Afford Anything - So You Want to Be a Blogger?

Episode Date: February 29, 2016

#14: Can you make money as a blogger? How? We share the good and bad reasons for choosing to go into blogging. Send us your questions or comments https://affordanything.com/episode14 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I hear from a lot of readers who say I have no idea what kind of a side hustle to start. And so that's kind of the thingy that I want a thingy. The thingy that you want a thingy? I deal with words for a living. Welcome to the Paula NJ Money Show, a podcast about growing wealth and financial freedom. Your host, Paula Pantz, is a world traveler who built financial freedom through real estate investing. She runs the website, affordanything.com. Host Jay Money is a husband and father of two, striving for financial freedom.

He hates real estate but loves to blog for a living over at Budgets Are Sexy.com. Which one resonates with you? Grab a beer and find out as you listen to the Paula and Jay Money Show. Hey everyone, Paula Pant here. Thank you so much for all of the feedback that you've been sending us. We've been looking very closely at the reviews that we've been getting on iTunes, and we've noticed that people either love us or hate us. We have a lot of five-star reviews and a lot of one-star reviews.

And that is fantastic information to know because it tells us two things. Number one, we might just be divisive people. We might be the type of people that you either love or hate, which is fine. I get that and I appreciate that. But number two, we looked closely at the negative reviews. And I'm using negative in air quotes because the negative reviews that were written on iTunes were very helpful. They were very constructive. they were polite. They were told in such a way that I got the sense that the person who was writing

them really wanted to share that feedback so that we could improve. And so the negative reviews that we've read have basically said that they feel like we lack substance. And so we want to rectify that. So we've decided that we're going to start episodes by explaining what we hope you'll learn throughout this episode. Today's episode, we're going to cover blogging, how, and we're specifically going to cover four topics. Number one, can you earn money as a blogger? Is this a viable side hustle for people who want to earn additional income? In fact, is it a viable full-time job if you wanted to eventually take that step?

So number one, can you earn money as a blogger? Number two, if so, how? How do you do it? Number three, what not to do? Are there certain money-making operations? that you should be passing up and skipping. And number four, good and bad reasons for choosing to go into blogging. Before you talk about the how of blogging, you should first talk about the why.

So we're going to cover why you should or should not blog and why that why really matters. Thank you so much. What are we going to talk about today, Paula P? We were going to discuss our blogs. Yeah. So I don't want this to be too inside baseball because I'm sure that there are going to be some listeners who are like, oh, my God, bloggers talking about blogging again. But from a hustling perspective or from a making money online perspective, starting a web-based business. Let me start by saying I'm an accidental blogger slash entrepreneur.

I didn't know there was any money to be made or there was. I mean, I knew people did stuff online. I just didn't know anything about it. So my experience through all this is just from learning and tweaking and figuring out how the whole online world works over the past eight years. Right. And actually, we got to say happy birthday to us because both of us have big blogging anniversaries. Yeah? What number are you at, Paula?

This is my five-year blog-aversory. Woo! Blog birth. I wasn't sure if blogs get a birthday or an anniversary, so I figured it's a blog-aversary. I like that. Birth-aversory? A birth-a-birth-a-birth. So five years for you.

Yeah. I just eight years, you know. And it's funny, like the world changes online and, you know, all the ones you started with, you know, only a couple are still left, blogging. Right. It's an interesting world. But I'm glad that we're both still in it and we're having fun, Paula. So congratulations, my dear.

And, you know, and we both have very opposite approaches because mine is really business oriented. It's really strategic. I actually, I've been outlining the, my philosophy around it, the three-eastern. There's the management, the marketing, and the monetizing. And then under each of those, I have various subcategories. And I can go through all of that in this episode. But my, yeah, my approach is extremely strategic and business oriented.

While you, like, I don't know what you do, Jay, you like showed up on the internet one day and here you are. Honestly, that's how it was. I showed up. I started writing. I like the community. I have absolutely no, for the better or the worst, no strategy, no plan. I write my articles the day of or the day before. And the reason I'm glad we're talking about this is because I feel like there's a blog online and then there's a business, right? And then you also get like some weird merging of them. So why you want to start something online, that goal is really, really important. For me, it's always been about having fun, building a community. And then when I realize you can make money, hey, if this can give me enough money to do this like full time for a living, you know, like a lifestyle business, that's awesome. And that's what's turned out. And I mean, and, and, and, and, and, and,

I know for some people, like when I did blog coaching, people said, oh, you can make money online. I want to go make money and be a blogger. Like that's my main goals. I just want to make money, right? And that changes things and that changes the way you blog. It changes the structure of the blog. You know, it changes what you blog about. There's certain things you can blog about, you know, socks, right?

Might not make any money, you know. I'm sure there's sock lovers and fetishes and whatever out there, you know. But it's different, right? Talking about finance or something when there's a lot of money in the industry is different. Right. So I started as a hobby and then I slowly grown into business stuff. But for me, it's, I would say 60, 40, 60% hobby and 40% business. So the decisions I do was really based on having fun and for community, not for the money. Okay. So let me just cut to the chase, Jay. You started this as a hobby. You then figured out that you could earn enough money to be able to do it full time. Where does that money come from? How do you make money as a blogger? Great question. Bloggers make money a lot of different ways. There are ads on the site direct. So you'll see these ads that change from AdSense, from Google, or just a visual ad like you would normally see when you first started the internet when you first came on, right? Like there's ads everywhere, advertising. And how does that pay? So the way that pays is there's two different ways. One, there's, you know, like platforms you can put on your site. So Google AdSense has a really popular platform. You embed the code. And then every user, it shows up an ad and it changes. And it changes. in theory based on your interest and what Google thinks you like. A certain amount of impressions and clicks all goes into how much they pay you.

And for the grand scheme of things, they don't pay you much, even if you have tons of traffic. Another way is if you, let's say, you know, American Express, it's like, oh, Jay, I love your site. We have a campaign going. We have a new credit card. You know, why don't you plaster ads on my site and we'll pay you X dollars directly or anytime someone clicks and signs up? And so there's clicks and impressions. There's also something called affiliates.

Wait, wait, wait. Let me pause here, just for the sake of people who are listening. Can you define impressions? What is that? Impressions are page views. Cool. And let me give an example, too, to show you. I mean, I'm open with a lot of the stuff, but on my eight-year anniversary, you can track your stats, I guess is a good way to say it.

So you can track any blogger out there or someone that has a site, you can track who's gone to your site, how long they've stayed, have they come back. It's really crazy all the analytics that you have. And you can go crazy going into it, and I don't. But knowing how much traffic you have, like the more people that come to your site, the more money you can make depending on what you're doing and if you want to do that. How many people come to your site, Jay? So right now, we just crossed over 14 million total views since I started eight years ago. Wow.

Yeah, and every month, it's funny. I do the same thing now by and large that I did eight years ago. but because, you know, I've been around for so long, the articles go out much farther and bigger and picked up more. So right now I'm averaging about close to 400,000 views a month. So that million will keep going, you know, in two or three months, it'll be another one, right? It goes a lot faster once you get going. Yeah. For example, so I have AdSense on my site.

If you look at the top and the sidebar, there'll be ads that swap out. And this is like a very passive easy way. You don't do anything. You add the code and you're done. Right. But even that like ad sense that I make on my site to give you an example. of why it's not the best. If I get 400,000 views and it'll change, I might make like $2,000, which is good if it's for a side hustle when it's your career, like you can't live, I mean,

you probably can. I cannot live off $2,000. I couldn't even live off $2,000. Okay. So that gives you an idea. That's almost half a million page views a month and that's still only 2000. Here's a different example. So to lead into another way to make money is called affiliate stuff. So I like and you use, like we use Digit, right? It's an app that helps you save money. If I talk about Digit, because I love it and I'm on their board, so I believe in them, obviously, or on their advisors, and I talk about it and you're like, oh yeah, I want to give us a shot. You know, Jay likes it. I like it.

This might be cool. I'm going to sign up through my site, my link. That's an affiliate placement. And then any time you get a sign up in that relationship, they pay you X number of dollars. Digit pays you $5. And actually, anyone that uses digit, you don't have to be a blogger. If you like them and are telling all your friends and give them a link and they sign up, you get five bucks.

Right. And it has to be a particular link because every link has a given code on it that uniquely tracks you, the person who sent it. Yes. With affiliates and even display ads, the trick here is figuring out your happy medium between what you're comfortable doing and what you want to present to your audience. And some, like, Digit pays five bucks. I love them, right?

But that's hardly any money in the grant scheme, right? Right. There are certain credit cards. And credit cards are huge in the personal finance blogging world. There's credit cards where if you sign up, you might get paid $200, $300, $400, $400 during certain times. Right. So this is why you see a lot, hey, these are the top 10 best credit cards. Here's a new credit card, right?

Sometimes, like, why do the hell they keep talking about credit cards? Well, it's because they're making a ton of money. Right. And a lot of the sites back in the day, you know, three or four sites, right? They sold for millions of dollars, some of these big sites and naming a few, the simple dollar. Get Rich Slowly. Bargeneering, five cent nickel. If any of these names sound familiar, these are all sites that were started by a regular blogger, blew up. They killed hundreds of thousands of millions of page views and they made money through affiliates and advertising.

And some did credit cards more than others. But you know, you can make, for example, I knew someone that made 30 grand a month just on one credit card offer, which is a ton of money. Now, the gray area is if you're talking about getting out of debt, right, here's how to get a debt, debt's bad, blah, blah, and then you offer up credit cards, which if you're smart with it, it's great. I use credit cards. I love credit cards. Smart people use it, hack it, travel the world for free, all that good stuff. It's totally great. But if you're a debt-centered thing and everyone's in trouble with debt, right? That's the fine line that you have to choose. And that goes back to why you're blogging to begin with or starting something online. I don't do that as much. A, because I just

suck at monetizing and I don't like strategy, but also because it tugs with me with whether it's good or bad and what I think about it. Right. And in theory, that could be 10,000, right? For 400,000 page views, if I showed an offer for a credit card, odds are I'd make a quick 5, 10,000, like guaranteed. Just to give people an idea of display ads, you make money but less. Affiliates, if you're good and have a targeted market, you make a ton more money. And other ways to make money, you can have a product, you can have an e-book, you can have a course, you can speak. There's people I know that they have a blog just to help them get more speaking events, you know, and they speak for 5, 10, 15,000 to pop. There's people that start blogs to grow an audience

to then write a book and to sell the book. So it all goes back to really. what your end goal is. So I make my money through advertising, through affiliates on my site. I don't have any products, much to my wallet's dismay, but I love the community. And then because it's not enough for me to live off of, because I don't do all the business marketing stuff, strategy stuff. I have other things. So I launched Rockstar Finance, which also makes money through advertising and stuff. I do consulting. I do consulting for digit. I do freelance writing every now and then. Oh, freelance writing is another. When new bloggers say they make money, it's either one of two things.

One, they are getting paid to write for other bloggers or other sites, which is fine. It just doesn't directly come from their blog. Their blog is like their resume. Or another payment, which is another, you know, borderline one is sponsored posts. I have strong feelings about that one. Yeah, I did. So a sponsored post, right, if you come to me like, Jay, I have XYZ company. I want to write you an article or put an article on your side. I'll pay you 500 bucks to put that

article on your site. This is great. This is 500 bucks. And when I started, I took everything. I didn't know anything. And I was like, man, I'm getting paid. Sure. Why would I not put this on for 500 bucks? It's 500 bucks. But the thing is, it's someone else's content. They're usually promoting something. Most sponsored posts are not, I don't, I don't want to offend. It's a tricky situation, right? Like if a company I love and use wanted to do an article in my site, or tell me, right, hey, Jay, can you review my product? I know you love us. Hell yeah, I'll do that because I love you and I believe in the product.

And if I'm getting paid, double goodness. It's when people post things that go against stuff or their shady companies, like payday loans are real popular for this, where then you have to make a conscious decision, is this $500 worth losing my audience or getting in trouble? By the way, Google hates when you get paid links or paid posts. They hate it because it messes with algorithm stuff. So these are all conscious decisions, again, going back to your main goal.

Right. If you're in it for the money, this is awesome, right? Because you're just going to get paid. You're doing exactly what you want. You're writing, you're blogging, and you're getting paid for it. Right. But if you're in it for the long term, for building a community, for a brand, for a bigger, longer, successful thing, these are things that hinder you for that. Actually, let me go into sponsored posts really quickly just for people who are listening who may not be familiar with this concept.

Jay, exactly like you said, a company will read. out to you and say, hey, we represent X, Y, Z company. We have written this article. We'd like you to publish it on your site. And the article usually would be a piece of crap. Nine times out of ten, it was written by somebody in Pakistan or Bangladesh or Nepal. You know, you don't want to read a blog article written by someone from Nepal. You know, so it's like nine, a lot of times it was written by someone who barely speaks English. And it is just. garbage. It's just promotional garbage. It's not even helpful to the audience. It's, at best, it'll be one of those trite ten ways to save money. Number one, don't spend as much. Number two, still don't spend as much. You know, it's just, it's not helpful to anybody. It's just a waste of every, it's a waste of internet bandwidth. And then there will be links within the article. And those links can be what are known as either do follow or no follow. Here's what that means. The way that Google's algorithm works is that if a website links to another website, so if Forbes.com links to me, that's seen almost as a vote. It's a vote of confidence, where in Forbes is saying, hey, we like this article, we think it's good. You, the reader, should check it out. And Google reads that as a vote. And the more votes a website has, the more Google says, oh, that site must be pretty good. We will promote it with it.

our search results. Of course, people figured this out, and so they started gaming the system. They started paying for links, which Google hates because you're not supposed to be able to pay to get yourself to the top of the search results. You know, that's supposed to be a natural, organic thing. And so by buying and selling links, people were indirectly trying to buy their way to the top of Google's search results. And it works, too. So that's why they keep changing their algorithm, by the way. Exactly. Or I guess we should say it used to work. used to work. Yeah, Google caught on. And so they did a number of things. Number one, they began penalizing sites that they would catch buying and selling links. And we're not sure exactly how they

would catch websites. I mean, they would look for suspicious activity. They would look for a high number of links that would point to the same site that all got generated at roughly the same time. They had an algorithm that looked for anything that seemed unnatural. And if they caught you, they would just blacklist you from search results. So that was one of the measures that they took. measure that they took is that they're now reducing the importance of links in terms of determining their algorithm, and they're increasing other measures, such as when a person visits to your website, do they then hit the back button and repeat that same search inquiry, which is an indicator that your website has not adequately answered that search inquiry?

I didn't know they did that. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, they look at that, so they look at whether or not the inquiry was repeated. They look at average time on site because if a person spends a lot of time on your site, that's a measure of engagement. They look at average number of page views per site, which is another measure of engagement. So now Google's spending more time and energy looking into these engagement metrics that can't, at least can't obviously be bought or sold. I'm sure somebody will figure out how to do it at some point because that's the nature of entrepreneurship. But right now, yeah, they're emphasizing the metrics that they believe cannot be gamed as easily. At any rate, that's all a big tangent to say that sponsored posts are crap.

They don't serve the reader. At best, they're a waste of everybody's time. And at worst, they will actually do more harm than good. Unfortunately, they're the low-hanging fruit when you start blogging. They're the first big monetizing opportunity that most bloggers get. And so as a result, a lot of people do them because when you go from earning zero from your blog to earning 200, 300, $400 for a single article, that feels like a lot of money, especially if you've been slogging away at this for months and haven't earned a penny yet.

And I'll say two things, too. There's sponsored posts that are like that. There's also some that are like, hey, like I have the product. Can you write a review or can you write it in your own words? Those are a little better only in that. It's like if I did a post for someone, it'd be in my words. It would look like a regular article. The purpose would be to promote a company.

So I'd only do it if I love the company and it's good. So there are other variations, but yeah, by and large, it's true that it's usually not that good. And in full transparency, too. So again, when I started, I didn't know Jack about anything. Right. And I got a lot of these requests. And at first, for like two years, one or two years, I put links in my sidebar. I did sponsored posts.

And it came to a point where I started realizing, oh, this is not good, like in the grand scheme of things, except for my wallet. Right. And I'd have people say, hey, dude, I like your article. Well, what's this thing that came out there, you know? And like, I put a payday link on my site. And I'm like, I don't believe in that. Like, why would I do that?

Right. Like, I just didn't understand. And so when I made that conscious decision just to show you how lucrative it can be, and this was years ago, it changes it a little bit, there was a point where I was making $5,000 a month doing this on budgets are sexy. And then I turned it off and I made like $200 a month. So from that day forward, I lost five grand, which sucked. But I made the choice of, you know what, this is better for your community.

This is better for you. you understand it now, find other ways to make the money that you are okay with. So for people listening that do this stuff right now, just focus on what your goals are and what you're trying to do online. And it's okay if you're doing something like, oh, crap, I didn't know that was bad. Then it's just a conscious decision if you want to do it more or not. And I'm not calling anyone out and stuff. But, you know, like for Rockstar Finance, I read hundreds of articles a day on personal finance sites. And I can guarantee you that at least 10% of those, 20% every day are paid posts.

You know, now granted, most of them aren't. So anyways, yeah, there's a lot of it out there. And you as a reader or listener, when you're seeing sites, you'll start picking up on this stuff. And Google, Google's point is to serve up the best content. Whatever you search, if you're searching, I want to learn how to budget. They want to push the best budgeting content to the top. And links and everything like that helps. But this is why they crack down and they don't like it.

They don't want a shade a loan to show up at the top when you're trying to budget when that's not going to help you. Oh, that'd be terrible. And so you'll see, too, the sponsor post, but you'll also see like SEO, like when you're learning how to build stuff online, search engine optimization. Like how do I get the most people to my site, you know, while I'm sleeping? And so there's ways that people write differently. It sounds robotic. Ways to like get more people to search. So there's all these tricks and all these strategies.

And I mean, people spend 60, 70 hours a week on one particular site to try and figure out how to reach the top of Google. And again, like some of it's bad, some of it, a lot of it's good. But at the end of the day, for growth and brand at least, the best thing you can do is write awesome content, believe in it, grow a community, all that stuff over time, it takes longer will help you rank higher than doing all the stuff for quick money. I totally agree. And see, Jay, this is what I think is interesting about you and I. We have completely different kind of mentalities, whereas mine is business strategy and yours is what feels. feels good. But we've both come to the same conclusion, you know, where you're like, oh, I don't believe in this stuff. I don't feel good about putting this on my site, so I don't want

to do it. And mine is, I've reached exactly the same conclusion. And it comes from a business mindset. It comes from the idea that you diminish your long-term profits when you chase after short-term gains at the expense of building out something for the long-term. So that was my way. of thinking about it when I started getting approached for sponsored posts and I saw the crap quality of the writing, I thought this is absolutely no way to build an audience. I'm not going to get an audience if every fourth or fifth post on my site, or heck, even one out of every 20 posts on my site was like seven ways to save money on a car wash. I'm not going to build an audience if I'm publishing that kind of stuff. And so my thinking was sacrifice short-term.

revenue for the sake of building something that's sustainable and long-term. And the reason that I have, I just passed 23,000 email subscribers. Ooh. Hey, you got to talk about your page's and stuff, too. I divulge mine, young lady. Yeah, totally, totally. We'll get to that. But let me finish this thought is the reason that I have that kind of community is because

I spend a shi load of time on every piece of content. Like I have some posts on my site that have taken me more than 20 or 30 hours to write. The one about rent versus buy. That one took more than 30 hours of just researching and writing. But that's stuff that you can't get anywhere else on the Internet, or at least not in many other places. And therefore, that becomes unique about me and unique about my site. And that's really what running a successful online business is about. It's creating something unique.

not just being another Me Too website. Yeah, well said, my friend. Thank you. Well, and so Paula, you write less time. How many times do you write a month? On average. I know it changes. These days, I've increased to about two to three blog posts per month.

In 2015, I was going at like one post per month. Okay. So you do one or two, let's see, on average a month, but you spend like 30 hours on them, right? Yeah, these days it's a little bit more because now I'm doing a monthly real estate income report. Okay. So I'm like, I have to publish at least three posts a month so that every other post isn't an income report. Okay. So there's a lot of stuff to blogging and obviously we can't cover it all here.

But, you know, one of them is schedule. And so Paula does, you know, one or two or whatever a month. It's all around like what her goals are for the site, but also her style and she, you know, and you're a journalist at heart, right? So you're good at researching and putting everything together. So that works for Paula. Another difference between us is me. I used to write articles in 40 minutes, and granted, a lot of them were crappy, but I can't

write, I can't focus on one article for hours and hours on end. It doesn't fit with my personality, and it bores me, so then I would never do it. So if someone told me, hey, you only have to write two articles a month, but spend 30, 40 hours on them, I would not have a site. So I write three times a week. For six years, I wrote every single day. Monday through Friday for six years straight for an hour or two a day. It would take me. Now I switch from Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So now I write three times every single week. So that's like six

times what Paula does. And I spend three or four hours, sometimes four hours. And you might read one of my articles like, how the hell could he spend four hours on this? It was like six paragraphs and you were just talking about your feelings, right? You know? But that's the reality of it, right? Because again, going back to stuff, right? Titles and pictures and structure. There's certain things you can do to help market your same words better and faster. But probably, I don't know what six times, what, what I do, 12 times four hours, what, 48 hours, 50 hours. So we both roughly spend the same amount of time. But I have 12 articles that are shorter and more fluffier, I guess you could say, and you have two or three more solid pieces of content. And so these are just two

different strategies. And not one of them isn't right or wrong, right? There's pros and cons to both of those. Paul's articles probably have a bigger shot of lasting longer. They're more, they're more solid. Like Google probably likes those more than my shorter ones that aren't really in depth. But on the other side, I produce more content and my readers get to see more of me. If you like me, that's great. If you don't, that sucks. But these are all things that go into it. So for me, like, I know that the best I could ever do is spend four or five hours on an article. And I want to have fun with it, right? Going back to hobby, I don't care if it makes me $10,000, I just won't do it if I have to spend 30 hours. So these are all things you,

if you're getting into blogging, and that's, you know, one part of, that's probably like the least way to make money online is to blog, to be honest with you, but that is one way. There's company sites, right? There's, you know, products you can sell. There's courses. There's all kinds of things that you can do online to make money. But me, at least my expertise is in blogging. And Paula, I know you wanted to, I want you to get into your 3Ms, too. Do you want to do that now or do you want to talk about other things with online? Sure. Well, I guess just to round out the thought that you were just having is actually Will phrased it really well once when he said, somebody said, can you make money from a blog? Really? And Will said, he replied, no, but you can

make money from an audience. Ah, interesting. And that I think is really what being a digital entrepreneur, being an online entrepreneur, that's a big piece of, that's what it's ultimately all about. A blog is just a platform. That's all it is. It's just a space on the internet. So you could develop an audience by writing a blog. You could have a YouTube audience. You could have an Instagram.

There's one YouTube celebrity who I'm like obsessed with. And she technically has a blog, but you know, it's frankly, it's not that good. And she has a YouTube channel, which. I never watch, but I obsessively follow her on Instagram, and so do a lot of other people. And that's her platform. So it doesn't really matter what tool you're using, whether that tool is a blog or YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or whatever, or person to person face to face, you know, having a big audience within your local physical community. Those are just a vehicles. The way that you make money is to build an audience and then somehow serve your

your audience, whether that's recommending tools or products that you genuinely believe in. And it has to be genuine because I'm going to lose my audience if I were like, hey, everybody, take out this payday loan. You know, you have to recommend stuff that you genuinely believe in. My ethical kind of boundary is I have to personally use it myself and love it because if I'm not willing to use it, then I'm not going to recommend it to my readers. I call it the mom test. Like, would I want my mom to use this? I like that. Thank you. Yeah, that's great.

So you could do that. I'm in the process of creating a real estate course right now. So I have not yet built or sold any courses, but that's the way that I would really like to start monetizing afford anything. Because to be honest, I suck at affiliate sales, actually. I think last year I made less than $3,000 or $4,000 over the span of the entire year on affiliate sales, which, you know, for a blog of my, size and an email list of my size. I should be making a lot more than that, but I'm just really not into affiliate sales. I'm just, maybe this is where my feelings are coming in. I'm just not excited about it. And that's fine. Yeah. Yeah, because you know how, like,

you can write an article right now, especially if you spend 20 or 30 hours on it. Right. And go on the credit card route, right? Here are the top 10 credit cards. And here's why. Here's the best one for travel. Here's the best one for cash back. And you could literally make like 50 grand this month off of that one article. And then every month going forward, maybe, you know, a little less or maybe it catches on. Right. Yeah. So, so that tells you even though, and I know you already know this stuff, like it doesn't excite you. It doesn't fit all the way. So for you to make money, you do the course. I know you have, you do some other business stuff on the side. Like your, your blog is like your resume that gives you all these opportunities to do

other stuff if you want it. Right. Right. So how I have been monetizing my blog so far is primarily through consulting and coaching and freelance writing. So, yeah, the blog is that lead generator that creates those freelance writing and consulting and coaching opportunities. So that's been the primary way that I've been monetizing. And what's been really nice about that is that I don't have to make money off of my audience directly. So when I'm thinking about what content I want to serve them, I can just think purely about

the content without. having money factor into it. And that's really nice. Like as a, that's given me the editorial freedom to write whatever I think will best serve the audience. And so that's the reason

that I chose that monetization route. The drawback to that route, though, is that none of that is coaching, consulting, freelance writing, none of that is passive. And so every hour that I spend doing that is an hour

that I'm not spending serving my audience. And that's the reason that I ultimately this year, 2016, decided that I wanted to pivot and I want to do less coaching and less consulting and kind of step away from that and move over into another way to directly monetize afford anything.com. But I haven't really made that transition yet because the way that I would like to make that transition is by selling a course, but I'm not just going to like slap a course together in a week and then like send it out to the audience. Like I'm obsessive and I'm a bit of a perfectionist. If I am going to charge money for a product, it's going to be damn good. And so I'm

really putting the time into making it good. You know what's funny too is that all I do is spend time with my community and commenting and emailing and it doesn't make that much money. So I have to do the opposite. I have to be better about going outside the blog to make money, right, to make up for it. Because there's, you know, especially if you have a blog, and let's say, I mean, there's sites that have no advertising, right? They disagree with it or they're minimalist, whatever. And you think about the number of hours it takes to write an article, respond. I mean, we get hundreds of emails a day. Some articles get over 100 comments. Yeah. And a lot of people ignore the people. There's your readers and they're chiming in whether they're to say hi or to ask a question

or to agree, whatever. You know, I spend so many hours, probably four hours a day that makes no money, but it's for the community, it's for my brand, whatever. And that's a choice that also goes into all this stuff, right? And this is why you see sites that turn off comments. And comments, too, in the bigger media, comments are a lot different than on blogs that are more personable. Like, I find the bigger media comments to be a lot of nastiness and hate and hurtful stuff, whereas blogs, depending on how you are and how you run your site, or a little bit more nicer and more, like, there for a reason to learn not to like bash people. But these are all questions that you have to decide when you're writing, how much am I going to write? You know,

what am I going to do when people leave comments? Do I even want comments open? And all this goes back to again, why you have a site online, whether it's a blog or a resume or whatever it is that you're trying to do online. Right. Exactly. You know, and the reason that I think, Jay, both you and I have very healthy comment sections, but I think a big part of the reason that our comment sections are so positive and helpful and healthy is because we've spent a lot of time cultivating those areas. We'll respond to reader comments. We'll respond to questions.

There are some people who have the philosophy that you should respond to every single comment. I don't necessarily do that because some comments just don't need a response. And so I don't want to force something where I'm like, Tim, thanks for commenting. Because that's not adding value to the conversation. But if somebody asks a question or, you know, if there's some way that I can add value to that conversation, I will do it. I'm there so much. I'm very present in the comment section of my blog.

And that's facilitated a community. I know. That's awesome. That's the part with community, right? And a lot of the stuff that you have to consider building something online is how much time you have to put into it, right? Like if you only have an hour a day, a blog might not be the best route because, you know, you can spend an hour in comments, right? Or maybe it takes you 30 hours to run. write an article, right? It'll take you forever. So figure out how much time you have, what the goals are,

and then figure out how you can apply that to something online. And honestly, it doesn't have to be online, but since this podcast is about like online hustles, right? We're focusing on the stuff we know more about. But to give you an example, too, even with an hour, if you're just trying to start and learn and figure out how it works, you know, I spend 40 minutes a day on budgets are sexy, eight years ago. So it wasn't that much once I figured out that you can grow an audience and this and that. It's slowly transitioned to some days, 12 hours on one site. So it can take a lot depending on where you are. But yeah, so just think about all these things when you're in it. And I will just say, if you're trying to make money and that's your heart of what you're doing,

a blog is probably not the best way to go. There's probably other ways online that you can make money faster and bigger or with your skills than a blog. It's just my two cents. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that a blog is a very long-term play. I do think that you can make great money as a blogger, or I should say, kind of more broadly speaking, you can make great money as someone who has an audience. Yes. Good call. But developing an audience is an extremely long-term task. We're talking between five to years at least, you know, if not longer. For most people, I mean, there are some people who get lucky and, you know, they put up a YouTube channel and within six months they have this massive audience. But for the majority of people, you know, we're in the trenches every day building an

audience and building a community. I'll also say that sometimes you'll be surprised at what your audience thinks is interesting and what they don't. So when I started blogging, I had just come back from this big two-year round-the-world backpacking trip. And at that point, I had been to 27 countries, I think. Yeah, yeah, I'd been to 27 countries. Because then after that, I set the goal of reaching 30 countries by age 30. And then at this point, I'm 32 now and I've been to 35 countries. Good for you. That's cool.

So, yeah, so at the time that I started blogging, I was 27 years old. I'd been to 27 countries, and I thought that my readers would find that interesting. And some people did, but that really wasn't the thing that resonated with my audience. People really wanted to know about my real estate investments. And that's completely caught me by surprise. I thought it would be the opposite. I thought that everybody would want to know about traveling and that nobody would care about the fact that I bought a couple of houses and then rented them out. Yeah, it just did.

It was the opposite was true. And I think that the reason for that is, I mean, it might just be relatability. I think I have a lot of, there are a lot of people in my audience who don't want to go spend a month in Myanmar or Vietnam or Cambodia or Malaysia. But they do want to earn an extra $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000 a month through passive rental. Yeah. So I think that the way that your message aligns with the goal. of your audience plays a big role. And sometimes you're not going to know that until you just start telling your story and then you see what sticks. Well, Ann, I will say, so again,

I mean, we are opposite in so many ways. It's crazy. So when you start your site, right, like, like, remember, like I'm doing it more for a hobby. You're doing it for more. I mean, you do it for hobby too, but there's a bigger grand picture here. Yeah. My brain is just wired to think businessy. Yeah. So you're more businessy, right? So here's a perfect example. And again, I mean, it's pros and cons, right? So a downfall for me is I write about whatever I'm interested in, and that's all I do. So if I were to write about all these travels and people like, oh, I want to learn more about real estate, I'd probably talk about it. But that's not like, like, I don't want to focus on one thing.

Like, so my blogging style, I guess, is very diary, like very, here's what's going into my life now and here's the pros and cons and here's how it relates to money. I would never pivot. And there's people that said, hey, I want you to talk about student loans stuff, right? And the fact is, I don't have student loans. I was fortunate, you know, and I don't know anything about student loans. Right. And so while my audience might like that, I say, hey, you know what, I don't do that, but here's the sites that are awesome on student loans. Anytime someone wants to get into like real estate stuff, I always think of you first. I say, you know what? Like, I am the last person, you know, like I'm anti like owning right now, right? Like go to Paula. You know, she's an expert in that financial independence. I talk a lot about that now more than I used to, but only because it's now in my life. And I still say, hey, here's my thoughts, but here are the ones that are awesome. So I pass people around, but business-wise, it would be much smarter for me to be like the one-stop shop for anything personal finance. You want to learn about debt. Go to budgets or money. You want to learn about everything.

Go to this awesome site, right? But it doesn't fit my personality. And for me, the second I start writing something that I'm not interested in. or even for someone else. You know, I mean, I write, the reason I write is to help and share with my audience. Like, I love my audience to death, but I can't write whatever they're looking for. Like, if they start emailing, I want you to do this, this. I just, my blog would have been gone years ago.

And again, that hinders me. It helps in some ways. It hinders me. You know, maybe you're like, dude, this guy talks about random stuff or even, I mean, you know, like our podcast, right? Like, there's people that love us. And we got a ton of one stars. I was like, oh, these guys ramble on or they don't have substance or whatever it is,

there's a point where you have to make a decision, well, should I start doing this stuff that people are looking for? Or am I going to do what makes me happy and am I okay with the consequences? For blogging, my whole goal is I want to blog for a living. It's a lifestyle business. I want to be happy and have fun writing. And hopefully I can be successful enough to like do it full time for a long time. Like that's the extent of my goal.

In the podcast, I love talking about. money, not to reneworship, and I love talking to you, Paula, and knowing that people are listening to this right now and they might respond whether good or bad. It's just so cool that we can have another avenue to talk about this stuff. But as you know, Paula, as soon as it gets like strategy and like, here's what we need to get to the top, right? And it took us 10 or 11 months to put this thing out, right? Yeah. That was a hindrance because I didn't want to strata, like all this stuff. It was so, like it was hard for me to do it. You know, until we said, you know, let's just put it out there.

Right. We're best. And then we'll learn and we'll adapt as we go. And that's what we did. And that's why you're listening to this right now. So to the listeners, when Jay and I first started talking about this podcast, the first thing that I did was I listened to a couple of podcasts about how to start a podcast and took notes. And I put together this entire like strategy document with like step one, step two.

And this is what we do. And this is how we automate. And this is the system. And I sent it to Jay. And he was like, uh, Can't, can we just get on Skype and hit record? Yeah, and that's because we know ourselves well enough, right? And these are skills, right?

A lot of stuff that's on this podcast is because of you, Paula, like this half of us are going into merging this, right? So we have it out the door, but we also strategize a little bit and we want, you know, all this good stuff. But, you know, and again, I keep saying it, I'm sure you're tired of it, but it all just, again, goes back to like knowing what you want out of it, right? You know, when I first started, my brother, he gets on my case all the time. He's like, dude, you have this blog, you have all these listeners. You need to come out with books. You need to travel the world and speak and get courses out there. And he like sees all this potential of how my brand could get bigger and make a ton of money.

Right. And I agree. If I did all that stuff, I would be super rich right now. You know, no doubt about it. But then I asked myself, that doesn't make me happy. In fact, I hate that life. You know, I don't want to be a workaholic again. I'm fine being just a blogger.

And I'm putting that in quotes because everyone says, oh, you're just a blogger, right? I love, and now I guess a podcaster. I love being just a blogger and a podcaster on the side. But that's eight years of figuring it out and trying stuff and realizing, you know, I mean, I've been offered to do, you know, speaking gigs, radio gigs, agents in New York reach out, hey, like, we want to talk about doing a book. Reality shows. There's a lot of stuff.

When you have an online presence, you can get a ton of awesome opportunities. And it's really important to think about why you're there, what you're trying to accomplish. And it's okay to change your mind and do one thing or try it out and you like it or don't like it. All that's great. And that's why I love having a blog online. You get all of these opportunities and all these different ways that you can make money or have fun or build a brand or business. But at the end of the day, remember why you're doing it. And for me, it's to be happy and to have a lifestyle that I enjoy.

Wow. Jay, yeah, you and I are complete. It's funny because we've come to the same conclusions, but just from opposite perspectives. Yeah. Because, first of all, my thinking process is the opposite in that I don't consider my blog to be a diary or even something that I'm doing for the sake of my own enjoyment. I mean, I do enjoy it. That sounds terrible when I say it like that. I hope you enjoy it.

Yeah, you've spent a lot of time with those articles. You know, I do enjoy it. But to me, the blog isn't something that I do for the sake of my enjoyment. It's an act of service to my readers, which sounds all like high and mighty and whatever when I say it like that. But like in order to kind of give you an example of what that means on a day-to-day level, my first auto responder, when a person signs up for my email list, they automatically get an email. I started doing this in roughly, I think, March of 2015-ish somewhere around there. They automatically get an email that says, hey, please respond and let me know the answer to two questions. what is your biggest dream and what's keeping you from getting there.

And I read every single one of those. If I see answers like thematically that keep coming up again and again, I put them in a spreadsheet. Oh, my gosh. I know. Jay is like ready. Jay is so ready to die right now. That was cool. I admire you.

I wish I could do that. So I put them in a spreadsheet and it's literally just a two-column spreadsheet. column A is dreams, column B is obstacles. And this is what I look at when I'm determining what to write about. So I'm looking at the spreadsheet right now, and I'm looking at some of the obstacles. One person said, no ideas for a side hustle that we can start while working full time. Somebody said, right now we feel so burnt out every day from our current jobs, and we feel like we have no time and energy to do anything else but life maintenance.

Fear is what's preventing me from achieving things. I have a decent size savings account that I worked hard for at my last job as a field service engineer, and losing it to bad investments would be a nightmare for me. So this is awesome. I mean, I mean, I'm not that guy's afraid. That's not awesome. But this information is awesome because now I know what needs my readers have, what needs my audience has. And so now I know how to serve them. And so that's the approach that I take with my blog is figure out what can help your audience and then figure out a way to, you know,

deliver that. My feeling is if you do that and if you can consistently serve your audience and help your audience, money will naturally be a byproduct. Going back to kind of our earlier conversation about Google display advertising or sponsored posts, I mean, the reason that I don't do that, even though I could be making a lot more money if I were doing that, but the reason I choose not to is because, in my opinion, that's slaying the goose that lays the golden egg, or picking the low-hanging fruit or whatever other analogy you want to give it, whatever popular cliche you want to give it. To me, the fundamental question is, is this serving my audience or not? And if I feel like something is not serving my audience,

then I don't do it. You know, sponsored content, I don't think is going to serve my audience, so I don't do it. No one ever asked you for that on your email. I want more sponsored content. Yeah, exactly. My biggest dream is to read more sponsored content. You know what's funny is my auto responder is where did you find, where did you find me from? Like, how did you get to my site? Because I saw someone else doing it because I'm just curious. So I've only had it in a year and eight years just because I'm curious. Yeah.

And I like hearing people, oh, my neighbor reads you. And I caught them watching this site. I'm like, what are you looking at with sexy in there? Oh, it's about money. Cool. Like someone the other day was like, yeah, I'm at a university. And our teacher said our homework was to go to this site and then like find like three things on money that make you interesting or that you're interested.

in or whatever. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, I get all these cool stories and then I get to talk to them and then I do it just to talk to them because I'm curious. So it's funny to see that, you know. And, you know, in the beginning when I started blogging too, just so it's a little clear, like I would just blog about whatever the hell I wanted to. And some of it was garbage, right? Some didn't even help people. Over the years, I've realized if you want to keep doing this, write about stuff you're interested in, but make sure there's a point to it or make sure there's something that's, there's a takeaway that helps someone financially. So I changed over the years because I realized that's important. I don't want to just write and you didn't come out with

anything. But I'm not as extreme, you know, in this case as you to, hey, I'm going to write what my audience wants. I write and then pray my audience likes it. And at the end of the day, the only people that stick around are the ones that enjoy it. Right. And so a large part have stuck around, but there's probably a whole world of readers I'm missing because I don't do what you do. So, you know, there's a balance there. And I find it interesting that we're so different, but we're on the same podcast, you know, so we're hosting it. Since I've alluded to this a couple of times earlier, I should kind of quickly go over the three M's. We kind of got derailed and blah, blah, blah, but we've actually covered it pretty well.

So when I think of blogging or any kind of online business, I kind of lump this into three buckets. There's management, marketing, and monetizing. And so management is creating an amazing reader experience or creating an amazing audience experience. And that encompasses everything from writing really good content, having great visuals and images and graphics, serving your audience with information that could help them. one of the things that I'm going, that I'd like to start doing that I will start doing at some point in 2016, hopefully, because my topics are so broad, I write about real estate and Airbnb and general money management and investing and hustling and entrepreneurship. I write about this very, very broad array of topics that all kind of tie in under the umbrella of financial independence. What I would like to do is create specific, funnels on my website in which people can self-identify as somebody who's like, okay, I'm mostly interested in real estate, or I'm mostly interested in starting a side hustle, or I'm just a beginner and I just want to know general money management information, because this is all new to me.

What I'd like to do is sort of redesign the site in such a way that people can self-identify, and then that way, when they join the email list, I can tag them based on their interests, and then I can send them emails that are specific to that interest. So that way, instead of sending one email to this entire list of 23,000 people, I then have kind of lots of little micro lists within that, where the people who have self-identified as being interested in real estate are getting more real estate content. And, you know, the people who aren't interested in real estate are not getting that content.

So to me, that's part of blog management is, all right, what are you thinking? You know what I'm thinking. I always ask you to repeat it all because I phased out like after the first sentence. You're like talking about email list. We're talking about blogging here, Paula. So people know like having a big email list is really good for business and you can send people into their inbox, which is really, you know, a big thing. And, you know, like an email list, you know, if you write a new blog post, it'll get shot out to your email list, right, usually. Right. So anyways, email lists are really big when you're building something online so you can reach your audience. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, so that's all part of the blog management. And then monetizing we've talked about, you know, that can be anything from affiliate sales to AdSense to creating courses to consulting or coaching or whatever. There's a lot of different ways to monetize and you shouldn't do it all. You should pick one or two things that align with your vision and goals and strategy. And then the last piece of it is marketing. And, you know, Jay, I don't.

don't know how you, how did you build your audience? How did you market? I just wrote and I responded to comments and then I'd read other blogs and I'd spawn to comments. I did a lot of guest writing, guest posting. And then I got on Twitter when that came around and that's pretty much as lame as that sounds like the extent of it. But it goes to show that if you just do some of these things that you can grow, the trick with blogging is you can blog every day, but if no one knows you're there, nothing grows, right? So by and so by interacting with other people and I love talking to people. So getting to know other bloggers, tweeting, talking to journalists, doing all this kind of stuff, and then hopefully writing good content, it all helps grow over time. But I would say like when I did

blog coaching, like the number one thing you can do, especially when you're starting out is guest write for other sites. Yes. It's really, it's because there's two reasons. One, you get in front of someone else's already established audience. If I wrote on Paula's site, which I don't know if I've ever had, you know, and let's say that we didn't have this show and no one knew me, like all of a sudden, you know, her 20,000 email people are getting an article from this random J Money dude. Her site, everyone going to the site is seeing my article that I wrote. Then if you like me, or maybe you're just curious, you click over and you go to my site.

So it's instant traffic over. So you get the eyeballs. And then hopefully when you're my site, you love it. it, you stick around, you sign up to my email newsletter, whatever. That's only one part, the other part, going back to SEO, and we'll have to have a whole show on this later because it's too much to cover. I have links, going back to the link stuff, right? Now I have links on Paula's site. And Google says, oh, this J Money character is blown up. He's on Paula's site, which is huge, right? Like, this is amazing. So that pushes me up in the rankings. And every day,

for years, someone is clicking still on that link over to my site. So you get the, it's kind of like It's kind of like the whole passive income thing. One-time work of writing an article that's good enough to pass Paula's test to get on her site. And the bigger site you are, the hard is to get an article on there. Every day going forward, you get the link juice, but you're getting eyeballs. Someone interviewed me seven years ago on the art of manliness, which is a huge site. Oh, yeah. Love the art of manliness.

They wanted to quote me on budgeting and why it's sexy. I spent 30 minutes crafting the perfect paragraph. again, seven years ago, every single day I get at least maybe 15 to 20 people, sometimes more, sometimes less. Every day for one article that I was in, I'd even write it. I was just a little part of it. A guest post on someone else's site, burst your own, does you a lot better in the long run for growth. As crazy as that sounds. So, Jay, I just multiplied that. So 20 people per day multiplied by 365 days a year, multiplied by seven years is 51,100.

Holy crap. So that's a lot of people for a 30 minute interview response. Yeah, yeah. And not every interview is going to be that successful. But, you know, you do 10 of them or 20 of them. And then one of them triggers 50,000 people to come to your site. Yeah. If you did one a month, I've stopped doing it because, you know, it's hard for me to write on other people's sites.

And it's, you know, going back again, you know, what do I enjoy out of it? It's hard for me to write on my site sometimes. So it's harder for other people for me to do. But if I were to do that every month, I guarantee you I'd have at least a couple million more hits if I did that. If you just won a month, you know, it's really good. And what the keys are, a site that's bigger than yours is usually better and within your realm, right? Like if I wrote an article for a fashion site, it's still good if those people don't know about money and they want to learn. Right.

But it doesn't give as much impact as if it was, you know, on Paula site or another site that's money related. Right. Or the targets match up. But that's still fine too. and you'll see a lot of the same people writing on other people's sites. So there's a point where you can't max out stuff. So going outside is good. But anyways, the story is, yeah, if you start a new blog or you're already blogging and you want more traffic, guest posts on as many sites as you can within reason and that'll help you. There's no possible way for it to hurt you unless you say or do

something really stupid. Right. And even then, people will click over to learn about you. So there's no way you can go wrong. Yeah, I totally agree. Actually, Jay, when I started blogging. Yours was one of the first sites that I guess posted on. Ooh, look at you. Pass the test. That's awesome. When you were a three-year-old blogger and I was a zero-year-old blogger. You already knew the tricks of the trade right when you jumped in. That's awesome. So yeah, guys, I know we kind of go all over the place and, you know, we'll have more episodes that talk about some of these parts more in depth and more structured for you guys.

But we just want to get the conversation started and going and little bit so that, you know, since that's mainly at least for what I do, you know, like I've made, you know, like six, seven hundred thousand, maybe a million, I don't know, over my eight years doing online stuff. So we can go into more of that later. But, you know, since it's a big part of me, we wanted to kind of, and Paula, too, put this out there and get that started. Plus, this episode that we're recording right now is sort of the celebration of both of our birthdays. Yay. Yeah. Yeah. I can't believe they were born at the same time. Well, I have one for the podcast, maybe, unless we don't shut up and get off of it.

last flower. All right. Jay, it was great talking to you as always. You too, my dear. Thank you guys. Thank you everyone for listening. We really, really appreciate it. Yeah, take care. We'd like to thank our sponsors. Nobody.

We don't have any sponsors, but we would like to thank you for listening, because if you weren't, we'd just be talking to ourselves, and that would be weird. If you liked us, please do the following three things. Number one, subscribe to this show on iTunes. Number two, download as many episodes as you'd like. And number three, leave us an iTunes review. If you'd like to know more about us, check out themoneyshow.com.

That's themoneyshow. I'm blaring some rap music to pup me up. Oh, sweet. What are you listening to? Drake, started from the bottom, now we're here. There is this amazing rap song. It's about paying Sally May back. It's about paying off your student loans.

I just saw it last night. Oh, really? Yeah. Is it by like a real rapper? Is it by like a funny dude? Like a comedian or something? It's a up-and-coming rapper. He's a guy who just got signed to a record deal.

Oh, wow. And so he used the money from his first record deal to pay off his student loans. Oh, that's so cool. And then he made a rat video about it. He's like, I finished paying family, Mayback. Mayback. Hey, sounds like the car, the Mayback. Oh, yeah.

And so that's exactly what the video is. he's driving around in this Maybach. Oh, dude. Rapping about how he just finished paying Sally Mae back. That is. And then at the end of the video, he like returns the Mayback to a dealer lot. Where like it becomes evident that he just took it for a test drive and the dealer looks at it. And he's like, hey, hey, I told you to return it with a full tank.