Blogging For Real Income: Risking Little For Big Returns

The following is an edited excerpt from the book Words into Cash: Blog Your Way out of the Rat Race and into Secure, Stable Financial Freedom by Timothy Kim.

Most people think that blogging for income is a gamble — like you have to hit the lottery to make any real money with it. They look at my success as a blogger as if I unwittingly struck gold on some unforeseen, incredibly nuanced subject matter that millions of people around the world had an insatiable appetite for. Or people think, “Well, he just got lucky. That would never work again, not for me anyway.” But, that’s not what happened.

I get it; it’s hard to believe that something so simple could be so lucrative, but it can be, and the best part is you’ve got nothing to lose!

What happens if you go all-in on a blogging business and fail? Do the blogging police come to your home and seize all your assets? What about prison time, bankruptcy, permanent damage to your reputation? No, none of those things happen. Your credit score doesn’t even take a hit. In the blogosphere, there is a mere microcosm of risk to assume, with a world of riches to gain.

Personally, I like to experiment a lot. If there’s only a little risk involved of potential failure, why not go for it? Truthfully, the only legitimate risk involved is that your blog doesn’t work. For some reason, people tend to catastrophize their failures, but I see them as nothing more than experiments.

Failure… What’s The Big Deal?

There’s an old business adage that encourages entrepreneurs and others seeking long-term success to “Fail fast; Fail often.” With that in mind, I like to move from idea to execution in very little time, and I suggest you take the same approach. The faster you can act on an idea, the faster you’ll successfully execute on one of them. It’s a lot like taking half-court shots in basketball. Keep shooting, and eventually one of them is going to fall in the hoop.

Failure is such an ominous word. People react to it like it’s the monster who’s been hiding under their bed since they were young children. As a result, people tend to over-plan everything, especially business ventures. This over-planning is fed by procrastination, which is disguised as “due diligence” when a fearful mindset is present. The fearful mindset responds to the idea of a blogging business by saying something like, “Oh, I need to look into that more deeply. I don’t know if I’m ready to blog yet.” Not ready yet, really?

That makes no sense to me. I can think of only two reasons why somebody wouldn’t be ready to blog:

1. They just don’t want to. (Maybe you hate writing…or money.)
2. They can’t read or write. (Believe it or not, an estimated 26 percent of the world is thought to be non-literate.)

For that matter, if you can’t write or just don’t like it, you can still video blog (vlog)!

If neither of these is true of you, why wait? There’s almost zero investment involved, so delaying is just an unnecessary obstacle you’re putting in front of your success. It’s procrastination disguised as due diligence.

Blogging is not a binding agreement for anything. The worst thing that can happen is that maybe you pay for a year of web hosting and don’t get a lot of return on investment (ROI), so you may be out a couple hundred dollars, at most.

Truthfully, you don’t even need to invest that much, because WordPress is around $99 per year and Blogger.com is free. There’s also free hosting available if you’re willing to endure other companies making money from publishing ads to your site. So, you can start your blog with zero financial risk if you prefer.

Although, there’s something wrong if you can’t come up with $100-$200 to invest, because even the average homeless person makes around $13 per hour while walking a street corner with a freshly penned, “Help Me!” sign around their neck. Actually, substantiated accounts claim some elite panhandlers in New York City make over $100,000 a year. Try not to think about that one too much.

The point is — trust me, you can come up with the money if you need to. If not, you probably don’t have the grit it takes to succeed in your own business anyway.

I’ll talk more about hosting services later, but for now, just know that they don’t require a significant, if any, investment.

How Not To Fail

If you fail, you’re going to easily recover from whatever miniscule investment you put into your blogging business, and your reputation isn’t going to be damaged just because you started a blog that didn’t make you a millionaire.

Still, nobody wants to fail. Everybody has different goals. Some — like myself — may want to make enough money to quit their day job and enjoy a total passive-income lifestyle. Others may just want to make a nice, little supplemental income. Therefore, the question becomes how do you accomplish your goals, whatever they are? In other words, how do you not experience an epic fail in your blogging business?

There are going to be three key points for you to remember to answer that question. Maybe take a highlighter to this section. It might serve as a handy reference point later on while you’re making progress on your business. The three points are as follows:

1. Monetize early.
2. Don’t stress about the content.
3. Find your customers.

Monetize Early

Full disclosure…I like blogging. It’s fun for me, but I don’t think I’m a lot different from most of the internet-using world in that regard. Blogging can be a great hobby because you get to write about what you love, whether it’s money (what I mainly blog about), sports, fashion, celebrities, carpal tunnel syndrome, or worm farming. (Yes, there are plenty of blogs out there for the worm farming enthusiast.)

Blogging can be fun, but it can be so much more than that; it can be an extremely profitable business. That’s what I wanted because in addition to doing something I loved, I also wanted the freedom, security, and financial stability to allow me to opt-out of my nine-to-five corporate gig.

So why wait to monetize your blog? There’s really no reason. Later in the book, I’ll cover the details of how to go about setting up ads on your blog. At this point, however, I want to stress the importance of setting them up early.

Some bloggers fear monetizing too early because they don’t want to annoy their readers. They’re afraid that a ten-second ad or popup on a free content site will irritate people so much that they’ll stop visiting. That really doesn’t happen these days. Maybe in the infancy of the internet and the blogging industry, people got so turned off by ads that they went elsewhere for content, but that’s not the case anymore. People are used to ads now.

Of course, there are outliers in any category of life. Some people will absolutely detest ads, but you’re not going to make money off of those people anyway. If they’re going to leave your site for something as minor as the annoyance of ads, they weren’t going to stick around anyway.

Sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, for example, have influenced people’s acceptance of ads. People found enough value in using those sites that they were prepared to endure a ten-second ad. The key for those sites and any other, including yours, is to not overdo it.

As long as you’re delivering value, sparing use of ads will not cost you any viewers. If you’re producing complete nonsense, you won’t have any viewers to worry about anyway. So, the point to remember here is to provide real value with your content and monetize right away, because the risk is low. A few ads spaced appropriately throughout your website aren’t going to turn many viewers away. Not monetizing as soon as possible is just throwing all that ad revenue away.

Don’t Stress About The Content Too Much

Putting words online is not the path to profit. Rather, in the blogosphere, profit is all about attracting and retaining customers. The blog isn’t necessarily the message; the blog is the business. Therefore, it helps to think of your readers as customers. That perspective will change your entire approach. It turns the main purpose of your blog into an avenue for reaching your clients, where you can satisfy an added opportunity to upsell them.

All too often, I encounter bloggers who don’t understand that they’re running a business, and like any other business, a big part of its success lies in its efficiencies. They fail to recognize that valuable content is just one part of the efficiency equation in a blogging business. They worry incessantly over the quality of the content, and that’s not efficient at all. In fact, it’s a surefire recipe for burnout, which is a surefire recipe for failure.

Nobody is going to bother with your blog more than once if all they find there is gibberish. However, it also doesn’t do you any good to produce the most beautifully articulated professional prose on the internet. For instance, it doesn’t matter that Robert Shiller, the Nobel Laureate Yale professor of economics who created the Shiller CAPE ratio, wrote the most brilliant research paper in the history of academia. That’s great, but who is reading it? No offense to Professor Shiller, whom I have a great deal of admiration for, but a decent blog about something much less meaningful could attract just as many — if not, more — readers. Have you read his paper?

Think of the numbers. How many brilliant research papers could anybody possibly write in a year…one, maybe two, or three at the most? By contrast, you could write fifty or more ordinary blogs in a year that could attract a larger readership and make more money.

In the beginning, it might take a little longer for you to write content. Just don’t stress about it. Eventually, you should be able to get your writing time down to about thirty minutes to write a blog of about 500–1,500 words. To keep your site fresh in the minds of your clients, you’ll want to write about three of these per week.

If you find yourself with a case of writer’s block, you’re thinking about it too much. The best way to avoid that is to write what you know. As I said before, it could be about anything. If ants are your thing and you think nobody else cares about it, you’re wrong. Don’t believe me? Get on YouTube right now and type “Ant Channel” into the search bar. You’ll find some channels have over a million-and-a-half subscribers.

In a world of over seven billion people, there is an audience somewhere for your passion about ants or anything else. In fact, in a niche market like that, you will face much less competition, which could translate to even more money for you.

The sweet spot is content good enough to provide value, but not so finely tuned that it keeps you up at night trying to brainstorm new ideas and exercising your creative genius.

Find Your Customers

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this chapter is that you need to be active in finding your customers. Whether you’re Robert Shiller from Yale or Joe Schmo from Idaho, it won’t matter if nobody knows you exist.

Nobody is going to try a new restaurant in town if they don’t know it’s open. So, budding restauranteurs hit the streets to introduce themselves and maybe put up a giant, “Grand Opening” banner on their storefront. They might even hire someone to wear a giant chicken costume and hand out flyers and samples of popcorn chicken. (My completely off-topic advice: beware of free food handed out by a menacingly cheerful six-foot-tall chicken on a street corner.)

Unfurl your own banner. Leverage Google AdWords or other online marketing sources. I’ll discuss many of them in great detail later on, but for now, understand you need to let people know you’re open for business. You can’t make money in any industry — blogging, food service, or anything else — without customers, so get out, preach the value of your business, and find your customers.

Starting Out

When I started my blogging business, I was also still working my day job and multiple side hustles for about seventy to eighty hours per week. Blogging just happened to be one of those experiments I mentioned.

Fortunately, I still had time to take small breaks throughout the day. Everybody has at least a couple of small breaks in their work routine to get something done. Labor laws in most states actually dictate that everybody gets some sort of mandatory break, so I recommend maximizing the opportunity this free time presents.

Make the best use of whatever time you have for breaks in a day. I used mine to work on building my social media presence, which is a hugely crucial aspect of my turning-words-into-cash methodology. Use that time to “like” a gif or a post, leave a comment, or interact in any other way with your various social media accounts. The more you engage, the quicker you’ll be able to grow your audience for your own blog.

Looking back to when I started out, I made one mistake that delayed my success by just a bit. I should have tackled social media and blogging at the same time. Instead, I invested most of my time early on into social media almost exclusively. Then, once I felt comfortable with the audience I had built on the various platforms, I focused on my blog.

You should be able to dedicate enough time to building your social media presence and anywhere from one to three blogs per week, even if you’re working a full-time job in the beginning. If you can accomplish these tasks simultaneously, you’ll be able to achieve success in half the time I did because I did them separately. That means you’ll be able to leave that full-time job and reap the rewards of a passive-income lifestyle much more quickly than if you do only one at a time.

If you have only enough time to dedicate to one — either social media or blogging, I recommend focusing on the social media first, because that endeavor will build your readership base for when you do have the time to blog, later on.

How Many Subscribers Do I Need?

Most social media users have 100–200 followers regardless of whether they have a blog. Whatever your base of social media followers, direct them all from your social media pages to your blog right away.

The blog is where you’re going to generate revenue via ads, affiliate partners, and proprietary products. Chapters Seven and Eight are going to discuss that in detail. At this moment, you just need to know that the more social media followers you have, the more people you can direct to your blog, which means more opportunities to generate income from those three sources. From there, you’ll be able to implement multiple income streams, such as ads, affiliate partners, and proprietary products.

That’s the whole business model, in a nutshell. It’s not rocket science; it’s not even eighth grade chemistry. It’s simple math:

More social media followers equal more blog subscribers, which equals more income.

There is no magic number of subscribers you need to own a successful blogging business. But the more you have, the more money you can make. In the next chapter, I’ll talk about building social proof, which is a verification of your expertise, trust factor, and value as a blogger. To establish that, you need around 10,000 followers.

One important thing to remember is to not restrict yourself from any platform based on any personal disassociation. For example, Instagram is generally targeted at the eighteen to thirty-five-year-old age demographic. If you’re fifty years old (Facebook’s largest demographic), don’t restrict your reach. Just because you think you can’t relate to Instagram’s demographic doesn’t mean you still can’t go after their user base. Nothing ventured means nothing gained, and you’ve got nothing to lose by reaching out.

How Often Do I Need To Post?

You’ll notice a consistent theme throughout this book is that I detest best practices. I like to go against the grain, and if I have an idea, I like to act upon it quickly. Because I like to move fast, I don’t get hung up on an exact number for anything. I just do more of what does work. Therefore, I don’t believe any magic number of posts guarantees success in your blog or on your social media, but I do follow some general rules that have worked quite well for me.

There is a happy medium when it comes to posting content. Too much looks like spam. People get suspicious that you’re just posting non-stop repetitive, meaningless garbage. You definitely want to avoid that sort of reputation. Too few posts, however, has the opposite effect — people forget about you. Neither extreme is ideal. You’ve got to find the happy medium, which you can discover by testing for what works best.

If you have to choose between posting too infrequently or too often, go with too often. You’d rather be considered spammy than forgotten about. If you’re viewed as spammy, people will just ignore you most of the time, but at least you’re still relevant in their world, and once in a while, they’ll probably check out something you have to say.

One of my mentors — Grant Cardone — is one of the spammiest people on the internet I’ve ever known, but he has a real estate portfolio that has a mind-bogglingly high value. I probably read about one out of every hundred emails he sends me, but that doesn’t bother me.

Your particular industry niche is a factor in finding the right frequency as well. For instance, some influencers have meme pages that do amazingly well, but they need to post a new meme every ten minutes because that’s what their audience wants. By contrast, an accounting blog would probably post once or twice per week.

If you’re looking for a universal measuring stick of sorts regarding post frequency, I would start by posting or publishing something at least every day across all social media platforms. I would recommend one post per day in the beginning until you garner some legit social proof.

If you’re running short on time, don’t stress too much about what you’re posting. Around 30 percent of your posts can be about anything at all. They don’t necessarily need to be relevant to your blog or industry niche. These posts can be more related to who you are, what you like, and your sense of humor than anything else.

You want to make sure you’re constantly relevant in people’s minds at first. Once you get established, you can probably tone down the blog frequency. These days, I’m posting about three blogs per week, but I did much more in the beginning.

Timing Is Not Everything

Frequency is important because that’s how people develop a relationship with you and your content. I place far less value on the timing of content, however. A lot of bloggers obsess over timing, always trying to find the best time to post something that will draw a huge readership. But honestly, I consider timing to be mostly irrelevant and advise you not to waste much time on it. Contrary to what you’ve heard so many times before, timing is not everything.

A lot of bloggers, especially in my niche, post on Monday morning. However, very few of them post anything on Saturday or Sunday. That’s the unwritten, but universally accepted best practice of the blogosphere, but of course, you know what I think of best practices. Therefore, I challenge that go-to method of timing.

I understand that people want to unwind most weekends, so reading a blog may not be tops on their list of priorities during those days, but 500- to 1,000-word blogs take around ten minutes to read, so there’s still time on Saturday and Sunday for most readers to enjoy their favorite blogs.

Viewers also get bombarded with new content on Mondays, and tend to read only their favorite content. So, why battle all the competition in such a saturated timeframe? Why not break away from best practice and try posting on a Saturday? If it doesn’t work, you can always try reposting it on a Monday a week or two later, because there’s nothing wrong with reposting content.

If you have the choice between competing or an easy-win…this is business, so go for the easy win. I don’t like competition. Who needs it?

You never know when your blog is going to strike the reader at the right time. For example, if you post something with the title, “The Top Three Pizza Toppings You Have to Try” at 1:00 p.m. during the workweek, you might not get the attention of the people who just had lunch. However, if you post it at 5:00 p.m., right before dinnertime, when everybody is coming home from work exhausted and not in the mood to prepare an elaborate dinner, you might get a few more hits.

Once you have a decent following, you can repost content. If you post a blog that becomes a dud, readership-wise, try it again at a different time of the day, month, or year. Remember, you’re not getting charged per post by anybody, so you may as well test everything you possibly can.

On Instagram Stories, you can display stories, have your readers swipe-up to your blog, and the posts will disappear twenty-four hours later. You can repost those in any combination and catch people at different times and moods to get views.

One catch with reposting is that the more familiar your readers are with you, the more they will tolerate your spam. A reader who doesn’t know you is much more likely to stop following you. As your number of followers goes up, however, their tolerance goes up, and the more often you can repost content.

New posts will always generate more traffic anyway, so be sure to capitalize on that by saying something like, “New post! Check it out here!” Once your social proof is established and your followers trust you as an expert in your niche, you can mix in some recycled content very effectively.

What is the best time of day to post a blog? I recently attended a conference where wildly popular blogger, Neil Patel, was speaking, and he said the best time of day to post content is 9:00 a.m. PT. This is typically when most people (on the West Coast) are arriving at their jobs and are ready to do a quick, comforting glance at some of their favorite topics.

Engagement takes a drastic dive until around 6:00 p.m. After that, most people start settling into their routines at home and might be looking to unwind with some online content again.

Analytics from my Instagram account align pretty well with Patel’s recommendations, but it’s not a huge difference. For instance, I might get only 80,000 sets of eyes on a post at 1:00 p.m., instead of 100,000 at 9:00 a.m., but posting at only certain times of day can be limiting, so I wouldn’t be afraid to try any time of day.

Just remember, timing is not something you should be concerned with — don’t waste your energy mistakenly thinking that timing is everything, because it doesn’t really matter.

Setting Specific Goals

My goal is to make $100,000 per day from my blog. I like to aim high! That figure usually makes people either question if they heard me correctly, check my temperature, or call for a mental health counselor, but that is truly my goal. Actually, I might be a little too conservative with that figure, because there is no need to put restrictions on your earning potential. Blogging is like any other business; the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

When you start out, you may want to set smaller, more-achievable goals, for some quick reassurance. For instance, think about trying to earn $100 per month from your blog to start with. After you achieve that, shoot for $1,000 per month; then, $10,000.

Approach monetary goals as if you’re going up a staircase; take one step at a time. You might be able to leapfrog two-to-three steps occasionally, but if you miss, you could break your face, so it makes more sense to take incremental steps throughout your blogging journey.

After reading this chapter, you have a big-picture view of blogging as a business. You’ve established some expectations and gained some insight on the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. Most importantly, you learned that there is almost no risk involved and a whole new world of profits and rewards to be gained. Take those words with you throughout the rest of these pages and into your blogging business.

In Chapter Two, I’m going to tell you all about how to build that incredibly important social presence, which will be the fuel for your money-making blogging engine.

To keep reading, pick up Words into Cash: Blog Your Way out of the Rat Race and into Secure, Stable Financial Freedom by Timothy Kim.