I’m so tired of hearing these warm fuzzy entrepreneurial stories of people who magically fell into success.
Their advice to those looking to do the same… don’t try to make money, just find something you love and share that.
Yep, that pretty much sums it up. They say something virtuous, like “I had no idea this would make money”. Or, “I never did it for the money”.
I’m sure it’s true and don’t get me wrong, I love their stories. But where are the stories from people who totally started their blog for the money? You need money to eat and pay bills.
I just feel like we’re left with this idea that you are bad if you start a blog with the goal of making money. Like starting with money in mind is dirty.
Is it not possible for the average person to make money from a blog, if they go into it looking to make money?
Well, according to Penelope Trunk I shouldn’t even try. Why?
Because writing is hard.
You need the advantage of having a tech person, either yourself or someone else to figure out the website side of it.
Unless you’re already have a name, you won’t make it.
You have to be controversial or no one will care.
You can’t do it if you have kids and have a job.
And a bunch of other bull crap.
I am here to show you that you can start a blog for the main purpose of making money.
You don’t have to be a professional writer or a web designer. I actually partnered with a web designer/ programmer on a business project, his website was a disaster. When you have things like WordPress, why over complicate it.
Stop worrying about how polished your site is, how good or bad of a writer you are, and if your content sucks or not.
You still have to pick something you can offer people, something you can share, but it’s ok to do it with the intention of earning money for it.
Example: You love to cook, but you suck at it or you think your awesome at it and you want to start a food blog.
Go for it! Embrace creating the worst version of your site and writing crappy descriptions and taking crappy photos.
A number of things will happen when you embrace the fact that you are gonna suck.
You will move into action. So many people are paralyzed by the fact that their site or blog isn’t as polished as the other guys. Their photos aren’t as good. Or they think their writing is awful.
If you’re totally ok sucking at it, you’ll be ahead of anyone not doing it. You will improve. You may never be great, or you might be better than you ever thought.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t do it. And there is way more chance of being great when you embrace sucking, take action and be ok with the idea that you might just be average.
I love to write, but I’m not a great writer. My grammar is horrendous. And My spell is even worse.
I wrote a short story that I submitted for review and one of the feedback comments was, that they had to stop reading because they just couldn’t take how bad the grammar was. Ouch.
I’ve since downloaded Ginger to help with grammar and spelling, but I’m pretty sure I still suck.
I find the desire to be amazingly successful, paralyzing. I’m constantly questioning if any of this content creation is worth my time. Who am I to think I could work as a blogger.
But then I see that I average over 2000 people a day to this blog and over 100 returning visitors.
My best month was $700 and my average is $200.
If I can do that with this half assed blog, imagine if I tossed the
self doubt, embraced sucking and let all that resistance go. I’d stop procrastinating out of fear and become much more consistent with creating content.
100 returning visitors, they must like something about it.
More content, means more visitors, more visitors means more money. They say the hardest part is earning your first dollar, because after that, you know making money is possible and from there you just need to scale.
If I can start a blog to make money, and actually make money, then anyone can do it.
Have you looked around this site? This is not a great site. It’s not a big site either, it has less than 200 articles. It’s made up of mostly curated content, in fact that was the point of the blog, to highlight the work of others.
It’s made up of videos, websites and resources I’ve found online.
That is my thing. People are always telling me how awesome I am at finding cool shit. That is my talent. That’s what I’ve got. So, I decided to share this cool shit in a blog format and throw some ads and affiliate offers up on it.
It’s only today that I realized I have something else to share.
I can tell you that it’s ok to be average. All these online success stories make us feel like we have to have this amazing idea for an online business, but you don’t.
Maybe while doing something, that something will turn into what looks like this amazing idea. And / or maybe it will forever be average.
But you can find an audience for your average, even sucky blog and still find your audience to make money.
If you already have a blog, I’d love for you to post the url in comments below.
Resources for making my blog image:
https://pixabay.com – download free images for commercial use.
https://www.canva.com – upload your free images to add text and other designs.
While it isn’t easy to make money blogging , it definitely is possible. In fact, I believe anyone can make a full-time living blogging if they are patient and committed enough to it. In this video blog , I ’m going to share with you how you can start to make money blogging .