Step-by-Step Guide: How To Make $1000 From Your Blog Every Month

Money is a source of motivation!    

How many times have you tried to raise $1000 from your blog and failed? Well, content marketing could be your saving grace.

We all believe in hard work – working our butts off! But at the end of the day, so many bloggers have nothing to show for their so-called hard work.

If you’ve been battling with this, I’ve been where you’re right now. But my story changed. Yours can change, too.

At the time, I couldn’t generate $50 from my blog and I kept wondering what I was neglecting.

This post is like a blank check for you to cash in.

Don’t take my words for it – but if you want to make money online, it takes more than hard work. In fact, it’s not all about hard work.

There is something you need that beats hard work. What’s that…?

Simple plan that works

I was damn broke when I started blogging. I knew all about waking up early at about 7.00am and working for 8 hours.

Did I achieve my ultimate goal? Strike me for all I care, but I didn’t make a single dime. What it takes to make a living off your blog is a simple plan that you can run with.

The moment I set goals for my business, everything about my life started to fall into good hands. Trust me; the only place where HARD WORK is vital is when you’ve a clear business goal.

A simple plan of how you can monetize your blog. What you must be doing every day to generate income from your blog.

You see, if you simply answer the title “I’m a blogger” and expect money to fall off the sky, you’d wait forever and even at that, nothing would still happen.

This article is over 2000 words. I’d like you to take action immediately after reading this and once the money starts rolling in, share your success story with me. Let’s get started right away.

How you can earn $1000 monthly from your blog

Yep, $1000 is nothing to a super affiliate or pro blogger. But because majority of my readers barely earns $249.02 from blogging, I’m sure that $1k would bring joy to their lives. I told you earlier that a simple plan is what you need.

It doesn’t matter whether your blog is 2 weeks old, 2 months old or even 2 years old; you deserve to live the internet lifestyle – at least, to a certain extent.

Don’t be scared of $1000 if you’ve never made $100 because it can be easy if you follow my step by step guide. The first step you must take is to break down the total and see what we’ve:

$1000 divided by 30 days = $33.33/day or $142.86/week

Look at those numbers critically. In other words, if your blog can generate at least $33.33 every single day for the next 30 days, you’d successfully make $1k.Or if you’re the type of blogger who prefers to calculate weekly – then just earn $142.86 and that would fine.

The question is, do you think it’s possible to earn $40 from your blog on a daily basis?

I don’t know what you’re thinking right now, but it looks realistic. Remember, a goal must be realistic and measurable. Otherwise, you’re going to struggle to make any worthwhile progress.

Get your blog ready to receive cash

Is your blog ready to make money?

Before I share with you the best ways to start making $1k monthly, we need to talk about the readiness of your blog.

The layout, navigation, text color, background and foreground color are integral elements when it comes to turning a profitable blog.

If your blog loads slowly, it can be very difficult to earn income with it. Did you see problogger, copyblogger, John Chow and other 6-figure earners; they’re all fast loading blogs.

Even if you can’t afford a professional/customized theme, you should research fast loading themes and use the best.

Don’t settle for crappy themes. A low quality theme would automatically result in low quality content, it doesn’t matter the amount of time you put into producing those content.

Prepare your blog. If you’ve been a long time reader of this blog, you’d recall that from the onset, I had a great theme. I didn’t spend a dime on it initially.

But I earned a decent income from that same blog. Earlier this year, I hired a wordpress designer to customize my theme. Because I needed to build my brand and earn more money – that investment has paid off 102%.

Your blog’s sidebar is a money maker – don’t misuse it

Studies have shown that when you’ve too many options for your target audience to choose from, you’d confuse them.

Instead of buying from you, or clicking on your ads, they’d leave because you chased them away. Your blog’s sidebar is meant to generate income for you. You must not misuse it. How?

If your blog is new, then you don’t need more than two affiliate banners at the sidebar. Except you’re open for paid advertisements, which can be difficult for a new blog with no pagerank and good alexa ranking.

Did you know that when you add 1 – 2 affiliate banners or ads at your sidebar, you can generate more income than, having too many banners? And that’s the problem with newbie bloggers. They can’t imagine the possibility of one web hosting banner, and how it can result in 2 – 5 new leads daily.

If that’s your thought, stop that right now and clear your sidebar. Isn’t it high time you get specific? Your goal must be simple; realistic and measurable.

Step-by-step guide: what you’ve been waiting for!

I recently discovered the secret of making money with a new blog. Of course, as a beginner, you don’t have credibility yet. You may not be as famous a Seth Godin, Brian Clark, Darren Rowse or Pat Flynn, but you’re unique in your own special way.

The beauty of blogging is that you can leverage. So the first step to making money online with your blog is leverage. Let’s quickly talk about that…

Step one: Leverage successful people’s product  

Affiliate marketing isn’t new. But every day, it gets even better.

The truth is, there are brand names in the blogosphere – especially those listed above and several others.

Now, those pro bloggers have digital products.

They’ve e-books, membership sites, software, plugin, kindle books, paid podcasts and so on.

If you’re broke right now, you can leverage on their digital product and start cashing in easily.

So, instead of looking for the best affiliate product, simply register as an affiliate and generate your hoplink (customized link).

For instance, if you can add Darren’s “31 Days To Build A Better Blog” banner on your sidebar, the chances of getting clicks and sales are higher than adding an unknown internet marketer’s product at your sidebar.

What about websynthesis; a web hosting service from copyblogger?I’m sure that you’d generate more sales than promoting all manner of affiliate offers from strangers. You’re trying to leverage successful people – so that you can eliminate the stress and make money easily.

I’m not saying that you can become rich overnight, but it doesn’t have to take 12 months or 3 years before you can start earning decent income from your blog. Don’t forget, if you work hard to promote an affiliate offer that no one trusts, it’s a waste of time.

How to leverage successfully:

–       Ask yourself this question, “who is my blogging mentor or role model”?

–       Find out whether your mentor has thousands of fans and readers

–       Find out whether your mentor has a digital product (e-book, membership site, plugin, themes, consulting et al)

–       Join your mentor’s affiliate program (if any) or indicate your interest in sending targeted leads to him. Always remember, A-list bloggers and Super affiliates would prefer email subscribers, more than few bucks, any time, anywhere.

–       Where does your mentor visit frequently? You must locate their social media presence and become active there. This is to enable you get acquainted with his voice and style. It’s going to be useful when you write review or recommend his product and service to potential buyers.

–       Work hard (there you go) to promote your mentor’s product. You already know where he hangs out, his personality and his marketing style. If they’ve been using a particular marketing tactic for years, it shows that when you use it, you’d get similar results.

But what exactly is leverage?

Leverage can mean so many things. But for this instance, to leverage simply means to stand at someone else’s shoulder and visualize the world of opportunities.

Guest blogging is a good form of leverage because it exposes you to authority blogs – which ordinarily, you can’t write for.

To make more money using leverage as your tactic – do this:

Create a landing or squeeze page

Once you’ve grabbed your affiliate hoplink, it’s time to reach out to your target audience.

You’ll need a landing page, which can be a separate page on your blog. The purpose of that page is to capture email leads of potential visitors (blog readers).

This is why email follow up is important if you must make $1000 monthly from your blog. As you collect email leads, you’d schedule email messages on your autoresponder account. You can use Getresponse, Aweber or icontact to follow up with subscribers.

Since you’re leveraging famous blogger’s product, you can promote an e-book, plugin or membership site instantly.

If you were to promote your own e-book or digital product as a newbie blogger, I’d say wait for 7 days. Within these 7 days, you can build a relationship with your list members.

But because the product is from a credible person, whose name is worth more than $1000, you can leverage that opportunity to make money with your first email follow up.

What happens to your blog’s sidebar?

On your sidebar, you can display the affiliate banner. The landing page is for email capture, but the sidebar is for direct sales. If your sidebar is clean and has 1 or 2 affiliate banners, you can easily earn $40 on a daily basis.

And when you multiply $40 x 30 days, you’d have successfully earned more than $1000 for that particular month.

Everything I’ve shared with you so far are from my experience with affiliate marketing. It’s not head knowledge or some regurgitated tips from content mills.

Make sure that your affiliate sidebar is colorful and calls for action. As a graphic designer myself, two out of every five affiliate banners on my sidebar are redesigned by me. At times, the original banner would look awkward or unattractive. A redesign can boost your click-through rate by 103%.

The “twisted” way to attract red-hot buyers

I’d assume that you’ve added the affiliate banner on your sidebar, as well as created a landing page for email capture. The challenge now is attracting real buyers to those helpful products.

As a matter of fact, rest assured that the product would deliver because it’s from a reputable person. If it were to be from a marketer who wants to make quick bucks and disappear – that’s a different ball game.

Successful bloggers are known to produce quality product – because of their brand and network. You can’t expect Brian Clark to create a product that wouldn’t live up to expectation.

The best way to attract read-hot buyers is through “SEO guest blogging.”

SEO guest blogging – what’s that?

It’s a simple concept actually. As you can see, it’s about using guest blogging to improve your rankings in Google first page and consequently, drive more targeted traffic to your blog. But it’s not what you think, this is quite unique.

So many bloggers have lost their rankings and Pagerank due to Google’s frequent update. The Panda dashed a lot of websites and we thought that was all. The Penguin update surprised everyone and the most recent EMDs update totally blew a lot of websites away.

But despite these SEO changes going on around the Web, you can still leverage authority blogs that weren’t affected by the updates. Opportunities to dominate Google’s first page are still available.

You just need to research the top blogs that are occupying good spots on the homepage and guest blog for them.

Surprisingly, some of the new blogs are ranking highly for some competitive key terms in Google. Quickly dig into these blogs and you’d see the popular posts. Pitch a similar idea and write the best guest post that can get a “YES.”

On the author bio, don’t link to your homepage or blog post except the product review page for the affiliate offer you’re promoting.

But more importantly, link to your landing page and capture leads. Then follow up through the autoresponder email messages.

So, taking advantage of blogs in your niche – that were not affected by Panda, Penguin, EMDs is termed “SEO guest blogging.” That’s my phrase, I coined it myself (you should credit me when you eventually use it).

Simple calculations that equate $1000 monthly

Are you convinced that you can earn $1k from your blog every month? Without an iota of doubt, I can achieve this goal for my new blog. Ensure that you’ve optimized your landing page so that over time, it can rank highly on its own.

What you must do:

–       Write at least 5 – 10 quality guest posts monthly using SEO guest blogging tactic.

–       You’d drive at least 50 potential buyers/readers to your landing page in 24 – 48 hours.

–       If your landing page is catchy and valuable, you’d convert at least 10 visitors into email subscribers.

–       If you follow up effectively with exclusive content and your mentor’s product, you could make 1 – 4 sales in your first email.

Get started right away

And if the affiliate product costs $37 and your commission is 50%, you’ll make $18.50 from a single sale. And for 4 sales, you’d earn a whopping $18.50 x 4 = $74.

Our target is $40 daily, but now you’ve just earned $74 from 4 sales. Remember, this commission is from 50 potential buyers that joined your email list in the first 48 hours. Hopefully, you’d bring in more potential buyers before 30 days elapses.

The leverage gets even better

Search engine ranking is a gradual process. But if you target a long tail keyword, and your guest post gets published on a blog that has good positions in search engine, within 14 days, your content page can rank on Google’s top 10.

This is no gimmick or B.S. It’s a proven marketing tactic which I’ve been using since I started blogging.

The moment your guest posts starts ranking on Google homepage, you’d receive more potential buyers on your landing page. And more traffic equals more subscribers. Eventually, this affiliate marketing system will work on its own accord.

This is where hard work comes into play

Earlier, I told you that hard work without a simple plan that can produce result is a waste of time. But the secret of successful people lies in their zeal to see results. The truth is, if you’re lazy, you can’t earn $1,000 monthly.

To drive more targeted buyers to your landing page, social media networks could be of immense help as well. But if I were you, I’d focus 75% of my time on SEO guest blogging because it can bring you closer to your goal. And this tactic doesn’t expire – it’s evergreen.

Some of my guest posts on A-list blogs are still dominating Google’s first page, irrespective of Panda, Penguin or EMDs updates. I had a plan, and I worked hard to see it come through.

If I did it without laying complaints and pointing accusing fingers at Google, and other forces, you too can!

So, can you make $1000/month from your blog?

Don’t let Google dictate what happens in your business. Even if your blog was affected by their weird updates, you’ve got to think out-of-the-box. You’re the BOSS of your life – start taking responsibilities today.

If you’ve enjoyed the step-by-step guide as laid out in this post, let me know in the comment below.

If you’re confident enough to earn $1000 monthly from blogging, tell me in the comment section. Also, what’s your greatest challenge when it comes to making money online?

Photo Credit: morethanthegames