Transcription
In this video, I'm covering the top five new things you absolutely have to do if you want to start a successful blog this year because a lot's changed. You know, there's the March core update that decimated a lot of rankings, then the August update that brought a lot back. A lot has changed, so I'm covering what revenue streams you need to focus on now and why a few of them are out. We're going to cover how to scale your content, how to serve your audience wherever they are, and if you stick to the end, a full game plan to start a profitable blog for yourself right now.
Now, if you're new to the channel or don't know who I am, my name is Adam Enroy. I started the fastest-growing blog at AdamEnfroy.com. Even Forbes took notice, and they can't lie about revenue; they check bank statements. And I teach beginners how to make money online without wasting your time or money.
Now, before we get started, I'm going to be showing you some AI frameworks and new AI blogging prompts. If you want them, make sure to click the link in the description and top comment below, and I'll send you 10 free AI prompts to find your niche, unlock your keywords, write your content, everything. And I'll send you my free AI masterclass, so make sure to click that link below, sign up, and let's get into it.
So, if you are looking to launch a blog and make money today, we have to kind of understand the current landscape. So, AI is obviously a very popular thing, and what that's really bringing is just the ability for people to scale their content faster than before. So, what used to take 10 hours to write an article now might take one. So, it's just a speed tool. When I first started my blog in 2019, I was writing every single article myself, one to two a week. Now, the expectation is to probably publish an article every other day, 10 to 15 per month, kind of at minimum, just start publishing a little bit more frequently using AI, and I'll show you kind of how to do that. There's nuance to it, though. It's not just crappy AI content, copying and pasting ChatGPT.
Now, the amount of content you create builds topical authority, which is how authoritative Google views you based on how much content you have in a given niche. Now, the number of articles you need is going to be completely different based on every niche. If you're going after credit cards, for example, you might need 100 articles, you know, in a really competitive finance niche to get any traffic. Whereas if you're talking about paintball guns, you might need like five articles; it's not as competitive. So, the volume and topical authority you need is dictated by the niche, and really, it's more about choosing the right niche and the right keywords, kind of the content strategy as a whole, than it is about perfecting every single word in each blog post. We know that as bloggers, we don't have to be great writers. There's AI tools, there's Grammarly. You know, I started my blog not as a great writer, so it's more about assembling content in a monetizable way that your audience and Google likes so that you can make money.
We have to realize that when we're going after keywords, when we want to choose the right keywords, that sometimes keyword research tools are wrong. A lot of the time, you know, there's a popular tool like Ahrefs. I showed in another video how I was doing keyword research; it showed the search volume, the number of searches per month, at 10, but really, I was getting like 3,000 visits a month to that article. So, this all comes down to choosing the right niche, choosing the right content strategy as a whole, based on what are all of your blog's keywords, and then monetizing it. So, really, when we think about it, what is helpful content? Well, yes, it's what you actually write on the page, but it's also what the entire content strategy is. So, think about your niche. So, for example, we have a student who's doing non-toxic living. So, you want to live in a non-toxic environment. Well, what would the keyword strategy be? Well, people that are searching for that stuff online, they're going to be looking for the non-toxic brands, so things related to laundry soap, things like that, all the brands that they could use. And then how to make things themselves. So, you have to just kind of take a step back from the keyword tool and use your instincts and your intuition a little bit about what you know about the niche and be like, if people are searching for this stuff, what will they actually be searching for?
So, for example, if your blog's about golf simulators, you're going to be reviewing the best ones, telling people how to install them, and tips for playing on them. If your blog is about dogs, it's going to be dog products, toys, GPS trackers, all the different dog products, and then info about caring for that dog breed. It's about fitness, for example, you could say, let's build a bigger back. That's your niche. Well, it's going to be back exercises, techniques, and the equipment you need to build a bigger back. So, really, ultimately, it comes down to every article should be interesting to your potential audience.
So, number one is you have to choose the right niche. So, how do we do that? Well, luckily, I'm going to show you an AI prompt right here that will choose your niche for you. So, if you click the link in the description below, answer your email, this is one of the 10 prompts you'll get. This is the AI Niche Hunter, Niche Hunter, however you like to pronounce it. I copied it, I'm going to paste it here into Claude. Claude is free. I like it a little bit more than ChatGPT for creative response. ChatGPT works too, you can paste it into there, but, uh, I like ChatGPT for research and analysis, like putting in a URL and getting research done. Uh, I like Claude more for ideas and creativity. So, this is a simple one. It says, "I'll need the blogger to provide their main niche of interest. Could you please tell me what the main niche is?" I'm going to say fitness and workouts. You can kind of say whatever. And then it's going to give me some five relevant sub-niches. So, it's going to say home workouts, strength training, cardio and endurance, nutrition for fitness, mind-body fitness. So, I'm going to say home workouts is my niche, and it's going to give me a good overall general content strategy with 20 keywords that I'm going to go after. So, 15 informational keywords, five affiliate keywords. It's a good blend of different things that'll be helpful. This is good for brainstorming, right? This is the first thing you want to do when you're thinking about what niche should I actually go after, cuz you want to have, and it has pillar posts in here, like the ultimate guide to home workouts for beginners, big pillar post, spend some time on it, it's a really good article, and then some easier ones like best bodyweight exercises, build muscle at home, home workout motivation, low-impact home workouts, home workout nutrition, quick home workouts for moms, home yoga routines. There's a couple of affiliate posts here like best workout programs for the home and things like that. So, another another pillar post would be best home workout equipment, right? So, it's a pretty good overall keyword strategy with 20 keywords.
So, now, based on these keywords, I'm going to take one of them and I'm going to create the outline and the article. So, this is another AI prompt that you can get if you sign up. Again, it's going to be an email one, the bottom of email one. A lot of people say, "I didn't get it, I didn't get it." Just look at the bottom of email one, check your spam folder. So, we paste this system prompt into Claude, new one here, and now it will say, "I'm ready to create an SEO content outline. Please let me know what keyword or topic you'd like." So, I'm going to say home workouts for beginners. Now, what this is going to do is it's going to write the entire outline for us. So, I trained this kind of to get good titles, including the year, gives you a meta description, writes from the first-person perspective with some interesting stats and stuff at the beginning. So, it writes the introduction for you, and then it gives you the headings. So, this is really important to get the actual outline right of each article when you're writing a blog, because you have to match the search intent. So, if you miss the search intent, the article is not going to rank, no matter what you do. So, you have to think of the psychology behind the search, what people that are typing that in actually want. And this is good, so it's like, why home workouts are perfect for beginners, convenience, cost-effective, all that, essential tips for starting, and then 10 beginner-friendly exercises to get you started, and it gives you the ideas there. Creating your first workout routine, staying motivated, nutrition tips, incorporating technology, that's interesting, and then a conclusion that it writes, plus some semantic keywords you can add in that could be helpful for SEO.
Now, if we wanted to even take it a step further, we could have it write those individual headings and paragraphs for us if we wanted to with this AI paragraph generator. I copied that, I'm going to paste that into Claude now, and it says, you know, "Write like you're a teacher writing at an eighth-grade level. Don't be brash," blah, blah, blah, has certain writing styles, and it says, "Please give me a heading to work with." So, I'm going to take a heading like, um, I'm just going to take this whole thing, "Essential tips starting your homeworkout journey," copy, paste that into here, and then it will actually start writing it as well. So, let me tell you about my homeworkout journey. It's been quite the ride. I've learned a lot along the way. When I first decided to get fit at home, I was all going home ready to transformative fitness model overnight, but I was in for a reality check. So, it gives you some interesting written content.
Now, I don't always recommend writing everything with AI. I think it's good to outline stuff with AI, speed up the process, get it into WordPress, and then edit it yourself. Because again, helpful content is basically first-person experience-based content, things that AI can't do, your own experience, your own take, right? What are you adding to the conversation? Often times, what people used to do when they were blogging is just get a keyword, look at the competition, copy some ideas from other competitive sites, look at maybe if it's about products, you look at the product site, add some stuff in, and then publish the post. But really, you're not adding anything to the conversation. If you're not adding anything to the conversation and your article isn't unique, you're not going to really rank. You're not going to, you could, but you're not going to stand a good chance of ranking. So, we want to use AI to plan our niche, to figure out the content strategy, but then really humanize it, showcase your expertise, your experience at the beginning, and then really start scaling content with your own system. It's really about you learning what works best for you. And again, if you want these prompts, make sure to click the link in the description below, and you'll get them in email one.
Now, real quick, just to show you my own blog, you can see that this is the, the blue is the number of articles. So, I deleted a bunch of articles and then I started publishing them in the correct niche. So, I started going after one area of topical authority, namely Instagram, YouTube, blogging, things like that. I was really wide on different software stuff. So, you can see since this new revamp strategy, traffic has really escalated up to this say 248,000. But if we look at Google Analytics, you can see like this is the traffic here. So, it's been going up. If I look at just the last, for example, 30 days, we can see that there is 352,000 visits, sessions a month, and now to the website. So, it's about topical authority, finding easy keywords. So, I'm going to show you exactly how to find these keywords, but first, let's get to point number two, and that is you need to find and help your audience wherever they are.
So, people interact online in a lot of different ways. Like, you have to focus on one audience, solving one problem. You're either teaching people something, right? You're always going to be teaching something, how to do a hobby, how to play the piano, how to learn how to knit, how to make money online, all these different things. And blogging is a great path, but you also have to think, where else could your audience be? Like YouTube is the second best path. Vlogging and YouTube are the most open to monetization. Things like, people get really confused and overwhelmed because they think they have to repurpose all of this content and do stuff on Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and Instagram, and then they're like, "What do I do? There's too much stuff." And you see these videos about people automating all of that. It's really not worth it. I've made multiple millions of dollars the last three years from a blog and a YouTube channel, no really Instagram, a little bit of Instagram or TikTok videos, but didn't really make money or do anything. That's because blogging and YouTube are the most open to monetization. Cuz when you think about it, blogging, what you do is you can make affiliate revenue, direct Google traffic, you can put exit-intent pop-ups into your posts to build your email list, to lead magnets, to sell courses. YouTube, you have the link in the description, much like this video, that description is your entire monetization section. You could have affiliate links in there, you can have links to your own products in there, you can have sponsors in there, and then you're making ad revenue. So, those are the four main revenue streams. It's a little bit harder with TikTok and Instagram. TikTok, you might make like a penny for a thousand views; it's really, really low from a monetization standpoint. And then Instagram's a little bit more friction when it comes to monetization because if you think about it, affiliate products, how many of you purchase through Instagram? You'd have to find the creator, get to the thing they're promoting, a product, click on their bio, get to the bio, click the link in their bio, then go to the product page on the link in their bio, and then buy something. And that's much more friction than just clicking a simple link in a YouTube video directly to a product or landing on a blog post on Google and going directly to it.
So, basically, you have the choice: do you blog, do you do YouTube, or do you do both? I think it's hard to do both at the beginning. If you're just starting out, really focus on one or the other. If you want to do blogging, you know, you're introverted, you don't want to build community and courses and all that stuff and be on camera, blogging is the way to do it. If you don't mind that and you like building communities, then you do YouTube. But you don't want to do everything. We've had students ask, "How do I do Facebook and repurpose and Instagram and TikTok?" And it's really just too much. Just know that you should think about where your audience is. If you're cooking, you know, food blog, they might be on Instagram and your blog. They might be on, you know, if it's tattoos, it could be Pinterest in your blog. If it's video games, it's going to be YouTube in your blog. It's fashion, it could be a number of different things. So, just think about where does your audience consume content. But really, focus on your website is central. Your website is like the sun in the solar system; everything goes to your website. Even if you have a YouTube channel and you're telling people to link to things and going to stuff, it's going to your website. So, that's something to keep in mind. But you really have to come from the perspective that you're helping an audience, you're teaching. Even if you're just starting out and you think, "I can't teach anything," there are periods in my life where I could say that. I was 18 years old or 24 when I graduated college. A lot of people go to college for six years, seven years, they're called doctors, Tommy Boy. Um, but a lot of people, there's periods in my life I'm like, "What the heck could I even teach? I don't know." You just start learning, and what's good about like blogging and YouTube and stuff, you teach as you go. You go through the journey with your audience. So, if you're, if you want to learn how to garden and you've never done it before, it's pretty interesting content to create the stuff and be real and vulnerable, teach as you go. So, you can always get started. But those are the only two to focus on in my opinion is a blog and a YouTube channel.
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All right, the number three thing that you really have to do if you want to make money blogging this year is to focus on ad revenue and core sales as a priority over just affiliate revenue. So, affiliate revenue can work in specific niches that are less competitive, things like hobbies, outdoor goods, and things like that. Now, affiliate should be a part of your strategy, but it shouldn't be your entire strategy. So, really, at first, the big goal, the number one goal you should have when you're starting a new blog is to find your informational seed phrase that can expand your content strategy. So, what that is, is you need to find one to three informational seed phrases. Now, what these are, are these are keywords that when you add one word or variable to them, they create new, easy-to-rank-for keywords. This is the number one most important thing. So, let me show you some examples.
So, the easiest way to just understand this is if I'm using a tool like Ahrefs, or you could use a tool like Keysearch, which is cheaper. We're looking for matching terms. So, matching terms include the keyword and other variations to come up with ideas. So, we're coming up with keyword ideas to put into our blog's content plan. The easiest example of this is like tattoo ideas. So, ideas posts are really broad, they're kind of top of funnel. People are just looking for ideas for all kinds of stuff: tattoo ideas, patio ideas, living room ideas, clothing ideas. But if we look at the matching terms of tattoo ideas, this would be an insanely good seed phrase because there's 67,000 different articles you could write because think about all the different random tattoo articles you could write on for men, for women, sleeve, arm, bicep, and then there's like Viking, Greek god, cover-up, butterfly, literally endless. So, this tattoo ideas is an endless supply. Now, ideas posts are just going to have images and show different tattoos; they're not going to make affiliate revenue, right? But they are going to get a ton of traffic with, uh, and make ad revenue. So, ad revenue is what I call like the last resort of monetization. There's people that are just going to land on your blog, they're never going to buy anything, they're going to leave and never come back, and ads are the way to monetize those people. It's why there's so many ads and recipes because most people are just going to read the recipe; they're not going to buy a cookbook from that blogger necessarily, unless they read a bunch of recipes and really like them and join the email list. That's still possible, but you have to realize 99, 98, 99% of people that hit your blog are just going to read it once, maybe leave. So, with these ideas posts, you can get a ton of ad revenue. So, for example, I'm in Mediavine, and I just joined again a few months ago. I made $2,500 in September, so not bad. Just, I just added it back in, and that's with an RPM of, oh, $7 to $88 for 1,000 views. So, I'm getting like $7 through $90 a day or so just from ads. It's simple. Once you get 10,000 visitors to your blog, you join Mediavine, you add the Mediavine plugin, you just add it, you hook up the account, and then all your settings are actually in Mediavine. So, you can see the settings like in content ads, you want to have mobile ad frequency, it's high, spacing, minimum three paragraphs, optimize for content length. You can see all the difference, the simple settings, you just put them in here, and then it, it's really easy to implement those. But you have to find the seed phrase. So, like, you know, your backyard barbecue patio, patio ideas, and you just see, okay, there's 10,000 keywords. What if we drop the difficulty down to up to 10? So, these are showing easier stuff. So, maybe it's things like cheap patio ideas, patio shade ideas, gravel patio ideas, apartment patio ideas, all kinds of different patio, outdoor, backyard stuff. You can talk about patios, lawnmowers, all kinds of things.
Another seed phrase for music could be something like "how to play blank on the piano." It's going to put a word in the middle there, so you'll have 8,000 different keywords that people are searching for, like how to play "Golden Hour" on piano, how to play "Happy Birthday" on the piano, how to play "Für Elise" on the piano, "Piano Man" on harmonica. So, you'll have to see, not all of them make sense. Interstellar, Bohemian Rhapsody. Another 8,000 keywords there. Or if you're into drawing, "how to draw a something," and it'll give you 134,000: how to draw a dog, a rose, a dragon, a cat, a person, a face, a flower, a nose, a girl, a tree, a body, a horse, a butter, a pumpkin, a car, a bunny, a turkey, a star. You get the point. There's lots and lots of easy, simple keywords to rank for that you could get millions of visits to a blog like this. Or if you're into gardening, "how to plant," how to plant potatoes, garlic, snake plants, corn. You get the idea, right? So, you have to find, uh, some informational seed phrases that can do it. For example, in the back exercises, you could say "back exercises," and then it's going to give you other ones like lower back, dumbbell for lower back pain, cable at home, tons of them. So, even just "back exercises" has a ton. So, you have to find a seed phrase, which is going to be different in every niche. It's going to be a little bit different. This is kind of the hard thing to find sometimes. It's not the easiest thing to find. You really have to think about your blogging niche, what it is, what most of the helpful articles will be generally about, and then find it that way. And it might include different words in there, like it might not be as easy as putting in one and finding a 100 articles. You might have to put in different words, words for a few, and really find it depending on how hard the niche is.
Okay, so ad revenue can be a big part of your strategy when you're blogging now. Now, we want to also talk about the next point, and that is shifting your affiliate marketing strategy. You have to find lower difficulty affiliate keywords to rank for. Hobby niches are better for affiliate. Go after the lower volume, easy stuff. So, why are we going after easier stuff? Well, things that we're really competitive got a lot more competitive. So, let me just show you an example here. This is a site, Quick Sprout, that was just dominating it back in 2022. They're a good DR 70s, 80s, popular blog. And back in November of 2022, they were ranking for, you know, 1,600 pages for 294,000 sessions a month. And you can see that's gone down a lot. Now, what were they ranking for? Everything. They were they were crushing it: best VPS hosting, web hosting services, best website builder, they were number one, like best e-commerce platform, best cloud server host, posting, just making so much money. That's online business, bank accounts, email marketing, dropshipping, phone services, fact services, domain registrars. Now, we see what are they ranking for today? If we go to today, it's all just info, simple stuff. Is an LLC a business license? How to stop echo on phone calls? How to write a newsletter? How to get my domain name back? Simple info stuff. So, what happened? Why did this happen? It wasn't their fault. Literally, this is a good website. It's just that blogs that, and this is what my blog did too, I went after all kinds of stuff, kind of similar to this. I was writing about web hosting, website builders, e-commerce platforms, email marketing, courses, webinars, everything related to marketing. And the truth is, when you go that broad, you have to have a lot of authority. And what just tended to happen is just things just got more and more competitive. If we look at best website hosting now, if we look at the top 10 ranking sites for that, it's going to be a lot harder. There were more, it was basically all like different website blogs. Now, it's Reddit, Forbes, Shocking, PC Mag, huge media site, Bluehost, Tech Radar, Namecheap, SC at, and Quora. So, the whole first page is only forums, Reddit, and Quora, giant media sites, Forbes, and then huge media sites, Tech Radar, SC at, PC Mag, and then the companies themselves, Bluehost and Namecheap. You'll see the lowest domain rating on this page is 92. Now, Quick Sprout doesn't stand a chance anymore because authority now, all of a sudden, for these really competitive niches got a lot tougher. That's what happened to my blog too. That's why I had to scale it back with info content. So, they haven't done that yet. They might have just kind of abandoned this. They, they're very successful, they have a lot of other stuff going on. There's nothing they did wrong. You know, if we had a crystal ball, would they have changed their content strategy to make a bunch of informational content instead? I wouldn't have changed anything for my site because the money was already made. They've already made all the money, and they probably have a ton of recurring affiliate commissions. Now, they're still making a lot of money. So, it's just a good lesson learned that now, you know, it's easier if you're looking for affiliate opportunities to find easier niches, things like hobbies, and things that haven't gotten more competitive where Forbes and Reddit have taken over.
So, let's look at again, let's look at some keywords. So, if we do an example of what's competitive, well, like "best software," it's going to pull in matching terms, a bunch of really competitive stuff. Look at these keyword difficulty scores: 88, 89, 70s, right? So, a lot tougher to rank in the software niche, that's what I've found. Now, there's still going to be opportunities if you drop that difficulty down to like 10, and you go, "Show results," best free ad software, Google ad copywriting software, beat-making software. There's always going to be some in here that aren't as competitive. Problem is, though, a lot of the stuff around it is. So, if you created an article about CAD software, ranked for this, you'd have to write all these other CAD software things that are going to be really competitive. There's going to be still some, like if you do AI software, there can still potentially be some. We dropped the difficulty again, so we're only showing easier keywords up to 10 difficulty. There's still some AI SEO software. I think that's one that I rank for, AI editing, AI recruiting. So, there's still some. It's just, I'm saying it's not as easy as it once was, right? So, I'm number five or so for that AI SEO tools again, but my domain rating is 79, so it's a little bit harder. But we have to think of something that's like a hobby and easier, like "best archery." So, if we look at "best archery," all the keywords are still easy. They're not more competitive than they once were necessarily. So, archery targets, release, rangefinders, these are articles we would write transactional affiliate posts on, simple list posts with the products with affiliate links to each one. We can see it's a lot easier than software or, you know, something I enjoy living out in the country, bird watching. Not a ton of affiliate stuff, but there's binoculars, apps, cameras, simple stuff like that, tripods, right? So, these like hobby niches, things that if you think of the physical space, outdoor things, kayaking, fishing, camping, hunting, hiking, home stuff, homesteading, inside the house, furniture is getting more competitive, kitchen gadgets are getting more competitive with Forbes and stuff. But if we think about backyard patio, those are not as competitive. Power tools are not as competitive. You have to know this in the general landscape of what is and isn't competitive.
So, some of those things are, there's also other ways to look for this stuff. So, it's like fitness, you can do Bowflex versus, and you can find affiliate posts for, you know, PowerBlock versus Bowflex, or Bowflex C6 versus Schwinn IC4. There's tons of these, a thousand of these random ideas when people are looking for different products but wanting to compare them. So, this versus that is another one. Alternatives is another one. Alternatives is an interesting search, and you can see like some of the biggest, highest search ones across all niches, Omegle, OIC alternatives, right? Photoshop alternatives, DocuSign, Pirate Bay. So, you can put your niche in or some of the products in your niche, plush alternatives, and like the most popular one. So, like, you know, something like Peloton is a really popular product. I think I spelled that right, but that could be one, Peloton alternatives. I probably spelled it wrong actually, but you get the point. Alternatives, Peloton, you get the point. Alternatives is one that is the same thing; it's a list post for transactional affiliate revenue.
All right, so when we're talking about the number of affiliate articles we do, your info to transactional ratio is 100% dictated by your niche. For example, tattoos is almost 100% info content around just ideas and what to get. You're not going to have a bunch of articles on tattoo guns and stuff like that, right? The vast majority of traffic is ideas. Gardening is also mostly info; it's how to plant stuff, different guides to different crops. Yes, there's like gardening products like raised garden beds and tools, but the vast majority of content is info. Baby gear, though, might be different. Like, there's a ton of products, so trust me, I know they're quite expensive, like baby car seats, strollers, walker things, toys, teething things, things they put in their mouth, sleep socks that you put on their foot and tells you that they're alive, all that stuff. So, the searches on Google are more for products. So, you're going to Google these safest cribs, not how to install a crib or how to think about a crib. Like, every single crib is different. So, no, there's still info products, don't get me wrong, but a lot of the entertainment, mom helpful content has shifted to video, Instagram, and YouTube. So, really, it doesn't matter if you build topical authority and your ratio is 80% transactional content. If you talk about a ton of baby stuff, there's a site like BabyGearLab, for example, that's almost exclusively affiliate content, and they rank really well. So, it's really about the niche itself, what is most helpful. If you're looking for baby products, a ton of affiliate articles is more helpful than random info. If you're looking for tattoo ideas, a bunch of ideas is more helpful than a ton of products about things that you don't need.
So, ultimately, when we're thinking about the ads, courses, building your actual content strategy, your info seed phrase comes first, finding the informational seed phrase that can expand out to different content clusters, trying to think of like what are the five categories of content, create pillar posts in each one, then you create all your what I call glossary posts, the ones that aren't as quite important, but they still can get you traffic, link down to those, intern with internal links, keep the clusters separate. But the ratio is dictated by the niche. Usually, it's like 90% informational, but some niches, it can be completely different. So, the goal is just to build topical authority.
And another point here is dealing with sponsors this year. So, brands will pay bloggers to be put into articles, but they really only care about like the top transactional affiliate posts. They don't want to be paid to put into a how-to guide; they want to be paid if you're ranking for their product category. Like one I did, I've told the story before, but I was ranking for podcast hosting, so a brand reached out to me, would pay me $5,000 a month to be put number one in that article because I was ranking for their specific term. Now, there's been a lot of volatility in search rankings, though. So, one shift that I've seen people do is instead of charging a flat fee like $5,000 a month or $1,000 or $500 a month to be put into an article, you have to think more like a media site, like a media brand. So, you could have a media kit, there could be this is the price to be put into articles that already exist, this is the price for new sponsored content, you know, $250 and I'll write these, this article about you, I'll do a company review, and I'll write a couple other info pieces of content, $250 each for each article. Um, but we had a student who was charging thousands of dollars a month to a brand, and then her rankings have shifted, and the brand was like, "I'm paying $3,000 a month and the traffic's not what it was." So, and then she regained those rankings, and now it's like, "What do you do?" Well, one way to combat this is you could charge brands to be put into transactional articles, but you charge on a cost-per-click basis. So, you use Thirsty Affiliates, put a Thirsty Affiliate link in that, you know how many clicks it's getting, but then, and they can see it in their own analytics, the company, but then you're charging per click. So, no matter what, the traffic goes up and down, you have a fair rate, no matter what. I think brands are more interested in that. So, there's math on charging per click. So, you can use a Google Keyword tool or even Ahrefs to find the cost per click for the keyword. So, every keyword has a cost per click, how valuable is it, what are people, would they bid if they were bidding on PPC, pay-per-click advertising? So, you can estimate your affiliate link clicks. So, if you're getting 1,000 visits to an article about the best baby strollers, and that cost per click is $5, you realize the number one brand in that article is getting 300 clicks a month, which that's what I see, about 30% of visitors to an affiliate article will click the affiliate links for brand one. Take 300 times $5, that's worth about $1,500. You're sending them 300 clicks, $1,500. So, the math on that, maybe you charge them a thousand, you give them a deal. So, you want to give a brand a deal that's better than what they would pay for pay per click, but at the same time, just think about it like a media media company, charge per click, and then also just have think about sponsored content. You could have, you could do sponsored content on your site. So, a brand reaches out, they want to be included in something, say, "Hey, I'll write three articles about you, $250, $300 each, do a newsletter, send things like that," that you can actually charge sponsors for. So, it's pretty simple.
So, ultimately, though, a lot of this, it just comes down to choosing the right niche and the keywords that you're going after. This is where 90% plus of bloggers need help. It's choosing the right niche, choosing the right keywords. It's not even necessarily creating the content or monetizing it; it's just making sure that the keywords are right, that the content's helpful. So, here's what you should do. This is the step-by-step thing that you should do if you made it this far. So, find your informational seed phrase that can lead to 20 to 50 articles. Find that seed phrase, write down all these keywords into a spreadsheet, write all the content in the easy areas to build topical authority. There, join Mediavine once your traffic hits 10,000 visits a month, super simple process. Also, build exit-intent pop-ups to capture leads eventually. So, you can use ConvertBox or Kit, formerly ConvertKit, for free to create exit-intent pop-ups. That means if someone's mouse goes up to the top 10 to 20% of the screen, the popup will appear. This is how blogs get like 95% plus of their email subscribers. That's from what I've seen. It's a lot easier to get a lead through an exit-intent when the popup is in their face rather than them having to find it in a sidebar or something. No one signs up that way anymore. When you think about a lead magnet, you build a lead magnet into that. A good example I like is like if it's a woodworking blog, your lead magnet is the top 10 woodworking tools you need, simple one-page checklist. They get that for entering their email, then they get an automated welcome sequence, eventually selling your course on A to Z, how to become an expert woodworker, all the tools, all the demos, all of that stuff. Every niche has these. If it's a hobby blog, you're transforming, the course transforms the student from a beginner to intermediate or advanced. It's the whole nuts and bolts thing. The lead magnets like the teaser, that is also really valuable. So, you do that, you start capturing leads even if you don't have a product yet. I did that for like two years, two and a half years before I launched originally Blog Growth Engine. So, I built my email list up to 40, 45,000 people without selling anything. I was just building trust, free 7-day sequence, and then I launched a course. So, that's the best revenue stream for blogging is selling, selling your own product, but that just takes time to build that up.
So, if you know of any given 10 articles that you write, try to find one to two affiliate keywords that you can add affiliate links into. Now, this is very niche dependent again. Some niches are easier than others, some have more affiliate opportunities than others. A lot of people also ask me, "Do I need to buy every single product I review?" Not necessarily. Like, you should have as much helpful content as possible, and really owning it, showing the product, and all that will ultimately help you rank. But most sites don't do that. That's why like if you're reviewing a GoPro on YouTube, you have to get really detailed about all the features, showing it, the actual video footage, the starting it, unboxing it, all of that. Whereas a blog, literally, it's just written text and some images on it, way less complicated. So, don't overthink it, don't overthink images, don't overthink the text, just keep publishing, moving on, and getting better as you go. A blog is a living, breathing thing that can always be updated later.
So, really, it's just about just get started with AI. It's easier than ever before. Again, if you want those AI prompts, 10 free ones plus my AI masterclass, click the link in the description below. I hope you found this video useful on blogging. A lot of videos on YouTube on blogging are from people that haven't really made that much money blogging. I've made over a million dollars three years in a row. I like to teach it. I hope you join us. Click the link in the description below. Check out other videos on the channel like this one if you liked it. Leave a comment, I do my best to answer questions on here, and I'll see you in another video.