Transcription
From January 2019 to December 2024, my single blog, atam enfc, made me $5 million. Pretty hard to believe, that's not typical, but what I did to launch it back then is not exactly what I would do today. I mean, a lot has changed; there's AI content, Google algorithm changes, new stuff with affiliate marketing and SEO. So, if you're just starting out, I'm going to go through everything that I would do in this video to get to 10K a month. I'm also going to share some AI prompts with you, so a bunch of free frameworks you can use for keyword research, content writing, all kinds of stuff. If you're interested in getting my top 10 of those, make sure to click the link in the description below; you'll get that in my free AI master class. So let's get into this free course.
If I were starting a blog in 2025, this is what I do: the full 0 to 10K a month guide. So I want to teach you a lot in this free course. We're going to cover what I would actually do to make money blogging today, the different paths you can choose from in order to make money based on your niche and some other factors, how to create content quickly and efficiently with AI, the tools you need to get started, everything, the exact step-by-step thing to do, and then growing to 10K a month without burning out or having to go viral. So let's get into it.
So I just want to show you real quick, this is last year's profit and loss statement. I made $517,000 blogging, over $500,000 from affiliate marketing, and just the first two months of this year, I've made 130,000, uh, of affiliate revenue. So still about $65,000 a month with some new updated strategies that are actually working, even with not that much traffic to my blog. Still, here's the thing: what worked when I first started does not work this year. And because, like me, I didn't start this blog until I was like 30. I worked at a pizza place until I was 26. I learned enough about affiliate marketing and SEO to finally make it work. I learned about passive income 12 years before I made my first passive income dollar, but in 2019, I actually figured it out to create one of the most profitable blogs, fastest-growing vlogs ever made. Current life: I make between 50 or 100K per month; my best month I ever had was over $800,000; worst month I had was 22k on this business. I teach 5,000 students how to start blogs and successful online businesses, and I made over $14.5 million online since 2020. That's an average of 170k a month for the last 5 years. So scaling a personal brand through simple content with a website, uh, but however, I've learned that this has changed a lot; the online world is very volatile; you have to adapt to what actually works today.
So what would I do to make money blogging? This is what I would do: I would treat my blog like a sales portal, not an affiliate SEO site only. I'd build a true personal brand with a blog plus a secondary traffic source: Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and then three main income streams that I will show you. So why do you need a blog anyways? Well, you need a website because a website is central to all the monetization tactics you're going to have right there; there's affiliate links on your blog, you can sell your own products on your blog, you make ad revenue on your blog; all of those different things. So if it's a solar system, the blog is like the sun, and then all of the traffic sources are like planets. So there's Google organic; most people would only focus on that at the beginning, but there's other things too: LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, all of these different platforms, but you need a website to send the traffic to, and think of it like a sales portal, not only a Google-driven thing.
Now real quick, when you're ready to launch your blog, make sure to click my special Bluehost link below this video; it's my affiliate link, and you'll get 75% off; it's $1.99 a month to get started. So basically, you go to this page; it's normally 12 bucks; you can get it with my link for just $1.99 a month. You click get started now; it'll take you to this; you just choose basic; the basic plan is fine, and then you can just go to this; you can either put in a domain name if you already own it, put in your own name, cuz I recommend personal branding, or just choose it later. You can choose a variation of your name like Adamsadvice.com or something broad enough to keep it good, but I could say just choose domain later to get the deal, and then it takes you to the checkout page where you can get basically a year of hosting and uh free domain for the year, and you'll check out for $23.88. So a lot of other hosts like, are they faster, are they better? Maybe, but they're also like $2 to $400 a year, whereas Bluehost you can get for just $23 a year. If you're going to start a full business for a year, you might as well do it for the cheapest way possible. So again, go to the YouTube description, click the Bluehost link, and you'll get that $1.99 a month web hosting to start your blog.
So I'm going to show you three quick examples of personal brands that kind of stand out in the niches of finance, gardening, and yoga, and why it works. So here's the first one: this is Rob Berger, and this is a finance website. Now you'll notice he is an author, so he has a book here that he's selling; he has, you can buy it on Amazon. So his platform is also YouTube; so he has a YouTube channel where he has three, you know, a video on the portfolio trackers; he has articles, simple articles like retirement calculators, Mint alternatives, and all these different nice-looking simple articles, but you can see this is a personal brand; this, he has a YouTube channel, he has articles, he has a newsletter, he has a book. So there's multiple things going on here; one of his main calls to action is joining a newsletter. So there's multiple things going on.
Another one is Charles Dowding co.uk. So he is a gardener. Now you can see this is a nice-looking site; he has a gardening, his own product, gardening a garden planner app; he has a main call to action; you can join his free newsletter; he has a shop, so you can see he's actually selling physical products here; he has seeds that he sells, books, wall charts, growing guides, all of that; he also has blog posts, right? Blog is a component of your personal brand, but it is not just the one and only thing he has; that he also has a YouTube channel, courses, his own courses, skills for growing, no-dig gardening, seed harvest. So there's a lot going on, right? It's not just a simple, the days of just affiliate SEO where you can just blast a bunch of affiliate articles are over, right? It's not easy to do that anymore; Google made it a lot more difficult, which we'll show in the future, but really you need to think of it as a marketer; think of it as a well-rounded marketer; if someone's landing on you on your personal brand, what are you going to say, what are you going to teach, what are you going to sell, and you have to kind of have multiple traffic sources.
Here's another one: Yoga with Adrian. So this is, you know, subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter; she's got her blog here; she's got a calendar; she's got free yoga videos; she's got a shop. So there's a lot going on, right? This is a personal brand again, a sales portal blog; that's what I view it as. So there's videos, there's blog posts, there's ways to interact and buy things. You'll notice how these are multi-traffic source personal brands, and the blog is the central place to get all of the information; it is central to the monetization strategy here, and it kind of looks like this. So there's the unique brand of you, your personal brand; you are only you, and you are a unique person that has something to teach and something to share with the world; your website and blog is central to that; we have content creation; so this can be WordPress, this can be a blog; I'll show you which exactly what to use for that, or YouTube or Instagram or things like that; content creation plus your own products, courses, coaching and guides creates growth and profit, the actual output of this. So this is the big D here: all content creation, and yes, you can have affiliate links to products; yes, we can have ad revenue and different things that we'll cover, but the main thing here is this is a formula: creating unique content for yourself with the help of AI to funnel people to your own products, your own services, and also affiliate links.
So with that said, let's talk about the different paths to make money blogging today. Well, first, we have to think about how do you actually make money with a website? Well, there's a couple different ways to do that. So these are the different main blog revenue streams that we can talk about; this is a chart here that has the level of passiveness of the income, one being not passive at all, 10 being very passive income, and then the time it takes to get to that income. So first is affiliate marketing; this is kind of the bread and butter of the blogging world; however, it's getting more difficult on its own to just focus on this through Google; the passive level is seven; it can be quite passive; I'm still making money passively from articles that aren't even ranking anymore because of recurring affiliate commissions; so that's good; however, takes a lot of work to create the articles, to add the affiliate links, to monitor traffic, to make sure that they stay ranked, to update it, to get links to it, all of that stuff can take time; so it's passive level of seven, and it's about 6 months to get there. Then there's ad revenue; so banner ads on your blog; you can join an ad network like Mediavine; you get banner ads at the bottom, sidebar; these are just, you know, ads that are thrown on, and you get money every time that someone views your content; however, it takes a long time to get there; 12 plus months at least to make any significant revenue; you need, I'll show you the math on it, but you need a lot of traffic to make any decent amount of money with ads. Next is sponsor; so you can get sponsors to either do sponsored content on your website or be, you know, pay you to be added to articles; passive level is four; cuz you're actually talking to people, emailing, getting back and forth, talking to them, put them into articles and get paid and invoicing, and that should be probably 12 plus months as well because brands aren't going to pay you if you don't have traffic. Next we have courses and coaching, which is a passive level of three; so it's not passive at all; it's active income if you're running a course or coaching business; you are creating a course with video content, right, and then once it gets passive, it can be quite passive, but you want to update the course; you want to have live Q&As; maybe you can hire a coach and get it really passive; I've done that where it's quite passive for me over time where I, we have multiple coaches within programs and things like that, and uh live Q&As and whatnot, but the thing about this is courses could take 12 plus months because you need a decent-sized audience to get started and start selling courses; coaching can only be one month because when you think about it, I'll get to the math on this; coaching is more outreach, making just a few sales, high-ticket sales that can actually make that 10K a month a lot faster; and then services too; so services is probably the fastest way to make money blogging out of the gate; it's what I started with; I was just doing some simple link building and SEO for clients; I had three clients, and I quit my full-time job, and I was making about 9k a month or something like that with three clients paying me $3,000 each; so I was working; it wasn't passive; I was doing work for them, but it was pretty easy to be honest; that can come a lot faster; and then we have PPC affiliate, which is another way to make money by bidding on Google AdWords keywords to funnel traffic to affiliates that way; I just put the risk; the passive level is quite passive because once the ads start working, it can just start making a lot of money; however, it's risky to spend your own money, and you need to negotiate really high commission rates to make that work, like would think you want to make at least a $300 to $500 CPA, and you're spend, you know, $100 to $200 on keywords and clicks to make that money. So these are all the different ones to think about.
Now we want to really think about the math behind this; so what do we actually do today? The first problem though is that most people start with a passive income first approach; they want to get to passive income, and that's fine; however, it takes a lot of active work to get there; so why don't we just think about that active work as something that we can do and make money a lot faster? Plus, passive income can take a long time because it requires a lot more traffic, a lot more clicks on things in order to make money; we have to make active income a good thing; again, it's fun to do this stuff if you can take it full-time, and with the right revenue streams, we can get to 10K months a lot faster. So let's take a look at this with the different income streams. So affiliate marketing, getting to $10,000 could be uh, if we, if we're doing affiliate marketing, we get a 10% commission on a $500 product; so you're sending links to a $500 product, and that affiliate program is paying you 10%, you will make $50 per sale; so to get to 10K a month, you would need 200 sales at $50; with a 2% conversion rate to get those sales, you would need 10,000 clicks to those products in order to make 200 sales; and in order to do that, you would need about 40,000 visits to high-intent affiliate articles per month to do that; so out of those 40,000 people that visit those high-intent affiliate articles, about 25% usually click the affiliate links near the top, like if you have an article like the five best online course platforms, 25% of people will click uh the affiliate links in there; so you need 40,000 visitors a month to high-intent, probably competitive articles in order to make money, make 10K a month with affiliate marketing.
Ads: the average RPM or Revenue per thousand visitors is around 10 bucks; so maybe it could be 20, but for our purposes, we're going to say 10; even with AdSense, it could be like two; that's why, you know, in Mediavine, mine was like between $5 and $20; so you're getting paid based on the niche you're in, um, and then just an RPM that is really, you know, between 10 and 20 bucks; we're going to say 10; so to make $10,000, you would need 10 * 1,000 * 1,000; so you need a million visits a month to make $10,000 a month with ads; so this is a huge website with hundreds of articles, and that sounds like a lot of work. All right, let's get to courses; so this is simple math; that could be 10 sales at 1,000 bucks; so that would be at 500 people in your email list; so 500 people opt in, 2% convert, uh, and then from there, about 2% of people typically will join your email list from like an exit intent popup; so that could be 25,000 visits to related helpful content in your niche; so a little bit less traffic than the other two, but it's still a decent amount of traffic; it's not easy to come by necessarily. Let's look at YouTube sales and comparison; so again, you could have a low-ticket course, 10 customers at 1,000; you could have 500 leads to that; that would be 50,000 views on YouTube; or what about coaching, and this can be true through blogging too; two customers at 5,000 is only eight booked calls or about 8,000 views on YouTube; so the lowest amount of traffic you need, the smallest audience that you would need to make money is through coaching or services because just think about it; less traffic, you charge more, you can make the same. So we have to kind of shift our thinking when it, in when it comes to blogging, that we should be coaching; we should be teaching things and coaching people with live Q&As, a course, and a community and things like that because we can build a 10K a month and much bigger business if we're selling our own products that are actually a little bit more expensive than worrying about making a $10 affiliate commission.
Now certain platforms lend themselves better to certain revenue streams; YouTube is better for courses and coaching; I've seen this firsthand; the same amount of views on YouTube will sell a lot more courses than this; that amount of traffic through a blog probably buy at least five or 10 times, but blogging can be better for affiliate revenue; people are Googling things directly, looking for the best, best products and the, you know, best baby stroller; you're going to be Googling that; you're going to be looking at articles and going for it immediately. Now this can work also through YouTube, but Google is good for that too. Now here's what 10K a month uh blogging could look like; so a purchase has to be made somewhere when we think about making money blogging, unless you're just waiting for millions of views and ad revenue; somebody has to buy something; they have to buy an affiliate product or a product from you. So again, if you want to make 10K a month, you could do courses, 10 sales at 1K; you could do coaching, two clients at 5K, or that could be like three clients at 3K; affiliate, that could be 100 affiliate product sales at a $100 commission; or ads, again, it could be a million visits. So do you want to make two coaching sales or do you want to make 100 affiliate sales, right? So you just start thinking about it; you need 50 times more sales through affiliate links than you would just selling your own coaching program. So again, if you only have a blog with SEO traffic, there is a real business risk; there's a reason that big brands don't only rely on organic Google traffic; they have other marketing streams, and bloggers have to become marketers now; you have to have a secondary traffic source because really bloggers, you know, we can be mediators of purchase decisions; people Google things; they search for products like best laptops, credit cards, camping tents, anything; the millions of products out there that exist, and all of those keywords to an affiliate article to make affiliate revenue; it's really that simple; however, personal brands are more than that; we have to kind of get outside of just that little bubble and realize that that doesn't work anymore; it's getting too competitive in that, in that space; there are a few niches that it can work, but why not just make a lot more money and do something a little bit different.
So there can be Google searches, but also helpful info content leading to courses and coaching sales; yes, there can be affiliate revenue, but then what about a secondary traffic source like YouTube and Instagram with both affiliate link clicks and then people joining the email list here through your content to your co, your course and coaching sale, and it can all funnel the same way; basically, you can send all traffic from YouTube, from Instagram in your bio, from blog traffic to the same email list, the same landing pages into your same coaching program; that's where a lot of uh bloggers struggle with is that the offer is really, the offer can be good, but the way to get there is really difficult; the navigation is confusing on the website; we don't have one clear call to action; I see a lot of bloggers have this where it's like my c, my courses, my coaching programs, uh, my articles, this and that; it's is really hard to understand; we need one clear place to go if you have a course or your own program so that people know where to go.
Now we have to cover this; this is the Google algorithm, the big elephant in the room: can we trust Google anymore? There's been tons and tons of Google algorithm updates over the years; I've seen my traffic go up, my traffic go down, up again, down again, and at this point, you know, people are getting sick and tired of it to be honest, and blogging is completely different than it was; take it from me; you can no longer trust Google to run an entire business; Google is struggling in the last
Year? I mean, they're not struggling; they still make billions of dollars. But with AI, they're really—they're having a bit of an identity crisis. And they're really rewarding sites like Forbes and Reddit and big media sites and really screwing over the small independent publisher when it comes to ranking. So we have to adjust our strategy where yes, organic traffic can be a part of a blog strategy, but it shouldn't be the only part. It could have been the only part before. When I first started, it was the only thing I focused on—was just SEO.
But is SEO dead for small bloggers? I'm going to say yes, yes it is, by itself it is. I don't trust it anymore unless you're just a maniac that's really amazing at AI content and scaling publishing, or you're just really, really, really, really good at SEO. You're one of those 1% people that can make it work in a very non-competitive niche. I would not go for that only. You have to think, step outside of this whole affiliate SEO blogging Google world and think of it as marketing and personal branding. You need a secondary traffic source.
And here's the truth: everything is has its own challenges. So if you want to like get a following on X, you have to publish a lot of content; you have to post all the time; you have to have unique little takes and things. If you want to build an Instagram following, you need to create useful, helpful videos and image content. A TikTok following, a YouTube following, a blog—it's all somewhat challenging, right? No, I wouldn't say one is easier than the other. Is it easier to start a YouTube channel than a blog? There's technical aspects that are easier, but if you're an introvert, it's probably not. Everything has its own unique set of challenges. The key is just to stay consistent with something that you enjoy, that you can actually do, where you just cons stay consistent publishing content over the course of months and years and not quit. And most importantly, help people.
Because we're not just writing to entertain; we're writing to teach something. Teaching opens the door to all revenue streams, including your own products, instead of just, you know, creating entertaining content and random things. If you can teach, you can make money selling your own courses; you can send people with affiliate links to the products that they actually need to do the things that you're teaching; and you can build a lot of trust. So first, you have to think of yourself as a teacher, if you're a blogger. Even if you're not an expert, you can be a three out of 10 in the expert scale, and you can still teach ones and twos how to become threes. And over the course of time, as you're doing this and staying relatable and just telling the story of where you're at, you can eventually become a five, six, seven, and continue on. You don't have to be the best in the world at anything. Your job is not to be a guru; your job is to be a guide who has walked a path, even if you're one step in front of the beginner.
The internet is full of beginners. When people are Googling things or searching on YouTube or getting recommended videos, they're all beginners for the most part—90 plus percent of people. There's very few advanced people in different topics. So you've solved this problem; I'll show you how—you know how to help others win faster. That's how you want to really think about it when you're choosing your niche and you're coming up with your content plan and what your future course could be and what affiliate products you want to add when you're thinking about blogging this year. So let's take a look at how this would work in different niches.
So, for example, if you're in the niche of camping, you could focus just on affiliate revenue with a blog. You could just talk about the best camping tents and hiking poles and all the different gear that you need and the best trails and all kinds of info content, and you could just keep it with the blog. There, sure. Now, if you're in fitness, I wouldn't really recommend it. The main revenue stream I would focus on is courses and coaching; that's the main one that'll make the most money. And you could have a blog plus YouTube or really just only a YouTube channel into a coaching program—make a lot of money faster that way. And really, when we think about it, blogging is a good way to get from zero to 10K a month. Scaling a personal brand with YouTube and selling your own products is is the way to get to 100K a month. It's really that simple. I've had an 800K month back in August of 2023. We had high-ticket sales; we had course sales; we had affiliate sales; and it all stacked up to this crazy month that wouldn't have been possible without YouTube and a secondary traffic source.
So spirituality could be Buddhism, witchy stuff, Pagan stuff, whatever it is—the best thing for that would be courses and coaching. There's not like, unless you're selling herbs or books or something like that, the biggest path is courses, coaching, communities. So that could be a blog; that could be Instagram; some of that could be like women-focused Instagram account showing a lot of really cool stuff and day-in-the-life kind of footage, going into our Instagram ads, most likely going into a community for that. Fashion could be affiliate plus ads, and that could be a blog plus Pinterest. So that could be having a Pinterest account showing all the different clothing that you want to recommend and then blog posts with those two revenue streams. Food—so you want to talk about food? It's mainly ad revenue; that's why recipe uh recipes are so long, because if someone Googles a recipe, they're not going to buy something. So the last resort of monetization is ads; that's what I call it—the last resort of monetization. There's nothing that this person's going to buy necessarily; they might buy a cookbook, but how many times have you Googled chicken recipe or something and then actually bought a cookbook in that website? Pretty rarely. Maybe join an email list, but that's even rare too. So it's mainly ads, but it could be a community; it could be a course on cooking; that could be a blog plus Instagram or blog plus YouTube. And then finance—so teaching anything from investing to crypto to any number of things of what to do with your money could be affiliate, because there's a lot of big affiliate programs like credit card programs, banking programs, and things like that to recommend. But it is courses and communities, and that would be blog plus YouTube. There's a lot of YouTubers teaching that.
So really, you have to think about in your niche: where do people consume content? So yes, there's people that consume camping content on Instagram, but if camping is is it more male or female oriented? Slightly male, maybe? And where do they consume more content? Well, YouTube probably more than Instagram. Spiritual, or let's just say witchy things, are probably more women; they're probably on Instagram more. Fashion—they're going to be on Pinterest. So think about this—kind of goes down to like what niche do you want to be in, where do you want to teach, but also where does that audience go, and where do they consume content? All right, let's get into how to actually create this content with the help of AI in the right way. So instead of, you know, spending a bunch of money on fancy keyword research and SEO tools, which we can't necessarily rely on and they cost $100 to $200 a month, what if we could do this for for free? So I'm going to give you the free way.
Now, with all that said, how do we do this? Well, we use AI in the right ways. So method number one is free with Claude or Chat GPT. So we're going to use a system prompt to find your niche, develop your keyword strategy, create an outline, and then get your content almost published. So I'm going to show you this. If you want this prompt, make sure to click the link in the description, enter your email and all that—you'll get that plus nine other prompts that are free; you can use them uh to do all of these things. So I've got a couple different prompts here to show. This is the first one. So this is good for finding your niche. We have two versions: one can find affiliate keywords, and one will find 15 info pieces of content and five affiliate keywords. So we're going to put this one copy and paste this in. All right, all right, let's get started. Choose your main niche. What is the main niche you're interested in? I'll generate five relevant sub niches and five content ideas. I'm going to say yoga. Okay, yoga is a broad, popular—so then it gives you five sub niches. So this is like five content categories for any well-rounded blog to have content on: yoga for beginners—this would be all kinds of different articles about yoga targeting the beginner; yoga for specific health benefits; yoga for athletes and fitness; meditation and mindfulness in yoga; and it'll just keep going. And then the fifth one is yoga for special groups. So yeah, prenatal yoga, cherry yoga, senior yoga, postpartum yoga—all of that different stuff. So from there, I'm going to say which—it says choose one of them—so choose one, and it's going to give us 20 article ideas. So I'm going to say I'm just going to do yoga for beginners and see what that comes up with. So here are 20 article ideas: 15 info, five transactional, and two pillar posts for long-term SEO success. So if you have a yoga blog and you're targeting beginners, obviously you're going to want the keyword yoga for beginners. Another good pillar post, transactional affiliate content: best yoga mats for beginners, top picks. And then look at all these other helpful informational pieces of content you can create: beginner yoga poses, how to start yoga at home, breathing exercises, 10-minute yoga, morning yoga, yoga for inflexible beginners, yoga mistakes, yoga for strength, yoga versus stretching. So all of these are really good keywords that you would use. So one target keyword per blog post will show you exactly where to put it and how all of that will work, but I think this is pretty good. So then, transactionally for affiliate revenue, you could have yoga programs and apps, yoga blocks for beginners, yoga clothes, yoga classes, yoga starter kits. So then it'll tell you start with the pillar post, all of these things. So it's a good keyword strategy; you don't have to use an expensive SEO tool because it's getting less—SEO is getting a little bit less technical, more focused on personal branding, getting traffic from multiple sources, and just creating really good helpful content.
This is the second uh prompt I have; this is going to take it a little bit further. So let's put this one in. It's going to ask us—I put this whole thing in, very long, and then it asks me, drop in your target keyword. I'm going to say best yoga blocks. From here, it's going to create an outline. So what's cool is it's going to give us a title: Best Yoga Blocks of 2025: Top Picks for Stability, Comfort, and Performance—a really good title; meta description to add in; it's going to write the intro, and I kind of gave it some humanized elements to use exclamation points, write in certain ways, long and short sentences, ways that aren't always AI, and it's going to give us our main headings. So headings are really important; the way that you structure and organize your blog content is going to dictate the search intent; if people stay, if they keep reading. So this is kind of trained to do that. So the first thing is all well, why yoga blocks are essential; why do you need them; the different types: foam, cork, wood; and then the best overall. So you'll see here, this one is going to give you like—you pick this—I do not want you to get in the habit of making recommendations based on what an AI tool says and not having your own recommendation, right? So you put in—this is a good outline; it puts in the best yoga blocks, top pick; you put in the information on the different ones, kind of ends, how to choose the right one for you, tips to use them, and FAQ; it's very in-depth; then a conclusion, and then it writes the conclusion. So you could take this whole thing, copy and paste this into WordPress, and then fill in the blanks. So you're filling in the information now. Do you have to buy every single product? Not necessarily, but you in in a niche that you're in, you should at least have some experience, experience and know what's good; do some research; look at what's best; what kinds of things are better here; and put that information in based on your own knowledge, not just what the AI says. So this is a really quick way to find your niche, find five sub niches, all your content categories, uh pick your first 20 articles that you're going to write, and then get outlines for every single one for free.
Second method here is with make.com. So this is an automation software that you can connect multiple apps too. You can set up a custom make.com scenario to automatically publish content. So let's say you wanted to take all those 20 keywords, have them in a spreadsheet, and then automatically with the prompts, instead of copying and pasting, using it just have it in a way where you hit a button and then it automatically gets it into WordPress, either as a published post, which I don't recommend, but as a draft that you can then edit. There is a way to do that. This requires Chat GPT or Claude AI, a developer account, so that you can—you're paying a little bit of money every time that it runs those API calls and make.com. I have a full tutorial on this; I can't go over the whole process in this video; it takes a little bit—right, it's kind of in-depth, but you can search my channel for it, or we'll link it here if I remember—it's a 50/50 chance—but you'll find it. Um, and then another one—there's other tools, right? There's uh the most expensive option is using one-click tool, so something like Surfer AI or machine.a or content at scale or these—you put a keyword in and it writes the whole article for you. Now, again, I don't always recommend that approach, although it seems the fastest—you can write it for some some articles, maybe—but I think that you should should really put your own human elements into this. Be a teacher, not just a random AI bot. A teacher that is giving your own recommendation is going to have much more valuable content. Really, when I view it like there's two types of articles: there's the really kind of important articles. So again, let's say you have that yoga blog and it's like, well, any product you recommend is going to be important; how to, you know, yoga for beginners—that's going to be a really important article that you should write mostly. But then if you have a really—I call it almost glossary content—like this ancillary keyword-based content that's not as important, um like certain things on, you know, yoga stretches for seniors or something like that, maybe some of those not as important articles that are there, you can use lean into AI a little bit more heavier on, but I still I recommend just in case that you write everything for the most part yourself; you're using AI to speed up the process, create the outlines, create the stuff, but then you are the person; you're the blogger; you're the teacher, not random AI, because people can just use Chat GPT now; they can just look that up; you know, people are looking for real perspectives.
So the question is, can we just publish AI content lazily, not fact-check, not use the products, not contribute our own thoughts? Obviously not. No, we are using AI to speed it up, but you need your own unique perspective; that's what people follow; that's what builds trust; that's what makes money. Now we do have to take these and, you know, let's say you create the yoga article, you put all the inform information in, you hit publish—well, there are a few little tweaks that we would want to add just for Google's sake to make it a better chance of ranking on Google. So here's a little checklist; I'm going to cover this as well and go over an article of mine, but you need the main keyword—so one keyword, one article keyword in your H1, that's the main title of your article; an H2 heading—so the secondary headings—in the URL; and then in you want some semantic keywords, some—some thematically related ones; you want to format it correctly—we'll define in a minute what is is and helpful—but you want readability; when you're writing on a blog, like you don't want really long paragraphs; you don't want four or five sentences per paragraph; you want one to three max; you want images; you don't want to just use stock footage or stock images only; you want to have your own images. So with images, if you're in a hobby niche like yoga, for example, you would just take some time one day and take a bunch of helpful pictures of yourself or around the house of different items; you can take 100 pictures in one day, and you can just upload them to your blog and then use them over the course of time. Or if you're in gardening, you take a ton of pictures of the garden; if you're in business or software, a lot of your images are going to be more screenshots of your computer showing stuff—like I was doing software, and I would show the trial dashboards and things that are helpful. So you need helpful images as well. Um, user experience: you can use table of contents, things like easy table of contents plugins; you want easy internal navigation, internal links—so link to related content—topical authority is is one of the most important things. So if you have a yoga blog but you only have two articles on yoga, Google is not going to see you as an authority; you want to have 20, 30, 40, 50 articles and more over the course of time on yoga; the more you have, the more keywords you cover, the more topical authority you have, which is a better chance of ranking; and then, of course, humanizing your content.
So here's an example article of mine; this just—I've shown this article before, but it's just the simplest example to show for an on-page SEO tutorial. So you'll see the keyword is best online course platform; that's the keyword; it's in the URL. Now you don't want to have a really long URL with the whole thing in here, cuz this could say like the best online course platforms of 2020—when I wrote this, it was 2020 or 2021—so you don't want to—the URL is the only thing you can't change because you're going to point internal links to this; you're going to maybe get links to it. So this is the only thing that you need to keep the same; everything else you can change—the title, the text, everything in there you can change as much as you want. Target keyword is in the title, the H1; have a featured image, which you don't really need—that—I show a little social proof here, so one of my courses, Blog with Engine, has this is over 5,000 now, and it's called AI Income Blueprint, but uh Makes Money has over 20 employees. Here's what I learned: finding the right online course platform isn't always easy. So there's a lot of hook psychology when writing an intro—like I—you want to show your own experience, your own take, how you're ranking this thing if it's AI, and also like why you should trust this person, but you also need add page SEO. So you'll see we have a v variations of this course platforms in the intro, and then we get into the first H1, H2 heading: What are the best—target keyword—what are the best online course platforms? You put your keyword here in the form of a question for transactional posts. If this was an article on how to start a course business, then your just H1 would be How to Start a Course Business in Five Steps. Step one, do this. But with the listicle, the H2 is here in the form of a question; the H3 is the answers to the question. So this is paragraph text, and I use it again right here, and then this is paragraph; this is H3; a second of the—I usually just use H2s and H3s; I don't go down to four, five, or six. So your H1 is the title; H2 is these big headings; and H3 is answering the questions to the headings. I have a box here; you don't need this; this could just be text. So you'll see I have an affiliate link here in the first the first mention of the brand; I have a quote here; I've got another affiliate link; another affiliate link; some key features; all of that. So in a listicle, you're going to go over the…
Main, this will be different for everything. So if you're recommending kayaks, for example, there's going to be things people want to know, like the weight and the length and the comfort and things like that. But for software, they want to know the user experience, the pricing, the features. So what you're talking about in each item of the listicle will be dictated by your niche, and it really is just like, look at other example articles in your niche to get that idea of what's currently ranking.
But we get there, and then here's another couple affiliate links here and a button at the bottom. And then you'll see blogging is more about assembling content the same way every time because we get to number two, and it's the exact same formatting. So what's kind of nice about listicle formatting is that you can do it this way; you just keep doing it per product, and you get all the way down. This is a really long article; this was like years ago of work and some images and blah, blah, blah. And then if I go all the way down, I end it with a conclusion and the top pick.
Ultimately, this is not overly complicated, uh, when you're creating content and you're writing helpful content. Just put the keyword in the URL, put it in the title, put it throughout a few times—no, don't go crazy with it; that stuff doesn't work as much anymore—and just write really helpful stuff from your own perspective. So how can we make it more personal? Where we can humanize it, we can—it should be in the first-person perspective. I learned this when I did that, like, I struggled with yoga for years; I couldn't touch my toes for a decade; I couldn't even meditate for more than 5 seconds. And then I finally started yoga, and I learned all the poses, blah, blah. So first-person perspective, active voice, share your own personal stories, use unique images, use real-life examples, and communicate your authority. You can do all of that pretty much in the introduction, so it's like, you know, I've been doing yoga now for 10 years; I'm a yoga trainer, blah, blah, blah. So why should they continue reading? People skim content now; they skim blog posts; they're not going to read every single word. People's attention span is that of like a mouse or a goldfish when it comes to content these days. Thank you, TikTok, for that. But people will scan—scan the article with an affiliate article; the good thing is they just scan it; they find the products; they click the affiliate links, and they go. I'd rather have them do that. If it's a helpful, info-based article about yoga, for example, they're going to kind of scan, look at the main headings, look at the poses you're talking about or whatever the article's on, and then hopefully interact with you more. Those are just some simple ways to humanize AI content.
You also, if you're going to be using the tool to write some of the stuff, you want to replace overused jargon. So AI can be very generalized in its language. You can include burstiness, which is already included in the AI prompts (again, link below), short and long sentences, questions, bullet points to mimic how humans talk. Fact-check it; if you're going to say any stats or any facts, you have to fact-check. Make the content relatable and add empathy. AI does not add empathy; it doesn't really have empathy; it's starting to—it's starting to kind of seem like it does when it says stuff, but you know, you really want to say like, I struggled—like if there's a beginner, you're always talking to the beginner, so you put yourself in the beginner's shoes, for example. You know, when I first started gardening, I looked out at this patch of dirt and I was like, what the heck even is this? I don't even know what a seed is; how am I going to get started? I can barely even bend down to pick up a seed; why would I even do this? Obviously, I'm joking, but if you add empathy, you understand from the beginner's perspective; they're more likely to continue reading. So write like you're speaking to a friend.
Again, give your own take on the topic as a real teacher. Teachers—it's kind of funny—but like, you want to make a lot of money; you become a teacher, not necessarily a teacher uh, at a school, because those teachers should be paid more. But if you are a teacher on a specific topic and you can sell your own products on that topic, then you can make a lot of money.
So in 2025, how do we actually make money blogging? Step by step, just give me the answer, please. Well, here's a checklist: First, you set up web hosting and use WordPress. So I have a Bluehost link in the description; it's the cheapest web host out there; they have a pro promo going through that affiliate link of mine; it's a $1.99 a month. Basically, you can go through and check out, and you get a free domain for a year and you get hosting for a year for $23, I think, is the total cost when you go to check out and buy it. So it's like the cheapest thing you can get into WordPress with that. And then you'll get into your WordPress dashboard; you can use Cadence AI to design your blog. So this is a theme based on AI, so you can just put in prompts. Now, just says like, what's your site about? You can say, my site's about yoga, or my site's about gardening, and I want to teach beginners how to plant these plants, whatever, whatever your site's about. And then it will literally give you images; it'll create images; it'll create your website, your homepage, and all of that will already be done for you. I also have another video on that on my channel.
And then you want to get the right plugins. So again, we're using WordPress because it's the best for SEO. You want to use Rank Math; it's for SEO, so you can submit your sitemap to Google. So that's going to be key; you want Google to be able to find your site; you need to submit a sitemap to tell Google, hey, these are all the articles that are on my site; it's always being updated for you. So you submit it to Google Search Console; that's going to be key to get your website indexed and to tell Google that you even exist. Wordfence is a free security tool; WP Rocket is a speed tool; ShortPixel is an image optimizing tool. So you might have huge images; they need to be scaled down, and ShortPixel makes them smaller. And ThirstyAffiliates is an affiliate link cloaking tool; it's an affiliate link organizer. So if you add, for example, in an article 10 affiliate links, instead of having to manually change them if the link changes, you could just change it at once in the setting spot, and it'll change all of them for you. So it's a good organization tool.
What I would do, though, and this is kind of technical—I have other videos on this topic—you know, setting up a website; it's pretty simple, especially with AI now. But after that, you would use the free AI Niche Hunter framework from the email to create your first 20 blog posts. Then you want to create your core four pages. So this is pretty much done with Cadence AI: home, about, blog roll is done, and a contact page if you want that; you don't need it. Plan your secondary platform based on your niche and personality. So you start thinking, all right, I've got 20 articles now; I'm teaching in this area; what other platform, where are these people at now? Use AI in the right ways to free—this will free up your time to focus on other traffic sources. So we'll get into this in a second, but we want to begin your second traffic source strategy; that could be YouTube; that could be Pinterest. So this is what this could look like: So your blog is up and running; you publish 20 articles, 15 informational, maybe five affiliate like we showed you in the prompt.
Next, you have to find the time in your week to actually do this. So if you have a full-time job, if you have kids, if you have responsibilities, you need to find what is the time that you're most productive? Is it in the morning, early early morning? Is it at night? Is it the afternoon? When can you sit down with a coffee for 2 hours and get a block of time done, right? So you want to set a schedule to publish at least two blog posts a week; you want to get this to eventually be four hours a week where you're spending two hours per article. It might take you four or five or six hours per article at the beginning because you're learning this; you're figuring it out; maybe you haven't ever written before, but you can use something like Grammarly to make it a lot easier and better and have no errors in your writing, so you don't have to worry about it. But you have to create a monthly plan and stick to it, so you can have that 80/20 ratio of informational to transactional content: 80% info, 20% transactional. Let the AI guide you. Really think about this: It's less finding the perfect hidden keyword in a tool like Ahrefs or something, and it's more about, if I'm creating a well-rounded personal brand and website about yoga, for example, what would those articles be? It's like an intuition thing; it's just like, that's, you know, yoga blocks, obviously, stretches, poses; it's pretty obvious if you know the niche decently well. So if you're spending about 4 hours a week on your website, with that remaining time, think, you know, I want to spend 10 hours a week on the side at least; you need to at least set 10 hours aside if you really want to build and make money online; at least, the more the better, honestly; set aside 20 if you can. But with your remaining time, you learn the skills of your secondary platform; start building your personal brand. So that's very different; so the YouTube algorithm, it's very different than the Google algorithm that we just discussed with the on-page SEO stuff; Instagram is very different. So again, I have other videos on that too, but I can't cover it all in one video. But you want to start learning the skills of that. Within 3 to 6 months, aim to make your first affiliate revenue, and really, I would say create your course or coaching program as soon as you possibly can. So, for example, if you just start a website and it's about spirituality and you want to start teaching that, then start creating your content; start really planning this. And again, I have other videos; I have a lot of videos on my channel, hundreds, but there's some recently that I did about really about creating your offer, how you're going to sell it, the transformation that's going to occur for your students, um, how to price and package it, how to shoot the course, or if it's just—it could just be coaching; it could be as simple as getting some Zoom calls, but there's some tech stack behind it; it's not that complicated. But I would say the sooner the better. A lot of the times it's like, well, you need a big audience to sell a course; you need this huge thing. Well, well, if you're thinking only through the lens of a blog, you're never going to sell a course, but if you can think of a secondary traffic source, like I started my YouTube channel with a course, so every video I could link to it at the very beginning; I could start building my email list instead of waiting. So the sooner the better; it can take time to build an audience, but you want to just start collecting email leads at first, so—so you can use an exit intent popup on your blog from something like ConvertBox and just start giving people, you know, if it's yoga—I just keep using the example for this video; I've used tons of different examples over—over the years—if it's that, then, you know, your lead magnet could be something like the five free yoga routines or something like that in your inbox, or some weekly, you know, this is the yoga you get every week, something, something that is low-touch at the beginning when you're just building up your email list but is very valuable to people. So you want to give something really valuable, but maybe it's not weekly, because if you only have three people in your email list, you don't want to update it every week. So something that's automated through an email series over the course of seven days. Now, AI speeds up the whole process. So what took me three years could take you three months, as far as just content goes. I used to write every single word myself; I would publish like one blog article a week, and I wrote every single word, and some of those articles were like 10,000 words long. So it took me a long time. So it could be sped up a lot; you can make a lot less mistakes than I made. However, it is more competitive now than it was when I first started, especially in competitive niches. So that's why bloggers are marketers now; it's really personal branding. Use AI to speed up blog post creation; you can also use AI to speed up video creation. So, for example, I have another YouTube idea engine here. So if I do that one, I'll show you that. So again, you can use this to come up with YouTube ideas. So again, yoga is my niche—niche, however you like to prefer it—it'll give you YouTube content ideas. So again, video ideas for yoga for beginners, the 10 perfect 10-minute routine, I did yoga for 30 days; how it changed my life. So this really interesting title and thumbnail formulas, but again, we can use this to come up with an entire content strategy in minutes for an entire thing, and then it's just down to, all right, I'm going to shoot these in my house in one setup; it's really easy. Publish a video; link to my course. That's the people that are making a lot of money today are willing to do those things; they're willing to create videos; they're willing to actually market themselves. And if you're not willing to market yourself, if you want to kind of stay behind the scenes as a shadowy affiliate site, it's just going to be a lot harder over the course of time. You have to create a content machine; you have to create something where you just have a consistent schedule and you stick to it over the course of months and years, linking to affiliate products, eventually linking to your own products and all of that.
So with that, with a blog, if you're doing eight blog posts a month, that's 96 a year; if you're doing YouTube videos one a week, that's four a month, that's 48 a year; that's lots of pieces of content that can then get to all the different sources of revenue: affiliate revenue through the blog, ad revenue through the blog, joining an ad network like Mediavine once you get to like 50,000 visitors a month—there's really no pro point; you know, you're going to be making pennies before that—YouTube videos, YouTube ad revenue, courses and coaching, affiliate revenue; you can get sponsors, all kinds of different things. But it's really the brand is you; you have to market yourself, right? A realtor can't make money without marketing themselves; a brand can't make money without marketing themselves; a blogger can't make money without marketing themselves. And all that is is really just creating content and putting it out in the world and hopefully enjoying the process as you do it. And then over time, outsourcing. So what's really nice about blogging is what's crazy to me is my traffic went way down after random Google penalties and updates and things like that, but I'm still making $65,000 a month from affiliate marketing with barely any traffic, and I'm spending literally no time on the site. That's very rare; you can't say that about YouTube or Instagram or any other platform or podcasting or any other way to make money or e-commerce, any of that. Blogging is the one way where with recurring affiliate commission, somehow I'm still making that money every single month. So what's nice about it, too, is it can be outsourced; you could hire an AI writer from a site like Problogger job board to start doing some of the updates for you, maybe not the main important posts, but some of the ancillary ones that aren't as important. And then YouTube, if you're freeing up your time with video editing, so YT jobs, you can find a video editor anywhere from $250 per video up to $4K plus a month. I pay a lot more than this, uh, but you know, you can find these different things. And then all of a sudden you're treating this like a real business, so you're directing the strategy of your own personal brand. So right now, I have a full team behind this business. So you see me on YouTube talking, but there's marketing people; there's a video editor; there's another business partner that's like kind of the backend CEO running a lot of the course community kind of stuff; there's content creators; there's a lot of different things behind the scenes. And now I'm kind of in a leveraged position—position where I'm able to create videos on YouTube, teach things, have a blog that's kind of automated and make a good amount of money every month with not that much time compared to my old 9-to-5 jobs. So it's a way to scale up and just really start this process because this is the economy of the individual; this is the authority economy; you can only do this for yourself; it is all about building leverage into your life in the online space, and only you can do that for yourself.
Now, again, the total cost to get started here should be under $50 a month. ChatGPT is free; you pay the $20 a month for unlimited access and all that; domain is $10 to $15 a year; Bluehost is $1.99 a month; you can get a free domain for a year with the Bluehost link in the description. What you want to do to scale up, you can keep profit margins above 50% and continue hiring. So let's say you make your first—you could close a coaching client for $2,000; you made $2,000 that month; you're like, all right, well, what's my cost? Well, I have no cost; it's just me; it's $100 a month for software, let's say; all right, got some wiggle room here. Now, to—to hire somebody up to $1,000, keep my profit margin at 50%, and then continue scaling from there. So what's really nice about blogging is a typical profit margin for a business is like 7% for a restaurant or 10%. So you make a hund—you have to generate $100 in revenue to make $10 that you keep; the blog could be 90%, right? You could make $100, keep 90 of it. So that's the power, and start it for a lot less money: no inventory, no—no employees to start with, no rent, no uh, supplies, equipment. So really, it's a low cost to get started, but you want to have some startup growth principles in your approach; you want to think about how can I grow this thing and scale it up over time. I always recommend just keep profit margins above 50%; everything over that just starts spending it to—to scale.
So again, to confirm, in 2025, I treat my blog like a sales portal, build a real personal brand as a teacher, using a secondary traffic source plus Google and selling my own products as the main income stream; worry about affiliate and stuff down the line. If you're interested in learning more, click the link below; get my 10 free AI prompts to start your blog in 2025 and my free AI Master Class. You'll get that for free when you enter your email; you'll also have the opportunity to join AI Income Blueprint, which is a living, breathing coaching program to help you build this AI-powered business in 2025. It's an updated 37-video course to launch, grow, and scale your blog; unlimited coaching. So it's a coaching program; we have multiple coaches within there who answer any questions that you have; anytime you're stuck, you just post things, and you can get answers; we also have live Q&As every week, multiple ones, so you can get any question you have answered on building the website, making affiliate revenue, starting a course, YouTube—anything, honestly. But you can use AI to do 80% of the work for you, and we have a lot of AI framework. So in addition to the 10, you'll get like another plus 20 more just to help you scale this thing, uh, and really scale it up without having to hire anybody. And also, there's a limited-time bonus to—um, we have a new course, Blog Automation Factory. So this is the full Make.com scenario, building—building this fully automated thing where it's actually publishing stuff for you, so you can put a keyword in and it publishes an article in under five minutes. You can also automate social media through this, automatically adding posts to different social media platforms, and you can build a fully automated content.
Calendar for your blog and social calendar with this course. It is run by my friend Kevin, who is the content manager for my blog for a number of years, and he is a make.com wizard, a lot smarter than me.
What's nice about this, you know, world of online business is I find people that are a lot smarter than me and have different disciplines in different areas, and we just build a full team around that. And there's also ways to build your own keyword generators and web apps, all kinds of different stuff with that.
So, with that said, if you're interested, just click the link in the description below. If you don't want to get the course, that's fine; you can get the 10 free prompts.
But anyways, I hope you found this video, uh, interesting on what I would do blogging in 2025. Things have changed a lot, and you have to become a marketer now. This isn't about affiliate SEO; this is about stepping outside of your comfort zone and building a true business for yourself.
So I hope you enjoy the video. Please like it, comment with any questions that you have on blogging, and I will do my best to answer it, or anything at all, I'll do my best to answer it. Please, uh, subscribe to the channel, and I will see you in the next video.