogs have just surpassed 319.8 million accounts, and making yours stand out if key. Ofcourse blogs, play a part within your content strategy within business too. Having content that is clear, concise and engaging is vital for your rankings and your on site sales conversions. The more attention grabbing and engaging your content, the more likely users are to respond to your site, pick up on your sales prompts and follow through with a purchase. Google will rank your website higher in its organic listings, too! It is so important to ensure your content is written with clarity and the user experience in mind.
A very interesting article. I have to study it carefully.
I hope it helps you out!
nice very and useful information thnxx
No problem Hitesh!
Great stuff,
Many blogs are explaining about blogging and other related topics.But your standards are high. thank you and keep writing.
Thanks :)
Thank you very much, Matthew for taking out time to write this long post. I can’t stop thanking you on this. My blogging career is going to take a new dimension after now.
– Emenike Emmanuel
Keep up the hard work!
Very comprehensive article covering all aspect of successful blogging. I know few things already but there are many things to learn and apply to my website.
Thanks.
No worrys :)
The wife and I really love this blog and appreciate the creativity and inspiration you provide. If you ever decide to take this blog to the next level by offering a Mobile App version my company Zenlight would love to help for an extremely low price, we appreciate the hard work you have put into this blog and wish you all future success in business and in life.
Thank you for your time Matt, it is the most precious thing we all possess.
-Jacque’
Thanks for your kind words!
I have thought about an app but it would have to be something super useful. Most apps I see for blogs don’t really offer anything special over and above visiting the blog itself in a browser and I don’t like that bandwagon :)
thank you
very good
I hope it helps you!
Amazing and very informative article. Honest topic with great ideas…
Glad you found it useful :)
thank you matt,, your article is very inspiring for blogger like me,,
keep writting :)
No problem Lagu :)
I skipped few things because this post is MASSIVE. Those are some impressive numbers and I would love to make these results, sadly I’m just starting out and I’m in the middle of the desert so far, but getting better.
Everyone is always dazzled by the numbers, no one reads the bit about the gruelling hard work :)
very nice and useful information great
No problem John!
Hi matthew,
I shocked by seeing your income on Kontent Machine. Before felt that how the users can actually buy from our suggested product. Cos we also need the skills that visitor should convinced by our words and make a purchase. that can be done 1 for every 500 to 600 visitors.
But by seeing your earnings through your affiliate income, Felt i should start right now.
Always better to start earlier :)
Hi Matt,
Thank you for the above information you have shared with us on making money from your blog.
I will be using many of your suggestions soon, when I’m back online full time.
Have a great new week.
Thanks Rahul, you too!
Nice Work,
Great Information to make online income, we are thanks to providing an great ideas about online money making.
thanks
No problem :)
Hey, such an amazing article for beginner for making money online with blogs and you have included many great tips too. Thanks for sharing :)
No problem
Great Article …keep writing
Thanks Soha!
can you just give me pdf file of this 14k post so that it will be comfortable to me
https://www.printfriendly.com/
Thanks. Solid advice. Have you ever used anything like nichemasterly.com?
No I haven’t sorry
HI Mathew,
Thanks for the thoughts. I’m just getting started blogging and hope to make some money doing it.
In one sentence can you tell me what I should do first and what I should avoid?
Thanks you rock.
Trevor
First should do solid keyword research to map out the first 8 posts you will write before launching. You should avoid obsession with making money and focus on getting your first 100 subscribers instead.
Awesome! The given blog information fantastic articles to be shared through that post and I think this content very helpful in my business life,thanks for sharing that the post.
No problem Jual!
Nice article with a lot of infos..hope i will be expert like you in internet marketing
No such thing as hope!
Loving the refreshing thoughts man!
No problem Shaheen!
What an amazing article on blogging, took me a while to finish reading it but the information learned from it is GOLDEN! Thanks,
No problem Jesse!
A blogger like me should read this post before going to setup a blog or looking for new tricks and ideas, Anyway thank you man for your cup of trick.
Yes you should :P and you did!
Such an amazing article. Today is the first day of me building traffic to my new business website, and I am starting with your article :)
6AM to 10PM huh? I am going to outwork you.
But thanks man, really helps.
Hahah good luck with that ;)
Mein Got! I almost missed the game – that is one long post!
Thanks for the video tips – I am making a video to go along with each new post and using keywords for the video/post title – hopefully this will help me go up the SERPs.
Also, and it can’t be underestimated – posting regularly just cuts so well – I am guilty of losing momentum when another bright shiny thing flutters by. Must. stay. focused.
Grateful for your work.
Thanks!
No problem Bren, good luck with your blog!
What an amazing post. It took me all day to read it. I love that. I’m a work from home mama that balances blogging, running my online biz and chasing after my preschooler so that’s my excuse for taking all day to read a blog post, haha. Great writing. You’ve made me a regular reader.
Can’t you just put them in a dog crate?