Transcription
What's up, y'all? Welcome to the winning team. I'm Nikisha. If you're new, now today I want to talk about how to start a blog that actually makes money. Okay? Things are a bit different in 2024 for bloggers, for blogging, and I totally think it's still a very valuable thing to do. Adds to your brand, gives you credibility, all that good stuff, right? So I definitely think there's still a place for blogging; however, you got to do it a little bit different because strategies change, times change, right? And today I want to talk about how to make money blogging as a new blogger, even now.
About six years ago, I started a blog because I just simply wanted to share my thoughts with the world. But once I found out that I could actually make money online with this blog, I was like, "Oh yeah, sign me up!" And that's when I went all in with this blog. The blog turned into this YouTube channel and many other social media platforms. I currently make six figures plus with my blog and my total business, and today I kind of want to share my thoughts on how I would make money with my blog in 2024.
So the first thing you're going to need to do is actually have a blog. Right now, if you're new to the online space or just new to the blogging world and you're looking to make money with your blog, the first thing that I would do is start a blog that I didn't have to invest all this money into getting set up, right? Because we're trying to make money; we're not necessarily trying to spend it. So I would keep my costs low, and I would want something that's super easy and not complicated to set up because the focus is going to be on making the money. Okay? And so I would choose a platform where I can put money-making as the first priority.
If you're looking for something that's going to be low cost and easy to set up, you should consider Podia. Special thanks to Podia for sponsoring this video. Podia is an all-in-one platform that allows you to post your blog, build out income streams, and make it easy to market those income streams that you're going to be building out. I think it's amazing for beginners. It's absolutely free to get started; nothing, no money. You simply sign up for your account, and you can set up your blog with a few clicks—really, just a few clicks. And I think that's really good for beginners because a lot of times I hear bloggers say, "Oh, well, how do I make my site look good?" or "How do I do this?" or "This is complicated," and it takes all of that out. You don't have to worry about any of those things because it's literally click, drag, drop; the site is up. It's really that simple. And so you can get started much faster to making your money that you're looking to make.
Now, if you're interested in getting your blog started for absolute free—you have to put no money up front—and get a host of other features with that, I'm going to have a special link for you down in the description. Go ahead and click on that and get started so you don't miss out on this.
Now, once you get your blog all set up, the first thing and the first way that you can make money with this blog is going to be with digital products. Now, digital products are simply a product that someone doesn't get tangibly; you send it to them virtually, right, via through email or an immediate download or however it is you're going to send that document to them. Now, once they do that, they can open it up, and they can immediately start using it.
Now, why digital products are good is because, one, the only thing you have to do is take knowledge or skills that you actually have and put them down on virtual paper and share it with your customers and your audience. And this has worked absolutely amazing for me. I remember the very first ebook that I launched; I made about $1,400 in the first weekend of launching this ebook, and it really took me a two to three days to set that ebook up. So I do think that ebooks are probably one of the most lucrative things that you can start as a beginner because it takes the complication out of the process, right? All you're doing is taking knowledge or skill that you have, and you're getting it out of your head and onto the paper and reselling it over to people. And then another thing when it comes to ebooks, it's easy to prove your expertise at that. So say, for instance, I'm online and I'm talking about, okay, how I started this blog and it catapulted my online career; there's proof there, right? All you have to do is scroll back on my YouTube channel, scroll back down on my blog, on my Instagram, or my whatever, and the proof is there, honey; the receipts are in; she did that, right? And so you can easily go and verify that, which makes my ebook a lot more trustworthy because you can see, okay, yeah, she did; she did that work, right? And so I think that no matter what it is that you do, whether you're a homemaker, you're a home chef, whether you teach basketball, it doesn't matter; I think that it's easy to translate your experience onto the paper with an ebook.
Now, obviously, there are other digital products that you can offer, um, that you can create too, like templates. They're pretty easy to create, but it takes a little bit of time, and if you don't have that experience with a graphic design software, there's a learning curve there, right? And so digital products is the first way that you can monetize your blog. So what you would want to do is set up your digital product. Personally, I would recommend an ebook. Go ahead and set that digital product up; it's super easy and simple to sell this on Podia. Digital products are the first love over there; it's their first thing, right? And so I would set up my digital products on Podia, and then you could start creating some blog posts, crafting those blog posts around what your digital product is, and begin to embed those digital products inside of those blog posts. So the blog posts are going to gain traction because you're going to make sure you're doing your keyword research properly; you're going to be promoting your blog post on Pinterest and social media, and so you're going to be driving traffic back to your blog post as normal as you should do anyway, and those digital products will be embedded in that post, and you will give them calls to action in order to go ahead and purchase your digital products from you, right? So does this make sense? Digital products, hands down, one of the easiest ways to get started with monetizing your blog.
Secondly, you can offer a service on your blog. What do you mean, offer a service, Nika? I mean, if you are that person and you are a self-taught home chef, but your recipes are like A1, but they're good for other home chefs and home cooks and moms or whatever, if they're trying to put together a fancy, you know, recipe or a fancy hosting or something like that at home, you can offer services to those clients to—maybe you do a one-on-one Zoom call and you teach people how to put together a date-night meal to where their date comes over and it looks restaurant quality. Maybe you host group sessions on how to do turkeys at Thanksgiving, right? You can offer some sort of service with your skill that you have. So now look, it just simply builds on the digital product that you're also going to offer. So they came to you; they bought your digital products, and you taught them how to sew a basic thing—I don't know, maybe it's a napkin—okay? And then you, after they buy that digital product, keep in contact with them, and then you slowly begin to offer your service on how to do one-on-one lessons for sewing, right? So do you see how that works and how that all works together? Absolutely hands-down amazing. So offering a service that combines well with the digital product that you're going to offer works really, really well.
Now, here's the thing. Okay, here's the thing about this: You can also offer this on Podium, right? You can set this up to where you offer a service just the way you offer that digital product. But here's the—here's the sweet thing. Okay, here's the sweet thing with Podia: You also get free email hosting; you get free email management software. Okay, if you know, know anything, okay, about email management, email softwares, right, it costs, okay, when you hit 100 subscribers, and then you hit 200 and 500 and 1,000, the price of that management software continues to go up; it goes up every time. Trust me, I know; it continues to go up. But with Podia, on this free plan, you're getting that email for free. So when someone purchased your digital products, right, you keep them on your newsletter, and you continue to nurture them through, you know, sending out new weekly newsletters or how things are going in your business and you know what you've published online that week and tips and whatever it is that you want to send out. Email is another marketing opportunity for you then to offer the service that you're going to offer them as well. I mean, isn't it genius? App—absolutely genius. Okay, it's all free, all-in-one; you get everything included when you sign up with the free plan.
Now, I will say, once your business begins to grow and you're making all these sales and everything like that, you will want to upgrade. Now, the starter plan is free, but you can upgrade to the next plan, which I want to say that's $4—not too shabby at all—and with that you get additional features. And then from the $4 plan, you go up to the next plan and the next plan; it depends on all of the features that you need. But to start, all you need is the starter plan. Now, I will say, if it were me, I would probably start out on the starter plan for a little bit to see how things go, how I feel about it, how I like it, and then for me, I would definitely probably upgrade to, um, the paid plan—this, this lowest tier—because of this one thing: If you want a custom domain, you get that custom domain with the that first level. The free plan, as we've been talking about this entire time, comes with an array of features that I think is perfect for beginners, but if you want to just step it up a bit and you want to add on some, um, customer support in that custom domain that we talked about, you can upgrade to that starter plan, which is great; still very, very economical and makes a lot of sense if you're going to be selling your digital products and you want to go ahead and personalize and customize your brand with that custom domain. Then there's the Mover plan and then the Shaker plan for when your business begins to grow even further. So I would sign up, do what I need to do in order to get everything set up, see how I like it, get going, start selling some digital products, offering some services, and then I would go ahead and bump up to that next plan once I'm ready.
But those are two amazing ways, okay, that you can make money, but there's more. Hold on, wait a minute; there's more. The next way that you can make money with your blog is through affiliate marketing. Now, affiliate marketing is simply you receiving a commission from recommending products and services to the things that you love and that you like and that you use in your daily life. This is an amazing form of monetization to me because it's like, we buy things and we use things anyway, and naturally we promote them, right? We're showing off our outfits on social media; we're telling our friends this new amazing, um, service that we're using for cleaners that's coming to our house; we're telling the girls about the new lip gloss that we like at these companies. You're naturally doing affiliate marketing anyway; you're just not getting paid for it, but why not sign up and actually get paid for it? Get your coin back from telling people about it. Okay, it, it's real common sense to me, right? So now we got a strategy that combines digital products, a service, and recommending people out to products and services that we know, like, and love. Think about that; you see how that could all work together so seamlessly and flawlessly? Just absolutely chef's kiss. And to be able to start it for free and not have to invest any of your money in upfront, you get to prove the concept, see if you can make it and how it's going to go, how you like it, and then, and you can upgrade from there. So I think that's absolutely amazing for beginners or people that just want to try out blogging and see how it will work out for them. But we're doing money first, okay? Profits are going to be first; we're focusing on our digital products and our services, and then we're going to create blog posts that surround those things that we offer so that we can market those products and services seamlessly, passively, and we don't have to always, you know, obviously you want to promote on social media too, but these blog posts are going to be shared out on Google and everywhere else, and they will be promoting those digital products and services for you. Okay? So that's what I got for today. If you are interested in starting your blog for absolutely free—okay, free email hosting, free digital product hosting, all the things, an entire all-in-one platform—go ahead and click on the link down in the description, sign up for Podia, let me know down in the comments how you like it, what is it looking like so far, are you feeling it? Let me know because I think this is really, really great for beginners, and this is a great way to get you started making money online with ease.