How To Make $100,000 A Year Blogging – For Real

In this series of posts I will walk you through the methods I have used to create multiple blogs generating over $100,000 a year each.

When I first started out blogging, I was hoping to make a few hundred dollars a month to spend in college. However as I starting to put more and more time into building my site I soon realized that the potential was much greater than that.

If you’ve read my other posts, you’ve probably noticed that I like to talk about building a sustainable online business. To quit your job you must have a sustainable business that is going to continue to bring in revenue month after month. I’ve found that the best way to achieve consistency with online revenue is through blogs and organic sites that continue to grow each month. Every now and then I will make more from doing media buys and other forms of online marketing, however blogging has been my number one money maker in the long run.

Many people would probably just love to quit their day job and start making a full time living from blogging overnight – and this is what many ebooks and make money online scams out there will promise.

However my business was not an overnight sensation, and you will find that almost everyone with a legitimate online business will tell you the same thing. It requires hard work and a lot of persistance (that may be an understatement).

I love to talk about mindset because in the end the people who make it in this industry all have a similar mindset. For me this wasn’t a problem because I never had a “real job” working for someone else. For those of you who have been an employee for a long time, it can be a bit more difficult.

Once you have the right mindset you are ready to build out some sites.

Choosing the right niche is the single most important step of the whole process. It’s important to get this right the first time so you don’t end up wasting months of time building content and links only to realize there are no offers to promote. Generally when searching for a niche I look for three things..

1. There must be products and offers available to promote that are related to your sites topic. I’ve found that it’s much easier to make $100,000+ a year from a blog running affiliate offers than just from Adsense and CPM networks.

2. A niche that isn’t too saturated and one that is lacking an authoritative blog or quality site.

3. Finally you want to find a topic that is fairly specific, but something that you will still be able to get at least a few thousand visitors a day from.

When I first started I found three topics that met all of the criteria above. I then focused on the one I felt most comfortable with. If you are torn between two different topics and have a good amount of free time – try them both out. Sometimes you will find a niche that meets all of this criteria but just doesn’t work for one reason or another. However if you have a second site going as well that is working for you you can just ditch the first and will still be in a better position than you were a month ago.

After you have settled on a niche, you need to find and register a decent domain name. Don’t get frustrated, many of the domain names you think of will probably be taken. It’s important to find a name that has your main keyword or topic in it.

Example: If you are building out a site that will focus on living a Gluten Free lifestyle (which seems to be a pretty hot topic right now) you will want to have Gluten Free in your domain name. Try something like GlutenFreeLiving.com or GlutenFreeMaster – you get the point. Avoid domain names that are ridiculously long, are hard to spell or are hyphenated.

Once you have a decent domain you need to track down a good web host (they are pretty much a dime a dozen but try Hostgator, BlueHost, DreamHost etc), and get wordpress installed. Once you have a Worpress blog up and running, continue on to part two of this guide.

In part two of this guide I will show you a killer strategy for building out content, what topics to focus on first, and how to start building quality links.