How to Start a Profitable Blog in 2024 (#1 Free Course on YouTube)

today's video is my favorite video of the Year probably the most popular one that I create so this is my yearly guide on exactly how to start a blog to make money so back in 2019 I started my blog Adam enfroy docomo blogs on the internet right so it first year was over six figures 800k in the second year and then over $1 million in 2021 2022 and 2023 which is still pretty crazy for me to think about you know and even with traffic fluctuations and dips revenues remain steady because of recurring affiliate commissions but

I made a ton of mistakes right there were things that I did in 2022 and 2023 that I definitely should have avoided so really this is the video I wish I had back when I first started my blog because things have changed so we need really a stepbystep game plan to go from0 to $10,000 a month and Beyond so this is a 100% free course hopefully one of the longest most helpful most in-depth uh topics that exists on YouTube so make sure to get your notes ready maybe get a couple of C coffee bookmark the

video and I promise you that if you do watch it till the end you will have a strategy to make money blogging this year now before I dive in if you click the link in the description below you can get another 80-minute free master class and the information on how you can actually work with me in the future on your own blogging business so first of all why blogging you know people are asking is blogging dead isn't it too saturated isn't AI taking over it's getting harder you know not necessarily true in most of these

cases while some old way of doing things aren't working anymore and there certainly are niches that are overly saturated so think things like credit cards finance software things that are tough there are still opportunities everywhere you just have to know how and where to look for them because all this stuff is really nuanced and all I'm asking is that as you watch this video temporarily remove the black and white thinking any cynicism that this is dead this doesn't work I can't do it right these are all self-limiting beliefs and some people might also say you

know I'm not a good writer I can bar barely put a sentence together well as someone who failed out of college and English literature also I can confidently tell you that blogging is not writing it is assembling content in a systematic way to appease humans and search engines it's a science not an art form now when I think about the benefits of blogging this year first it's a great business for introverts because you never have to be on video or in a podcast you don't even have to show your face if you don't want to

right second Google search is only increasing every single year so there's over 999,000 searches every single second which is 8.5 billion daily also over 7% of daily searches on Google every day are brand new meaning they've never been searched before so that's over 600 million new searches for products and information every single day that had existed before and this is where the opportunity lies now another good thing about blogging is that you can Outsource the writing to another human being to scale your efforts so you don't even have to do it yourself eventually for example

I spend about 10 hours a month on my blog now pretty much doing some keyword research for the month and sending it off to some writers so if I took my yearly profit in 2023 of almost 1.2 million and I divided that by the hours I worked it's probably around a little over $2,200 an hour and some change now of course there are taxes you know I'm not necessarily taking that money home but you get the point right I don't think that this is really possible with a lot of different other types of businesses another

thing about blogging today is that it's a Google driven engine so it's ranking for search phrases on Google and then sitting there and ranking for month after month which is actually one of the most passive forms of income although again I don't totally believe in passive income right you have to put the work in so it's also powerful for your personal brand right so you create this website for yourself as the starting point of your online Journey you can make mistakes you can delete content you can find your Niche over time right and then you

can capitalize on pretty much all possible revenue streams online so things like ads affiliate Revenue sponsorships courses coaching even selling simple Services right away away for a few thousand a month so I know a lot of people struggle with this you know I know a lot of people try and fail and it's not a failure on their part or a lack of motivation it's usually just a blind spot so something they don't know that they don't know you know a little detail that trips them up because blogging is like piecing together a puzzle no individual

piece is hard to click into another one but there are a lot of freaking pieces you know some might be hiding under the couch or under the bed so really I want this video to find those pieces for you to give you this complete pict a complete understanding of what it actually takes to make money with a Blog because a lot of supposed gurus preach traffic and ads and making money overnight right get rich quick I don't believe in that I'd much rather have you make consistent Revenue over the course of years because that is

the only type of Revenue that will actually change your life not a flash in the pan but something that's consistent that could pad your retirement pay for vacations give you back some of that time freedom because you know I'm talking about this because at the heart of this is what blogging is right it's a way to fight back you know against the the 9 to-5 the rat race society that tells you you have to work for somebody else not even guaranteeing you enough money to afford a house and a one inome household right so that's

why I started my blog you know it wasn't some fun little side project it was my way to remove these golden handcuffs of a salary that was basically just enough to afford a rented apartment a rented car and a retirement that would probably take me 50 years to get to so because of blogging yes my life is a lot different now but you know I know where I came from when I was 26 I was living paycheck to paycheck you know I was making $9 an hour working at a pizza place delivering pizza and I

could barely afford my car payment and insurance you know I actually remember I was so broke that I went to a Subway I had a sandwich made in line right I had lettuce tomato all that stuff they get to the cash register I didn't have enough money on my credit card for the $5 foot long right a little embarrassing I still remember it vividly like it was yesterday so I'm nothing special is what I'm saying I'm not smarter than anyone else right in the room but I did over time finally get my career to work

only to quickly realize though that the American this corporate culture of company Voodoo and unlimited PTO days yet somehow no one takes a day off and a virtue signaling on LinkedIn and all the office politics and meetings it just wasn't for me so really I started the blog I made my first $5,000 a month and I left I left for good I didn't care if I was making less money than my salary I just did not want to go to the office ever again and you know my is very different because of blogging you know

it was my starting point it was how I built an initial audience and revenue and then I wanted to diversify which then I leveraged all that audience and revenue into building a YouTube channel hiring people and scaling to a larger business with my business partner Colin so ultimately I know we're getting losing track here but to get to the point and end my little rant here I honestly don't care what type of business you start but if you can just get a little courage build something for yourself keep learning build something for yourself and no

one else you will have a shot at a very different life than you have right now that's all I'm saying so enough rambling on blogging let's get to the actual strategy so in this video we're going to cover about five or six steps so first how to get traffic to your blog then finding monetizable content that you can create that actually makes money then we're going to cover uh search intent and what that actually means and what how it helps you create content next is the content assembly line which is a formula for creating monetizable

content at scale then we're going to cover blog monetization in-depth and of course at the end taking all of these steps and all of this learning exactly what I would do if I was starting from zero right now so let's get into it so first we're going to cover how to actually get traffic to a Blog because a Blog is text based content and we need people to actually find it and read it and there's multiple ways you can find it organic search Pinterest Twitter LinkedIn all kinds of different social media but we're going to

cover some of the main ways here now we have to realize what are we actually creating what type of text-based content are we creating well there's really only two types of content you ever need to create two types of Articles two types of keywords and that is informational and transactional so that's how people search for things on Google you as a blogger are a mediator between a Google Search and a purchase so somebody thinks of something in their head they either want information how do I build a shed you know how do I plant strawberries

type of information how to swing a golf club correctly or they're looking for product recommendations a blogger is the product recommendation person that lives between that search and that purchase providing comp comperative content in the form of blog posts recommending products so for example every Niche has these best golf clubs best credit cards best laptops any of that so there's two things how to do stuff and the products to do those things and that is how you actually make money blogging so those are the only two types so let's look at a couple examples of

really blogs that are just killing it okay so this is the tool HRS it's an SEO Tool uh I'm looking just for this video to show you some stuff so Feelgood food. they're getting 2.7 million visitors a month to their blog and you can see in individual articles here so one target keyword for one article right so their article on overnight oats is according to ATS getting 250,000 visits a month right so if we look at all of these what they do have is a lot of recipes a lot of interesting things so their informational

content in a food blog is related to recipes right that's the main form of informational content there baked oats cauliflower vegetable stew there's literally 2500 articles on this website let's take a look at another example garage gym reviews this is a fitness blog they have 1.3 million visits a month it's been going up we can see what key wordss and things they're going after so again the two types of content in a fitness blog best products so best pre-workout protein powder uh workout apps budget treadmill adjustable dumbbells and then also the information around it so

things like um alternatives to deadlifts uh gym mats it's a lot of actual products but then how much water to drink with caffeine informational stuff how many protein shakes a day right back and shoulder workouts so workouts and exercises are the informational intent in that Niche here's another one golfer geeks.com a golf site and we have you know the two types of Articles best driver for beginners drivers what loft is a gap wedge how many clubs in a golf bag so how to hit a driver right so these are the two types of Articles you

create and you can see these posts are just simple right what of the most forgiving irons for beginners this is a low Authority site in the N it's about dr40 um and you can see blog post are simple it's an introduction uh into the product recommend ations right so that's how transactional posts work so the internet is basically blog posts are basically lists everything is a list whether it's a list of the best irons or it's something like how to fix your golf slice if you look at an article like that really it's just a

series of steps you have an introduction and then first what is a golf SLI why is it bad and just some headings and simple stuff to go through the list so whether it's a how-to post or a transactional best of posts it's just a simple list introduction into the content now an important distinction of getting traffic and blogging is how much Authority and expertise do you actually need to rank for this stuff because every Niche is a little bit different so for example if you want to get into the health space or talk about you

know things like credit cards it's you're going to need a lot of authority they're not going to Google doesn't trust a Blog right away that is just brand new talking about things like credit cards because you can see if I put in like best credit cards you are there's a risk to the consumer right there's a risk to the Searcher so Google always wants to play it safe and that's kind of how they rank things a lot of the times lately is just give them the safest most authoritative site there so if you want to

rank for like best credit card for example it's very difficult there's NerdWallet wallet Hub CNN Forbes a YouTube video Reddit in CNBC good luck right so that's a niche that you don't want to get into necessarily unless you find some super crazy you know best travel rewards card for babies or something right like but it's not a way to build a sustainable plan so that can be difficult so things that are your money your life things that really change a person's life based on the search so buying things that are expensive or risky uh consuming

food and health related items are a little bit more difficult and challenging because you have sites like Healthline WebMD big Finance sites Tech crear Forbes ranking for a lot of this stuff so it's kind of how the internet works when we think about keywords the more money the keyword can make the more popular it is typically the more competitive it is because big sites are going after it the more money they can make right also the more risky it is the more Authority you need because it's kind of risky for a person to search for

you know how to get over covid-19 and then a random mom Blog shows up on the first page that's just not going to happen anymore so you have to pick the keywords uh accordingly based on risk and based on how much money you can actually make so when you start making videos you can't just hit the record button and hope for the best right you want to create the right type of content that your audience actually wants to see that can also maximize things like ad Revenue sponsorship opportunities and the potential for YouTube to share

it with a larger audience so in the past you've had to do hours of research before ever pressing that record button but now you can shorten the process and let AI even do some of the heavy lifting for you and because of this I use Tu buddy because of its powerful analytics and video optimization tools so it helps me improve my thumbnails find the right video tags write the perfect description and even come up with content ideas I hadn't even thought of before so thanks to TU buddy for sponsoring today's video if you want to

try them out go to the link in the description below and use the coupon enfroy 30 to get 30% off that's enf Ro y30 click that link in the descript description below and thanks again to TU buddy for sponsoring the video so let's take a look at some different niches and some informational content that we could create so for example if we want to do something low risk what about like knitting right now we need to use seed phrases to find ideas for posts right we can't just put we could put knitting in we could

try and then we could use something like the matching terms tool and this gives us information on all the different uh keywords and articles you could create that have the word knitting in them and then other words so knitting machine patterns free knitting patterns how to cast on knitting so there's some ideas here um and there's different seed phrases based on the niche so something like knitting could be like scarf ideas you put in scarf ideas and you can see there's a lot of easier stuff to rank for so keyword difficulty is how difficult it

is to rank how competitive it is green is good the lower number is good if you're just starting out you want to find things like under 10 even under five so you have like scarf storage ideas tie ideas crochet scarf ideas literally you could create an article on each one of these except for some of them might have overlap right like scarf ideas and scarf tie ideas but anyways you can find uh easy seed phrases with things like words like ideas for example if I'm in a interior design Niche I'm going to go living room

ideas right and that one is pretty competitive because again it's very well known and common if you look at this keyword we can look at you know the search volume every month 55,000 searches a month difficult to rank for because when we look down at who's ranking you have the spruce Good Housekeeping house bhg Southern Living Pinterest house beautiful so it's tough right so we have to find pockets of opportunity but what if we just did like room ideas and then we have all kinds of different rooms so yeah living room but also laundry room

room divider ideas and then if we can drop the difficulty down to see what is easier we might be able to find some things that we actually could rank for Minecraft room ideas interesting bloxburg I don't know what that means preppy room ideas Western toddler lots of really easy things dog room Gun Room large living room big living room so you find like there's an endless supply of ways that people search for things online you know there's eight plus billion people on Earth and more and more people in developing countries are coming online every year

too A Blog a english-based Blog can serve kind of the whole world of English speakers this strategy and stuff also works in other languages um it just really depends so that's one thing you can find is like if you're in a living room type of website I interior design you would use something like room or ideas as your starting point to find a bunch of informational content you can Rank and these are pretty easy right if you have an article on Western room ideas you just have like 10 random uh ideas and pictures that's pretty

much it you just want to look at the top three who's ranking and just kind of be in the ballpark let's go to Fashion so like something like fashion could be like fashion trends and we can see all right there's 2023 fall fashion trends summer Trends again we can drop the difficulty down I'll do it to like 10 and just see what we can find what we could write about uh we can see like teen fashion trends weird fashion trends Oscar fashion trends Spain F fashion Trends what about like watches so you can do like

best watches so luxury watches things like Rolexes you want to be an affiliate for you know expensive watch brand or like Bob's watches some of it will be competitive but again if we drop the difficulty down to like five we'll find the things that are maybe new and emerging we can rank for best watches under a th000 keyword difficulty of three really good search volume right every single month this is an indication of good search volume so you know thinking of the niche this is where Niche expertise can come in maybe you know a little

bit when you're choosing Ching your Niche for a Blog and again this is like all about how to choose your Niche well we're looking for the market we're going where the fish are where people are actually searching how we can monetize this because really informational articles are going to be mainly to get traffic to your blog to know showcase your expertise in some way to teach people something about how to do something or ideas or things like that and then they can build your email list you can eventually sell a product to them down the

road whereas transactional posts best watches will be for affiliate links and you can monetize with affiliate marketing that way let's talk about babies little tiny infants and children what if you're you have children you want to you know create baby content on a baby blog there's billions of products out there related to babies right tons of opportunities there but for informational content think about how many people search for names right baby names there's so many different ones and then you can drop the difficulty down again and you can see like what are the easy ones

we could do Italian country modern baby girl names black baby girl names worst baby names funny Western so like you can see that there are actually 5,000 different ideas for articles here so if you have a baby blog You' probably be talking about you know how to do things with a baby you could talk about baby name ideas get tons of traffic that way and then also talk about all the baby products so now let's go to workouts if you're in Fitness you can see some of the main ones again are going to be competitive

like bench press how to bench press or like shoulder workouts tricep workouts Prett competitive cuz you're going to have like bodybuilding.com and those in there but the opportunity lies in things that are a little bit more random and Niche so for example things like cable shoulder workouts uh cycle syncing workouts metabolic workouts cable ab workouts Smith machine workouts you get the point the seed phrase here in Fitness is workouts or you could use exercises and then you find thousands of potential things you can rank for based on things that aren't competitive just because there's so

many possible searches there's billions of searches that even the craziest writing team of Forbes and media sites can't keep up with all the opportunities so ultimately you need to think about your Niche think about what you know right not just what you're passionate about but think about what you know maybe what experiences you have in a niche and then start trying to mess around and find like seed phrases so for example it could be ideas or workouts or exercises or recipes or quotes examples Trends statistics you just have to find your unique seed phrase for

informational content based on your specific Niche now we when we think about building a niche website it's easier when it's just based on you when it's a personal brand you don't have to rely on picking the perfect Niche at the beginning because the truth is when we're all beginners it's hard to pick the perfect Niche at the beginning if I created some very specific like woodworking website and it just wasn't working it wasn't would working then I'd probably quit because it's not attached to my identity I can't pivot the domain name is stuck it's about

woodworking whereas I started my blog as a digital resume I didn't think it was even going to work but I put it at my name.com because the domain name we know in blogging it doesn't matter for SEO but I put it at my name I thought it was just going to be a digital resume but it ended up working and I was able to Pivot and adapt my content even in 2024 I'm able to like I realized I was going after so many very competitive software terms that I was getting pushed down a little bit

for super competitive stuff down to page two for like online course stuff and uh webinar software podcast stuff that I'm like okay I need to just shift and change my strategy a little bit go for some easier informational content that I found but because it's my name and it's not something like the email marketing expert or like the e-commerce guy you know I worked a lot in e-commerce I could have chosen I know a lot about e-commerce I'm going to become the e-commerce guy and I'm going to write about the best e-commerce platform Shopify stuff

all of that well it just seems weird if that doesn't work and I try to Pivot to like email marketing or blogging or affiliate marketing my domain name's weird so the greatest way to start a business is to start a broad domain name with just your name first last name I don't care if it's a it's a weird name it doesn't matter it sounds weird it's hard to spell just do it or make it I could have made mine like ask adam.com or Adams advice.com or Adam's tips like think of Tom's guy the huge media

site so that's one thing that is a big mind field that you can cross is like choosing the wrong Niche you don't have to worry about it too much at the beginning you just get started with your name and then the good thing about that is you can find Opportunities you can eventually pivot into the content strategy that works for you and you can blanket in uh the the topical authority of the area once you find it so again we're finding opportunities here and when it comes to this informational content like I said it's not

going to make you affiliate revenue or anything like that but on its own these lowrisk like ideas articles like something like living room or patio ideas right you can kind of talk about that without risk to the end reader compared to you know the best cashback credit cards or how to recover from knee pain right it's a lot less risky so however you know they're going to get some ad Revenue you can we'll talk about that in the monetization section but they're not going to you know make you millions of dollars right they're a good

way to build your email list so we need a bridge here we need a bridge to generate more money from keywords you know some of these ones are not very monetizable so if you rank for something like how to tie your shoes and this is also going to go into the search intent section the person searching for how to tie their shoes they're a random person on the internet searching for that that probably doesn't even know how to tie their own shoes right so are they going to land on that website and buy anything no

are they going to purchase shoes or shoelaces through an affiliate link no so it goes back to the search intent of that so some of these low value ones like how to tie your shoes from an ad Revenue standpoint you're probably making like a $5 $5 for every thousand visitors so if you get a h 100,000 visitors to your site you're only making 500 bucks so we have to kind of put this in perspective and realize that traffic does not always equal Revenue here but when we're looking for keyword opportunities we have to find this

bridge and find those transactional posts that can make us affiliate Revenue because that is the search intent when people are ready to buy something so when I think about it it kind of looks like this there's blog posts easy info content that you start with in your nation you want to blanket this and be known for one thing over time and have more content than anyone else in that specific area so there's ideas maybe it's names examples Trends but then we need a bridge from that easy top of funnel consideration stage content right so someone

how people search online if you're thinking about something like if I'm going to buy a couch first I'm going to search for living room ideas top of the funnel right I don't even know what a modular sectional is yet but I search for living room ideas I find what I like I look around I look at pictures then I say okay I know I figured out what a modular sectional is now I'm going to look up the best modular sectionals and this is the other half of the equation that you need transactional content when people

are ready to buy things so the answer is we're going to write articles about products in your Niche and we're going to write Roundup posts about them so if you're in Fitness right it could be best treadmills best bikes best whatever right best power bench machine I don't know uh if you're in software it's like there's a million types right best project management software AI writing software anything like that um so we're going to write these but the hidden component of finding opportunities when it comes to blogging is actually timing so think about it like

Shark Tank if you're going to write content in the kitchen Niche are you going to write about things that are old and outdated and have been around for online for 20 plus years and already written about so if you want to write the article on the best refrigerators good luck it's probably very saturated right because that product's been around forever a bunch of big media sites probably wrote it already but what about something newer in the kitchen some new type of blender or new type of smart home device for the kitchen or a touchless kitchen

faucet or some random strange product that is new and is emerging right new things are coming on Amazon all the time and new things are being created so timing is the crucial component here so we need new and emerging product categories to write about and certain niches have more than others right something like golf has new products every year but the products don't really change new categories don't come out as much there's like golf rangefinders GPS stuff golf simulators could be a really good Niche because those are expensive and pretty new so there's some there

every Niche has new technology and the new technology is the main driver of affiliate revenue and affiliate Revenue can make you a lot more money than ads for example if you're making $5 for every thousand visitors for how to tie your shoes you could be making thousands of dollars for a thousand visitors for certain keywords if the affiliate revenue is right so how do we find new stuff online well there's tools for this right there's something like exploding topics that tells you uh in the last you know couple years what's the main exploding topics out

there AI logo generators this company teamu cold cold plunge tub AI image enhancers and you can use a tool like this to find a lot of new Rising keywords right you could also use something like Glimpse which is an interesting tool that you can use Google trends for free Google Trends gives you all of this information or you could look at something go down to like you know technology let's look at home automation what's new there well there's things like electric lint removers single dose Grinders smart air purifiers smart door handles robot cat litter Nano

foamers I don't know what the things are I don't have a very exciting paid plan on this but again there are ways that you can find and the the traffic growth and the keyword growth because the truth is what happens with keywords and finding these opportunities when it comes to blogging is the keyword exists people understand it they find about it someone on the content team at Forbes or Rolling Stone finds out about it then they write it right they're not Geniuses but things that are new and emerging it's almost a game of who can

get there first because I've found that the keyword difficulty is low on keywords until it's not so the more competition comes in but timing your publish date the date that you published it is really important there's articles on my blog that I would stand no chance of ranking for now that I ranked for four years ago because I wrote it early on I wrote one on podcast hosting the difficulty was like 30 at the time now it's like 90 something so it's about timing it's about finding new and emerging product categories now these are even

easier to find with HF so you put in the word best plus the term and we'll get into search intent and how why best is the word to use but you think about best laptop if we look at best laptop this is going to be competitive it's going to have sites like CNET ratings Tom's guide New York Times Best Buy and all of that right very hard but again we just have to know how to find Opportunities because there's millions of them out there if we drop the difficulty down to under five we can see

best laptop for graphic design best battery life laptop best laptop for writers and then if we look at who's actually ranking for that it's probably not like Best Buy and stuff there's some in there but then there's also a site like author.com domain rating of of 17 very low or this one the L luh high.com domain rating of six probably no backlinks to this site really so we just look for these Clues so when we're looking for them we just have to know what to look for even something like software for example is going to

look really competitive because there's things like best video editing antivirus software look at all these really red things that have been around forever and everyone's writing about but again if we can drop this difficulty down we can see maybe there are some software things we can write beat making software music production recording photo organization podcast I bet you there's a lot of AI stuff so you dro the difficulty down there's things like AI trading software AI SEO AI video upscaling AI novel writing right so you have to stay on The Cutting Edge it makes more

sense to write about AI photo software than it does to write an article about web hosting web hosting has been around forever it's impossible to rank and then there are a lot of super easy niches I would say things that aren't competitive I I'd say does it pass the forb test would Forbes write about it Forbes writes about technology software gadgets business and finance I probably missed something in there but uh what about like outdoor and hobby stuff like kayak you can look at kayaks inflatable kayaks fishing kayaks fish finders for kayaks beginner kayaks there's

literally thousands of Articles you could write that are easy to rank for uh recommending kayx and you join affiliate programs if one costs $11,000 you have a 10% commission you make $100 on every sale for a kayak and it's not that difficult with these numbers sometimes a little niche experience comes in too let's say I wanted to find things to write about about power tools or some I can't really just put in like power tools if I I don't really know what the power tools are right there might be a few a few articles I

could write but I need to know what the actual thing is sometimes so something like a pole saw right it's a long chainsaw on a pole right I have to actually know what that thing is so it's I found the easy opportunity right there's Pulsa electric battery power gas I could write probably five good articles on different types of P saws the seven best P saws of 2024 2025 here's the list right um but I have to kind of know a little bit that's where some of the niche experience can come in and help you

because to spot new and emerging Trends you often need to stay ahead of the curve in the niche and understand it a little bit better than the average but you start to like think differently when it comes to blogging you start to realize just how many opportunities and products there are so I put in like best fishing you think about like I I used to fish a lot when I was in Florida and it's just the number of products you have it's pretty crazy um there's again fishing kayaks but then there's like rods sunglasses gear

reels rod and re combos right tackle boxes ocean stuff River stuff trout things you know polarized sunglasses it just gives you you realize like holy crap T telescopic fishing rods or like like like something I don't really know much about but I was going to get was like a telescope I knew nothing about it but like look at how many types there are best to see planets best for astrophotography even if I put in a certain type of telescope a dobsonian telescope right there's different articles that could be written on individual ones here that you

could make a lot of money on best 10in dobsonian 8 in 12 in right different sizes so when you look at this stuff it's really simple you find the seed phrase for informational content you use the word best which signifies buyer intent for these comparative articles for transactional content and then you make a list of opportunities so in a spreadsheet you just create a list of say 30 ideas so what's the ratio well the truth is this year you can't have too many just straight up best of Articles right you can't have all just best

best best best all affiliate articles it doesn't really Google doesn't like it and it's because you're not providing value in the form of informational content either so if I only have like best golf drivers ion Putters sand wedges rangefinders and I have nothing about how to swing a golf club or like golf courses or anything like that it looks weird right I look like kind of a spammy affiliate site and you don't want that you want to look like an expert so the ratio typically now and this changes over time so don't you know you

have to be pivotable and adaptable when it comes to this stuff it's pretty much like 80% informational at least uh 20% transactional at the highest so out of 10 articles you write eight of them should be like informational in nature and a couple of them should be these transactional best of so the goal with a Blog the thing is to make consistent Revenue with content you need a lot of content right and there's different levels we'll get to that in monetization so before we get into the content monetization plan let's talk about something that's often

overlooked but is vitally important it's almost the first rung of the ladder when it comes to creating content and what to actually put in these articles so let's say you have 30 ideas some are informational articles in your Niche you know best uh beekeeping stuff how to do beekeeping you have like you know every Niche right so you have 30 ideas so what do we actually put in them well we have to know what search intent is so when we think about the psychology of search people are literally thinking of things in their brain and

typing them into search engines right and then based on what Google is showing we can know what is working what Google is rewarding what people are actually liking right so there's ways where like if you wanted to write an article on a certain keyword but you did it the wrong way you'll never rank because you miss missed the search intent one example I like is how to lose weight right so how to lose weight we can see uh Google is rewarding a National Institute of Health type of UK site I don't know some government site

Mayo Clinic Health line right because again this is a health issue discussions and forums Center for Disease Control WebMD Harvard University what's interesting is uh two years ago this was not the case this was dominated by blogs this was all blogs there was like this site was up here um Healthline was probably somewhere on page one but it was mainly blogs now Google is rewarding this Authority and expertise so that's why it's like sometimes it's good to avoid these super competitive health and finance related niches but anyways let's look at the blogs uh we can

see 25 tips for weight loss that actually work how to lose weight fast nine scientific ways to lose weight we get into how to lose weight fast according to experts lose weight naturally backed by science how to jump start Weight safely so we're looking at the titles here successful weight loss 10 tips um what's interesting to me and I did this a couple years ago and I look at it and it's kind of interesting is when you think about the psychology behind the search people want to lose weight well what do they want to read

about right what do I put in this article and how how do I order it correctly it's not rocket science people want to lose weight fast and probably discreetly if your title of the article is how to lose weight slowly and in front of everybody right people aren't going to like that so you have to kind of think of the broadest possible appeal for your article to match the title now the the title here we'll get into the cont content plan and how to actually create the content but the keyword is how to lose weight

you're going to see pretty much most of these have how to lose weight in the title it doesn't always need to be there exactly but I recommend that you have the target keyword in the title and then there's extra room for stuff so I call these search intent trigger words these are like what gets people to click so you can look at the top 10 the top 20 and you can say okay for this given keyword I've seen the word fast in here three times I've seen experts a couple times so I'd probably have a

title that would be something like how to lose weight fast with minimal effort right according to scientists right that wouldn't all fit but it would be something to the that nature and you wouldn't have in the article and in the content plan the search intent of it is wouldn't be something like how to lose weight the history of weight loss right what is weight loss how does weight loss work like how does the cell how does the fat cell get removed from the body and then you go into the history like that's SEO from probably

10 years ago right the history of it this big giant long guy because you want to create the longest possible guide to rank people now in the Tik Tock era have no attention span so you need to get to the point immediately so you need like the top not 50 ways like top seven ways to lose weight fast according to experts intro of like two paragraphs boom number one and then you think about it i' be like well I don't want to say just do a calorie deficit because that would be people don't want to

hear that but it would be like something specific that's easy and attainable and fast right and get right into the list so that's a little bit of search intent on that one we also have to take Google into account when we look at this stuff so for example Google will put different the most helpful content that's what they're trying to do that's their whole goal is the most helpful possible information and content right away so I put in how to build a shed now what you'll see here is this is kind of dominated by videos

first right and then we get Home Depot there's some blogs shed plans Family Handyman which is a big uh handyman site Reddit family handyman again Wiki how Garage Journal but you see videos are first that's because like like if I want to learn how to build a shed it probably makes more sense in a video format than in text based form cu the text form would have to show me kind of like a you know one of those manuals when you're building something like all the uh instructions this thing that thing it's kind of hard

to create in the form of a text based blog where if you just shoot a video it's much more manageable and easy to understand so sometimes videos do actually make more sense for a keyword than blog posts do and it really just depends on each individual search and we do a different search like 40th birthday party ideas we see it's different it's just dominated by like Google's trying to give some sources across the web here uh in this search box but then we have all blogs right pure wow The Bash groovy guy gifts some products

for it and more blogs related to it right betsy.com 40 ideas to celebrate 40th birthday because you're you're just reading a list of ideas right it doesn't need to be a video I wouldn't talk about here's my ideas for the best 40th birthday like people just want to see it in a list right so text makes more sense in this case case which Google is rewarding more now we have to make one more really really important distinction when it comes to transactional content and search intent there's a big difference between the search laptop and best

laptop and this goes down back to the psychology of search when you think of just laptop what do we see well we see sponsored you know Google PPC ads but the first organic result is Best Buy Amazon Walmart the New York Times there's one media site Brands different things more pictures Best Buy Best Buy their Dell Wikipedia so we see mainly the brand selling them right when I do that best because laptop by itself is probably I just want to go to a product page I'm was looking for a laptop send me the Best Buy

category page for laptops I'm just going to look at them and check it out best is the word that signifies comparative content what are the best laptops what are they what are the best ones some human tell me give me the top 10 give me the differentiate and what are the best so when we search that yes we still have Google's PPC sponsored Google shopping ads but we're going to see uh media sites so like CNET is a uh website ratings tech radar New York Times Verge then Best Buy so you know usually if it's

just the term itself it's like at least 70% e-commerce brand selling the thing if you add in the word best it's pretty much 70% media sites and blogs about the thing so again it's about spotting the opportunity if I put in best dishwashers super common product New York Times Consumer Reports Forbes Best Buy right like we're not going to rank for this it's just not worth pursuing we're not going to waste our time when Good Housekeeping Home Depot and YouTube and consumer reports and lows are there it's just not going to happen for an individual

blogger but if we add a few words in like best dishwashers that use less water find the longtail version of this and you can see yes there's USA Today there's Best Buy but then look in here there's like ofhouses and trees.com earth911.com just small blogs ranking on page one for dishwashers just a different kind right so we see of houses and trees five most uh energy efficient dishwashers very simple introduction a few headings and then right into the product list with links to Home Depot for the actual things and you can see these are affiliate

links because it says redirect.sh and transactional comparative content to recommend products right so to master search intent your informational content should come from your experience right we don't just want to spam things that already exist online or use an AI tool to come up with the thing right we want to have it come from experience and then we optimize onpage SEO with a tool like Surfer SEO which we'll get to and it's really a volume game so there's different ways so when you comes to informational content we want to have a lot of it because

topical Authority is really important so having 100 artic articles on party ideas shows Google that you know what the heck you're talking about instead of having just three right so this stuff does take some time but you see you know exponential more rewards at the end the longer you stick with it and transactional like so informational content is a little bit harder to match that search intent because it takes a little bit more research it's like okay what are the top three sites doing is it about you know if it's lose weight is it fast

how do I lay this out in a quick and easy to digest best for human beings format so informational content can be a little bit more nuanced than like how am I going to order this thing but it is just again a list intro right into right into the topic transactional is a lot easier so transactional search intent the whole goal of this if we take a step back is to end the search Journey because there's all these different ranking factors for a Blog but the one that can't be faked is ending the search Journey

which means somebody Googled the thing they found your blog they clicked on it they read your article and they did not go back and click another one because Google can tell when that happens if they click your article read it go back find another one one and end on there that article that is a signal that that other article is better than yours because it ended the search Journey so to end the search Journey for transactional Content like best laptops under $1,000 or best golf drivers it's easy for transactional you add search intent trigger words

to the title that makes sense you know if it's beginner related it could be the best golf drivers for beginners in 2024 and then you cover your bases so to cover your bases with the content we'll get into the content planning you just have to think about who's going to read this and then provide every option for every possible person so for example if I'm talking about the best golf drivers I would talk about the best for righties lefties the best for beginners the best for pros the best expensive luxury option the best cheap option

right and just whatever that is and you can find those clues in other sites that are already ranking for stuff but the idea is if you cover all the bases and it's comprehensive enough the reader is going to be like okay they've covered everything they know what they're talking about I don't need to go back I don't feel like I'm Miss missing anything so when it comes to search intent this is kind of the heart of where the content plan starts because you can have a keyword but if you don't put the right stuff in

that blog post in the right order it's not going to rank and it's really easy you just find Clues from what's already ranking on Google what Google is rewarding and format it accordingly with your own Human Experience so we've covered finding opportunities and we've covered search intent it's time to cover the content assembly line so this is kind of our fancy wording for the way to create content at scale like Henry Ford created an assembly line right and it dropped the time to create a car from like 10 hours to an hour and a half

and it was a systematic way to create a product and we can do a similar approach with content we know we kind of have to because this year it's not like we can just write one blog post and hope to make money right we need a systematic way to do it and we know also we just don't really know in a data- driven way we're not sure what's going to rank on Google we're not sure what's going to work so we can assume that not every article is going to rank so we shouldn't spend you

know 10 hours writing this perfect Masterpiece for no all this effort for no reward when we're not quite sure if it's even going to rank cuz there's no way of knowing we can look at the keyword difficulty scores the search volume all of that but there's no real way of knowing so we want to create content in a systematic way now blogging is again a science not an art we can look at some article examples here to see what I mean so when we look at formatting like here's one best infant car seats so there's

this is a best transactional post this I would say is a more advanced version of a best transactional post because we have an intro but then we have this fancy looking column thing right they kind of coded this thing in there's five columns it's really it's got a rating system all kinds of crazy stuff there it's really cool and in-depth but I wouldn't know how to do this necessarily I wouldn't want to do this you know you can do it with uh WordPress and with Gutenberg editor and or Cadence blocks things like that like there's

options to make similar types of stuff but again it's a little bit more advanced um but when we look at it it's intro into kind of the ratings and then we get into the products themselves so this is we're going to get into onpage SEO how to actually optimize and create this article in a data driven way so here's a product again very fancy a lot of this you isn't even text this is like reasons to buy reasons to avoid so pros and cons system here's the actual text a couple sentences right and then back

into that so that's like a super Advanced example we should look at a simpler example uh this is one from h MD trucking.com the best truck GPS so we have an introduction how GPS for Trucking Works how to choose the best truck GPS screen size easy use special features installation storage space and then it gets into the actual products right heading here's the product this is an Amazon affiliate link it's got some pros it's got some cons it's got a couple sentences that's it next product right Pros cons sentences Pros con sentences so we realize

that once we have produ product one we have the format down then we copy that exact format formula for Product 2 3 4 5 6 however many you have in the content assembly line we don't want to have like 30 best GPS's at the very beginning right we would want to maybe look at the word count use surf for SEO and make it what we call a minimum viable post what's a really high quality post that we can create in less time but it's not like perfect in like 10,000 words right when we don't need

it to be we're trying to make the most efficient use of our time because a lot of us have you know kids work responsibilities Hobbies making dinner all kinds of stuff so how can we make the most uh progress in the least amount of time it's with a Content assembly line realing that uh realizing that a post has an introduction the best of post I'm talking about has an introduction product 1 2 3 4 Five summary that's it right so that's on page SEO and a nutshell for those transactional posts I'll cover it more in

depth here in a second but we'll go do a couple informational ones so here's like 61 thoughtful 50th birthday gift ideas there's a featured image there's an intro and then there's uh some interesting little things here but that's just not related to the article and then again much like products are in a list format ideas and these things are in a list format number one paint and sit pottery classes so it's just text if you can do Microsoft Word and you can add text in with some internal links and pictures that's all it is and

then there's probably a summary somewhere at the end maybe there might not even be no no I guess so yeah there's like one sentence summary another one would be this one on how to fix a leaky faucet informational handyman type of search fix the dripping faucet you can see there's ads here introduction it says tools required screwdriver allen wrench pliers pliers material required little bit of information step by step step one you don't have to have these fancy things you just read in step one right step two loosen the Allen screw step three removed the

cap and on and on right series of steps very simple so we have to realize that content is simple simple to create and write we have to know how to use how to rank what is Google looking for when we're actually creating content so let's cover onpage SEO step by step so we have a Target keyword what are we going to do with it well we're going to add it into the title so mine was best podcast hosting doesn't have to be at the very very beginning the title format that works is if it's for

transactional post like a number and I don't really use the that but I was trying it this actually is kind of like a Trip Advisor looking thing that's how they always say the best things to do in whatever city um so you have it in the title in the URL of the blog post so your target keyword should just be the URL the URL of this article should not be Adam enr.com th-4 all of those words right because the URL is the only thing that can't change because think about it you might get some links

to this article you might send some internal links to the article you can always redirect it later but when it comes to blog you can change everything you can change the title the images the featured image all the text everything in the article you just want to keep the URL the same which should just be the target keyword which for here is podcast hosting so it's in the title there's some interesting trigger words here I added platforms and then ranked for 2024 I used the Maz title tag Explorer because you can actually see and preview

what it looks like you don't want it to be too long I think over 160 characters and it gets cut off so you don't want that you want it to fit so that people can see it in the Google search results but then we'll see here there's a featured image that's not totally required but most themes in WordPress have them intro okay introduction now when we talk about an introduction it should be short to the point there's things about my site that I actually don't like right now I'm doing a redesign the font style it's

too hard to read in my opinion it's a little bit small and narrow uh thin from a weight perspective um so but you want to have like four to five intro paragraphs Max this could be a little bit long but um very simple you want to just kind of hook people in get them right here people skim articles they're not going to read them right now this is an H1 heading title of your article is in H1 and we are always going to be referring to Wordpress here we're not talking about Wix or Squarespace or

any of those things because they don't work as well we'll get into WordPress more um this is an H1 there's only one H1 heading in the entire article and that is the title of the article Google needs to understand what is the title there's the date that it was updated my author thing these things all kind of into a theme that AO it's pretty automatic I have a table of contents that is sticky over here but what we have here if we're just looking at text based content what's important is Introduction in paragraph text that

shorten to the point followed by an H2 heading so H2S are really important when it comes to SEO there's one H1 for the title there can be a number of H2 headings but there shouldn't be that many and these are the really this is how the exact format that Google wants to see so what is the plus your target keyword with a in the form of a question now this could also be an H2 that just says the best the 14 best podcast hosting sites or platforms not too much of a difference there but you

want the target keyword in your H2 heading and the form of a question makes it look good right because Google understands that and then I have a sentence here here are my top picks for the best ones now the company itself the first one is an H3 heading so this is important H1 is the title H2 is the main heading content H3 is the secondary content so whenever you're doing a transactional post H2 is the main one H3 is the list item right so all of the list items Buzz Sprout and I have this I

kind of had my developer create this fancy looking thing here rating system but it's if you look at it it's just text and images key features user experience pricing what I like this like a little bit long- winded honestly doesn't have as many cool pros and cons and interesting charts and stuff but it ranked for four years really well and made me you know I'll show you the revenue here in a minute but it was pretty high every single month then we get number two another H3 heading so basically an article consists of the H1

title with the target keyword the URL an intro and you want to have the target keyword somewhere in the intro you don't have to over stuff these things but you want it in the intro and in the H2 heading now if we go down the list we can see all of these different things and then I kind of have way down after I list everything thing you can have secondary content below the the main list for these transactional posts you have like an FAQ is it worth it where do I do it blah blah blah

wrapping up summary and all of that so it's a pretty simple format so here's another example of using Surfer SEO so this is a tool that I definitely recommend when you're creating your blog posts because it literally tells you everything you need to do and all the random keywords that you should add in there so this is one that I did for best web hosting services so I was foolish I created this article in 2020 or 2019 maybe it actually did get to page one for best web hosting for like a couple months didn't make

a whole lot of money but uh super competitive very hard to rank for I was getting links to it and everything and it was just tough but anyways uh surf for SEO so I pasted it in here and surf for SEO will give you the content score so it says you know out of 100 how much how SEO optimized is your article so here it's the word counts right because it's in the right range it's between 6 and 7,000 worth Prett PR dang long right which that's another reason to stay away from some of the

more difficult and challenging competitive Niche is cuz some of the content has to be kind of long versus some easier one uh headings count I could use more headings paragraphs I have a lot of them images I have like none but that's not true cuz I have I just pasted this in the most important thing in Surfer here is we know what the target keyword should be in the title and throughout the copy but how many times do we actually use it right we don't want to throw best web hosting in here like a thousand

times and try to trick Google right we don't want to do that so what we can do is we see what Surfer SEO does is it takes the top I don't know if it's 20 or 30 or 50 sites that are ranking for this term and then it averages out all of these different data points so in an article on best web hosting they're typically you know between 602 and 7200 words and they use the word best web hosting between 21 and 31 times so I could use it a few more times but these are

just little details typically with Surfer SEO they give you 80 semantic keywords so semantic keywords are all of these so for example a human being it' be really hard to come up with this stuff on your own this is using like uh natural language processing machine learning and just scanning these articles uh but for something like this like for example I don't know if I could come up with something like you know hosting packages or VPS hosting reseller hosting shared hosting dedicated website builder these random things that Google would expect a robust and helpful article

to have because Google is getting smarter their machine learning is saying understanding the contextual relationships of words as they scan your content they're basically organizing the world's information and as they do that their natural language processing is getting smarter so if you don't have any of these words in your article Google's probably going to reward the ones that do a little bit more because that seems like semantically related words in the English language that makes sense for this keyword so really all you can do is add them in certain amounts you don't have to at

every single one you don't want to over optimize your articles and have like all 80 of these in here and have it overly optimized and they're all green that's too optimized right I would say now you over optimization worked like 3 four years ago where you could just get this to like 90 and it rank really well now with Google's helpful content update and more like Human Experience stuff this isn't as important I would aim to get your score to like 70ish 65 and just move on so you don't want to overdo it you don't

want to have too many keywords in here but I mainly use this for the semantic keywords and understanding generally how long the article should be next you can use a free tool like grammarly to fix everything right if we're not great writers we put a sentence in well it can fix things for us it can find errors punctuations spelling mistakes uses of passive voice and random stuff like that I put in one here that best pre-workouts article from garage gym reviews it was really well done and I found that was interesting is it's not a

perfect score there's still 177 issues with grammar punctuation in here and you know a year ago I was like making this a 99 and perfecting it no issue ever everything has to be perfect and what I realize I think is if you over perfect it and you fix every little tiny thing it almost makes it seem too robotic and not as readable so I think this is a good thing to just kind of help your writing you can uh aim for a score in the 80s uh don't over optimize and fix everything necessarily uh some

of the things it'll pick up don't make sense either so like it's saying you know this is an error third party tested what's it's saying it should be testing doesn't really matter right um so some of the errors aren't really true but I think over optimization is a thing that worked three years ago but it doesn't anymore so grammarly can really help your writing though the more that you use it you'll find that like oh I can re reord this sentence it sounds really good and it's more readable so aim to use it paste your

content in there there's also Chrome extensions and things for Surfer and grammarly to show up right in WordPress but it's really good to help your uh you know make sure there's not a lot of errors and your writing is better another important thing in the content assembly line is thinking about who's going to write the article so is it just going to be you writing everything yourself are you going to use an AI tool at all so you know Surfer has a really good AI tool Surfer AI you do a one-click thing and it gives

you a completed article with like usually a 70 Surfer score you know I still recommend that you write everything yourself and perfect your craft before either Outsourcing it to another person or trying to like use chat GPT or some AI tool and then editing it a ton just makes it more difficult when you're doing that and we want to Future proof our blog I'm not saying AI content's getting penalized right now but it might in the future right so we don't want to write a 100 articles with chat GPT that are kind of not helpful

not from a human experience and then maybe we get a little bit of traffic right now but then it goes down in a year and we get nothing right so we don't want to take these shortcuts we want to really build a real brand around this thing and also think about like if you're going to write it all you want to master it a little bit so what I would tend to do is like start in the middle of the article if you're writing a transactional one start with the first company put in the name

of the company right a picture screenshot of the homepage start writing about the feuture start writing about your experience all of that stuff and then focus on creating the middle of the article first intro and conclusion last because a lot of times that the intro can be the hardest part to write because you're like thinking about how to write a good hook so when you're thinking about onpage SEO and like writing for human beings also there's a lot to consider so when we're writing for human beings we want to have things that are from our

own experience so we can say like I liked this about the product or when my team reviewed this thing we thought that this we like this but we didn't like this a lot of the times too many articles just say this is great that's great this is great but nothing is actually bad right differentiation is important pictures of yourself with the product I get this question a lot too do I need to buy every product I recommend and review on my blog no because it would be impossible and most sites never did that in the

past they're writing about if you have a like some of these big media sites have a thousand let's say they have a th they definitely have more than this a th000 transactional articles each with 10 products that's 10,000 products to buy review and look at like it's just not possible but two three years ago what you could do blogging is just take the keyword look at the website about what it's about look at other blogs writing about this thing and then give your own spin on it making it up a little bit saying I like

this about it I didn't like this when I was doing it in software I could actually like do a free free trial look at the actual free trial take screenshots of the trial with arrows and things to make Unique Images and all of those things based on human experience but I didn't have to buy every single software much like you don't have to buy every single thing which is a good good thing about blogging and it's not YouTube if I'm looking at the best fishing kayaks on YouTube I'm not going to expect a guy to

sitting in an office with no kayaks right I'd probably want to see somebody actually using them whereas with a Blog you're just expecting an image of the kayak from the it or whatever and then text underneath so however with the helpful content update and with Human Experience coming to be more important uh there's little ways and tricks you can do so using a lot of iws adding quotes within the thing so within a product review you write you know um I've done this with a few articles but you can write like you know if there's

somebody else maybe you know as an expert you could use them or yourself and add a quote like I really like this about it says so and so the CEO of this this business I thought that this part was blah blah blah something specific so adding quotes in adding how you test and validated your offer adding author pages to your site uh showcasing a lot of you know your methodology so for example the garage gym review site they have things on you know our process and how we do this how we come up with reviews

and this three-point system right so this claimers disclosures we can cover that too but ultimately it's about creating human content so what you can do like if you're writing about hot tubs or pools or something no you're not going to buy us 10 swimming pools in your backyard and line them up in a row that could be pretty cool but what you can do is like go to a hot tub showcase take pictures of yourself with the thing there's a reason that garage gym reviews took like 40 pictures of different people using pre-workout it's because

it's very in-depth and it makes it seem like they really know what they're talking about which they do right it's a very impressive article so when we think about writing writing blog content in a nutshell we have to first think about optimizing for a keyword we don't want to just write random stuff typically so Target keyword we put it in the places that I told you then we optimize with Surfer to get it to a decent level with the right semantic keywords we format it with the right headings and then we add our own human

elements to it that can be pictures of you that can be eye statements that can be quotes that can be things from your own experience that really make it stand out because we are entering this world of a I and like I can ask chat GPT what's the best laptop and it'll give me some stuff but it is outdated people want human-based experience to tell them how they did things that's also why Google's rewarding Reddit with a ton more traffic because people are interested in people's take and they trust people so we've made it pretty

far so far we've talked about a lot and if you've made it this far thank you and there's plenty of more value to come because we've already covered finding keyword opportunities search intent and writing content so now it's the fun part let's get into blog monetization so the truth about this is you notice that I haven't talked anything about like creating a website yet or a Blog because that's kind of lazy and that's what everyone wants to do for affiliate Revenue but there's all these things you have to understand before you even think about that

because you have to understand monetization at the beginning if you want to be successful it's hard to do keyword research and search intent and find the right Niche without understanding the big picture of how monetization Works across different niches is and what the revenue streams actually even are and which ones you want to do and are fun for you so there's an order to monetization so for example you have blog posts and there's transactional and informational content right 20% let's say is transactional 80% informational and there's affiliate revenue and AD Revenue so affiliate Revenue has

higher Roi than ads return on investment it makes more money and it's algorithm based meaning you have to rank for stuff to make money right ad Revenue lower return on investment but it's also algorithm based there's also other revenue streams though there's sponsorships there's core sales there's Services there's lots of other things right because we're in this attention and monetization economy where there's four main things here there's getting attention to your blog post getting traffic getting views getting affiliate Revenue ad Revenue course Revenue sponsorships but there's an order to blog monetization there's a reason we

don't launch a course on day one we don't have an audience yet there's also a reason we can't have sponsors yet we don't have any traffic to articles to get a care about a sponsor we build a Content plan with affiliate and AD Revenue in mind but we have to go after the right revenue streams in the right order and on this slide we can see some interesting distinctions here so like there's all these different assets on the left these are unowned assets that aren't related to a blog like YouTube Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Pinterest these

are secondary unknown assets right they're they have algorithms you don't own it you don't own your content on it if it's Facebook right you don't own that content they do if they go down everything goes down so the good thing about blogging is you own your website you own the web hosting now the thing is though we have to go from attention to monetization we have to go from this algorithm based thing that we have to understand right the Google algorithm the Tik Tok algorithm the Pinterest algorithm into an owned asset that we actually can

control which is an email getting somebody from the algorithm finding your blog to an email list is how you get your own sales through courses and sponsorships so that comes down the line but the main things to think about when it comes to blogging is affiliate Revenue add Revenue you can run just with that that's just a Content you can be a ghost you can hide behind your site just run with that but you can also add in sponsorships core sales and services to it as well now there is a personal brand path to seven

figures as well everyone starts with a Blog they create some affiliate articles so I'm saying transactional best of posts then they have ads they have informational content and transactional content you can stay here right and this you should stay here for at least 6 months really mastering the process but then you could launch a course right all of your informational content about in your Niche could eventually become a video course that you sell now you're not making 10% affiliate commission or whatever it is you're making 100% because you own an actual product right then once

your systems are in place you're making money you hire a writer that at that point you could have an uh one writer one video editor then you have you're making blog Revenue with affiliate marketing and ads and courses and then you can start making videos to kind of match what you're doing in your blog with the informational content to then get people to click the link in the description I've been doing all this for years now right it's very lucrative but you have both a Blog and a YouTube channel and then you just do everything

right you have blog and YouTube and then you have unlimited revenue streams affiliate marketing ads sponsorships courses coaching so I wanted to give you the big picture on this first because the blog is the entry point it's the first thing to do the first action to take for all of these revenue streams there's a reason I started my blog first in a website it's because I knew how to do that ultimately but also I didn't even want to do YouTube like I wanted to stay behind the scenes and not do anything and you can just

stop right here right blog affiliate marketing and ads you never have to show your face um if you do that you can make $10,000 a month maybe 20 maybe more if you do this really well but to get to Seven figures $100,000 a month or more that is possible it's very possible but you will need to have your own products and you will need to spend time building an audience and just real quick there's like another model here there's a newsletter model where instead of YouTube you don't want to do YouTube okay you can do

more text based content you build a business around a newsletter where you're doing that through Twitter LinkedIn posts building that you know free newsletter and then selling sponsorships in a newsletter that's another business model that just starts so what what's really great about blogging again is that it's the first thing you do you can infinitely pivot and adapt your content when it's a personal brand if you have a YouTube channel you still need a website to send people to an opt-in page on right you can do clickfunnels but it's a little spammy if you are

doing Instagram it's good to match it to an actual website so a website is always first and it's it's really important to think about the big picture that the the the opportunity is a lot bigger than you think it's not just I'm going to create a tiny Niche site and make two grand a month it's if I do this right and I build a personal brand in the background of my life for the next one to five years and I don't quit I can really build something big and I can be known for something and

I can have my influence in the space and I can teach and I can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month if you put in the right amount of work now with all of that said we have to go back to basics and start with the blog and our content plan so we need to understand the numbers behind revenue and blog monetization is a numbers game it's based on traffic and then it's based on the commissions that you're getting either through affiliate marketing or ads or whatever so for example let's do an example of

getting a lot of traffic for low value keywords for ad Revenue so something like how to tie your shoes or random posts like that so let's say you're getting 100,000 visitors to a blog post or an average of blog posts posts assuming a $400 RPM Revenue per uh, visitors you would be making $400 so $400 for 100,000 visits for random ad low value ad Network Revenue right which is crazy because you would need a million visits to make four grand a month way too much right we don't want to just rely on super easy random

keywords that don't mean anything and have no search and you know value now we can do another example so hi trffic ad revenue for something a little bit better so I was in you know one where I was in a media an ad network but I was making money uh maybe I think it was a $20 RPM $25 $30 RPM so for every thousand visitors when I was in medine I was making like let's say 20 let's assume it was 20 I think it was higher but so now if I get 100,000 visits to things

that are in a slightly different age maybe like business ideas posts or software related posts and I have ads put on them right banner ads we're talking about at the bottom and side whatever wherever they are throughout the content that could be a $20 RPM which would mean for 100,000 visits I still only make $2,000 a month so I'm like that's still not that good right like getting it's kind of similar to like getting 100,000 views on YouTube and having no product you're making a couple Grand competition is fierce though and that's kind of how

the ad networks work when it comes to blogging or YouTube like the more specific and Niche you are in a certain thing that's valuable the more your RPMs or Revenue will be because advertisers want to be on certain sites for certain things so if I have an article on web hosting Brands like Blu host or wpx will be more interested in putting a banner ad there than they would on how to tie your shoes right because it's like it all works out that way so however that's ad ad Revenue so yes you can do ad

Revenue by itself you can just put banner ads on your site but just know that you'll need a shitload of traffic to make a real substantial income think like a million visits a month or more and that takes a lot of content and a lot of work you you can do it with simple and like you know party ideas birthday party ideas this party idea that party idea it'll just take a lot of content all right so let's talk about the power of affiliate marketing so affiliate marketing you just make more money because people are

clicking things and you're making commissions that typically dwarf anything that you're making through an ad Network so let's say that you're getting 10,000 visits a month to a blog post or an average of blog posts for best of transactional stuff and through that you know the product price is generally $100 for what you're recommending now what we realize is when people land on an article about 30% of them will click an affiliate link not every single visitor is going to click on an affiliate link right so 30% click in affiliate link that's 3,000 affiliate link

clicks now what happens with affiliate marketing is you can control like the clicks and the traffic that you're getting but once you say like here's the best hiking boots and they click that link to REI it's now on REI to convert that traffic into a sale and they have to convert it into a sale typically for you to make money you're not going to get paid paid for sending clicks to any affiliate brands that you're promoting right so at that point the typical e-commerce conversion rate is 2% so a visitor is visiting a product page

you can assume that 2% of them will actually buy the thing so 10,000 visits to a Blog 3,000 affiliate link clicks at 30% bear with me uh a 2% conversion rate on those 3,000 clicks would be 60 sales so you're generating 60 sales for the brand If the product costs $100 and you have 60 sales $66,000 in sales to the brand so let's say that's you know $100 hiking boots you made 60 sales of 60 hiking boots $6,000 in sales to REI you have a 10% commission you've made $600 okay it's not bad right for

10,000 visits to get $600 that's a $60 RPM so it's triple what you're making from the ads at 20 right it's a little better but and of of course there's like there might be some more affiliate link clicks that's why you optimize positions 2 3 4 5 down the list but you're not making substantially more in that instance but let's look at one little tweak that can make more affiliate Revenue so same example 10,000 visits to an article or a set of Articles the average product though is now $11,000 so $11,000 instead you've made 60

sales on $1,000 product so that is uh $60,000 in sales now you're 10% Commission is $6,000 that month now you're at a $600 RPM so now we're talking so higher priced affiliate products in the $500 to $1,000 range if you're getting the same you know amount of traffic to those types of Articles you could literally be making 100 to 150 times as much money from that traffic than you are for something like how to tie your shoes right so 10,000 visitors to hi to tie your shoes you might be making $40 10,000 visitors to a

high priced affiliate articles you might be making $6,000 so there's a huge range of different blog monetization amounts right depending all on the keywords that you pick so again it goes back to if things are expensive and they're searched for a lot it's going to be more competitive it's going to be harder to rank for so you have to find the pocket of opportunity the hidden Factor here is timing so for example in partner stack you can see that I've made uh $1.1 million in this one affiliate Network right and this is since November of

2020 I've been making consistently around oh I don't know $30,000 a month let's say and then there's what's considered affiliate locking periods so you make an affiliate sale in say uh March then you might not get paid till April or May depending on the brand so you'll see like this is not paid yet this will actually go back up to here because this is just one of the brands that locks two months later so anyways what I'm saying is you can make a substantial income but timing was a a component here this is pretty much

a couple of different articles this is like two articles that I wrote back then that I would have no chance of ranking for now that I'm not even ranking for that well now I was ranking for online course platforms for four years in like the between positions one and two then what happened is all the course platform started writing the Articles thinkific teachable kajabi big media sites and stuff and others and it just got a little bit more competitive Reddit came up you know forums a few videos and I got pushed to page two so

traffic went down a lot however Revenue that was back in you know around middle of last year so you can see revenue is still 28 30 30 25 32 26 so and this might again increase cuz these are locked so the power is timing and it's finding opportunities that can make you a lot of money so that was an example in a competitive recurring affiliate Commissions in software so for example software can pay you every month for as as long as a customer remains a customer if someone signs up through my affiliate link for example

for podcast hosting I will get a I think it was a 20 or 30% commission uh on that customer now it's a small amount right but there's power in this compounding effect for example if you're making 20% recurring commissions on uh a company maybe it starts out slow and it's 300 but this math Works where by the end of 12 months if you're just adding some customers and assuming a 5% turn rate you could be making 34 $0000 if you can bump that to 30% commission you could be making 5,000 so if we look at

my buzz Sprout account for example this has been going on forever since April of 2019 I wrote the article I started generating some money $14 my first month 110 270 412 632 1,000 14 18 22 27 30 and it got up to its peak and then actually interestingly in sometime in like July or August I was at hundreds but I talked to the affiliate manager at Buzz Sprout I was able to negotiate a $5,000 a month flat fee deal for the remaining of time up until it passed 5,000 and then it went here so all

of these months from May 2020 down to like I think it was September of 2019 was actually 5,000 a month um and that was the power of ranking on Google I was ranking number one for podcast hosting it was less competitive them now it's more competitive but you can see this is just goes on 2022 this is monthly revenue for one article so it's kind of crazy to look at because I was making less than this when I started my career uh full-time working 40 hours a week and this is just one article making it

so as you can see here it's going up it's gone down slightly in the last four months it's lost like it peaked um looks like sometime around December of 22 and then yeah my ranking for this has gone down but you can see from just this one article like I'm still making thousands of dollars every single month with this so I have to revamp and I have to make some updates to it but that's the power of recurring commissions how however recurring is very competitive software is very competitive if you're just starting a new blog

I recommend don't do it right um there are a little bit of opportunities in AI but it's tough so on one hand recurring commissions can grow a sustainable business it's the most stable for a Blog however it's the hardest to actually make work from an affiliate perspective the other two when it comes to affiliate marketing and really understanding your Niche and what Niche you're going to choose is there's two other ones so like high ticket you're making more for every sale so think like golf simulators or like luxury watches or things like that so if

you're making $100 or more for every commission so like a $10,000 golf simulator if you're getting a 5% Commission on that you're making $500 every time somebody buys a golf simulator simulator through your site that's like I what I would consider High ticket at that point you only need a handful of these articles to rank and work sometimes though they can be more competitive and then the third type and this is the most common and the most kind of easy for begin ERS is the volume game so think smaller commissions per sale so average of

$50 or less per sale think things like pet products so like dogs and cats right there's pet food there's pet kennels leashes all kinds of different products but they're not all expensive most of them right the average of the cost is pretty low yes there's like electronic fences and Invisible Fences GPS things but for the majority of products they're not that expensive so what you need in these types of niches is volume you need to rent lots of Articles lots of easy ones for Revenue so that's things like you know a lot of outdoor goods

too like we talked about fishing or kaying or camping or hiking or winter sports or boating or you know whatever it is like you just need a volume of Articles so the more you know if you can get to $500 per article every month then you're looking at well I need 10 of those to rank well and do that and then I'm at $5,000 a month so those are the three main types of Revenue when it comes to vog monetization recurring which is through like software High ticket luxury goods and then the most common is

just a volume game you just need more articles more things ranking so to get started with affiliate marketing you create your content you write it you publish it and then you want to see how you're ranking so you install Google analytics Google search console all that and then I don't say like don't join affiliate programs right away that's a common mistake a lot of people make is they want to join them immediately it's like I want to get those affiliate links in just doesn't make sense blogs aren't going to blow up immediately right like they're

not just going to get tons of traffic out of the gate it's a slow grind to increasing your traffic and looking at the numbers game like if you're getting 50 visits to an article and you're getting 30 affiliate link clicks or 20 affiliate link clicks maybe you might make one sale on that and then depending on your commission maybe you're making like five bucks so it's just not worth to spend your time effort and energy in joining a bunch of affiliate programs when you could be spending that time writing more content so but how it

works is pretty simple you sign up for affiliate programs you Google you know the name of the company plus affiliate program or you can find it in the footer often times of their website and every program is run by the brand itself and has different terms in commission rates and things like that so for example like Dick Sporting Goods has an affiliate program that they set their own commission rates so they say we will pay 5% commissions you sign up through that you get your unique affiliate link right just for you that signifies that's when

somebody visited through your link and that's pretty much it you add your links into your content so then you can use something like thirsty Affiliates which is a WordPress plugin that you just add your links in name it and it cloaks them it gives them it looks nice and it organizes them so every time you're in to post you just have to click a little button and you can add your affiliate links in once you've added them in then all you do is you view your dashboard it shows you how many clicks and conversions you've

generated for the brand and then there's always a payment section so you can add a bank account or typically PayPal account into it that's pretty much it you look at the dashboard like you saw Buzz Sprout looks a lot different this is partner stack this is an affiliate Network so so you can see in an affiliate Network there's ones like impact partner stack is pretty much software there's share of sale and CJ those are like the main ones I'm probably missing a bunch but those are the main ones and like a network is interesting because

it houses a number of different affiliate programs in one place so you can see like recru you get 20% of every sale in year one I don't really like that cuz by the end of year one you're not making anything right some people do that so earn uh San box 30% recurring Commission on all sales AI email productivity tool very interesting uh so you can see this you uh click this and you join it you add some information in so you join programs in a number of different ways if you're interested in learning more I

would look at like impact partner stack CJ and share a sale and when it comes to affiliate marketing there's a lot of nuance here too because I was an affiliate manager working for an e-commerce platform when I worked in Austin Texas so I saw all these bloggers and people making a ton of money and that's what kind of Hit the Light Bulb going cuz I was managing them I was helping them promote our software um so the goal here is though you want to find like the top you know the most five most popular companies

in your Niche because what tends to convert the best is the most popular mid-priced products in your Niche cuz we don't know what actually makes money until we add the links and see how it converts there's plenty of things I did rank for that just didn't make money for a while I was ranking for like best streaming software I'm like oh that seems really good the affiliate programs weren't really there and it wasn't making much money um whereas other things I didn't think would make money did so again as an affiliate you control clicks affiliate

link clicks traffic you get the traffic to the company that you're promoting the benefit here is you don't have to have your own product right you're reviewing others but then it's on the conversion rate of them so typically the popular companies convert the best so if you're in hiking and outdoor stuff look at REI look at well really well-known brands that people trust and you can always start with Amazon although the amaz Amazon Associates affiliate program gets a lot of heat CU their commission rates suck it's true sometimes it's 2% 3% right you're not making

a ton of money it's a good catchall at the beginning if you want to just join once you're getting traffic so at least you're making a little bit of money until you join the main one so like let's say you're ranking for best basketball hoops join Amazon first add some in add your Amazon affiliate links in and then you can worry about joining like the Dick Sporting Goods program or like doing research on which ones have higher commission rates because you can usually get higher commission rates typically outside of Amazon so if you have a

Content plan you understand your keywords that you're going to go after then create a simple you know create another tab in your spreadsheet one is the keywords that you want to write um one is the affiliate programs you want to join so just don't join them yet just add you know uh links to the opt-in page so you can sign in you just need a name email sometimes it's very good to not just use a Gmail email address when you're signing up for an affiliate program use a branded like domain one just use like Google

workspace and create one with your domain sign up that way and then you can start joining affiliate programs so affiliate marketing is a little more complicated than ads ads you know you just join an ad Network so let's say you get traffic to 10,000 a month you join an ad Network like mediavine ISO or ad Thrive I recommend you stay away from AdSense I tried it you know I was excited I was getting like 500 to 1,000 visitors a month when I first started I joined AdSense and I made like a dollar or two or

something and it was like a ton of work that I just did for nothing so some of these have traffic requirements I can't remember which ones but just look into it some don't but you just join an ad Network you pretty much add a WordPress plugin to your site it adds the banner adds in and then you get paid so you don't have to like do anything you don't have to add affiliate links in or talk to an affiliate manager or anything like that so affiliate marketing and ads is kind of the core of the

strategy when you're just starting out because it dictates your content plan like what content you're actually creating if you understand monetization and the numbers behind it do some back of the napkin math to understand that I need this much traffic for this specific specific keyword the products are cost of this much I'm making a 10% commission what could I actually make in this right every month if I'm ranking in the top 10 so it's you don't have to know it's really hard math equation you're not going to know the exact answer but it's pretty obvious

that like ranking for something recurring like vpns that's super valuable or something really high price like luxury watches is going to make you more than a pair of socks right it's just understanding that behind your Niche so finding the new technology finding the new opportunities so let's talk about some other blog monetization strategy so one that I really like is selling services so this is could be called the agency model the Consulting model the service model whatever you want to call it but this is one that I actually started with when I started back in

2019 the benefits here are you don't need any traffic to your blog you can do this with a sales approach just on email and Linkedin and you can close clients a lot faster you don't even need traffic you can just build this little mini agency as you're starting and charge a few thousand per client or whatever you can so we do teach this in some of our content and courses uh we're seeing a lot of students find success with this and it's because you know if you don't have traffic and you're waiting on the algorithm

you're waiting on affiliate marketing and ads and it's just taking a while why don't you just take some control into your own hands take what you learned going through like blog growth engine our course being in the community working with other students taking any cor just learning about SEO take the Google analytics exam take the Google AdWords exam right figure out some digital marketing thing you want to offer find your vertical Market your audience I have another you know full video on this can't cover it all but you find your audience could be local SEO

for dentists right then you charge them $2 to $500 to manage their Google my business or do simple SEO for them now with this model you're kind of a freelancer that's actually you're getting one step closer to time freedom because you're not tied to a job you can make thousands of dollars faster with Consulting and it's what I did when I first started I was doing Simple SEO services for some software companies and I made you know I was making between $5 and $10,000 a month with that before I had any affiliate Revenue yet but

with that it was the excelerant my blog needed to scale so you build this little agency model and with that I had money now so the business was making money because every business needs money and the quickest way to get money right away is to do Services right because if you're starting a blog and you have no traffic there's other blogs that do have traffic or other local businesses that need more traffic so instead of doing just content for your own self why don't you do some for another brand too while you're building this up

then you make thousands of dollars doing consulting you hire your first writer now you actually have a single team member that can write stuff for your clients and write articles for your own blog once you've master that so it's an accelerent it's a way that we teach to scale things a lot faster if you just want to make money online just start selling services and coaching and do Outreach don't wait for people to find you reach out to them so it's an interesting one that you can do you know there's people that say you're an

expert on film making or or book writing you know you might get traffic and then it's like book call with me on calendly here's a link $500 an hour boom get 10 of those a month there's $5,000 a month so there's a lot of ways you can do Services there's another one sponsorships so sponsorships is another way to monetize your blog it's a really interesting one you know you need some traffic first so we don't cover it too much when you're just starting out but I did I did this so like instead of having an

affiliate Link in the first position why not just have a company pay you directly every month to be in that first position and when you're ranking for these transactional keywords in their product categories like I was ranking for like best LMS Learning Management Systems um I had a learning management company pay me $60,000 boom one payment for the year to be number one in that article and honestly I think I was on page two for it so it's pretty nuts but uh you can sell sponsorship placements so that's like I'm put you in position one

in this article um for this and again that's the unfortunate reality of how the internet works it's not always the best recommendations that get put in the top spots it's what makes the most money but I didn't make those rules um and you can also just do sponsored articles so like yes I'll write a review on you it's 1,500 bucks something like that right so sponsorships are interesting kind of like YouTube sponsorships but you're placing people into blog posts Brands and of course there is courses and coaching and again we don't do this one right

away because this takes a real audience to sell too so all of your info content though can be helpful and teach something so you know my blog I have articles on how to make money blogging how to start a blog how to make money online random stuff like that right every single one of those can have an exit intent popup with the lead magnet to a free guide free master class going into a sales funnel right so uh courses is kind of where you want to aim to be where you can get it just takes

a solid year or two I don't mean to to scare you off but it can take you a little while if you're doing blogging to do that so if you wanted to accelerate way faster you know and you don't like the idea of blogging at all then you can just do courses through YouTube if you just want to do courses starting with YouTube's probably the answer but you still need a website so there are still options for courses for introverts so people don't want to be on video well there's some like people have courses on

Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets right it's just screen share stuff or drawing right it's just a hand or even crypto maybe you're just in a little corner talking about stuff what's interesting about course content it's it's video based content and it's usually the the editing and the style it's not as expected to be as good as like YouTube people expect flashy perfect editing on YouTube whereas in a course it's just slower methodical you don't need to keep people you know engaged all the time you're just talking going through a step-by-step process so for example if

I was a woodworker what I would have is articles on my blog on woodworking you know the best woodworking tools all of that stuff exit intent popup get my free 10 essential woodworking tools checklist sign up here with your email boom now you're in the email list automatically it would be sent the woodworking Essentials you know the 10 tools and then through that over the next week get an email every day about Woodworking and then slowly why you really need the best woodworking course I have everything right 10 20 hours of you know how to

be an expert woodworker in every single detail you need and it's you know maybe $500 or something so pricing of course is another whole thing I have videos on that too but it's another interesting Revenue Stream So to sum that up to sum up blog monetization it has to start by selecting your Niche based on kind of understanding how all of this works focusing first on ad revenue and affiliate revenue and knowing down the line courses is where you need to go you need to be teaching something that eventually can become your own product an

informational product because education is changing college is not going to be able to know all the stuff that I'm even talking about in this video right you're not going to learn this from a professor so there's individual people can become experts on a number of different things and it doesn't matter what it is it could be guitar piano woodworking gardening knitting crocheting anything right fishing um all kinds of stuff can have courses that teach people how to do things Fitness has a ton right so um it takes time though it takes time to do that

so the goal here at the end is just seeing how big the P big the picture and big the opportunity really is because once you hire a writer and you maybe you get a video editor then you can go multiplatform you can have a Blog and a YouTube channel and you can batch your time on YouTube where yes I'm shooting this super long ass video and I'm losing a little bit of steam as I do it and my ears a little bit plugged so I can hear myself in my brain but I'm not losing my

mind yet and you're still here if you're still here I mean that's amazing but what was I talking about thing things other things so for example going multiplatform it can take time it it might take a year to get there but you could do blogging plus YouTube you could do Pinterest and Instagram plus blogging it just really depends on what you're in you have to know where your audience is also before you even start right like that's another just there's so many little roadblocks and little details I'm trying to put the puzzle together for example

if you're talking about video games go on YouTube if you're talking about homesteading for mom's it's Pinterest and Instagram with your blog right so you have to kind of know where your audience lives if it's about business stuff LinkedIn right so going multiplatform building a true personal brand typically requires more things you'll notice I didn't really talk too much about Pinterest because it's pretty freaking simple you create pins you link your pins to your articles that's it you try to go viral with them um same thing with Twitter and Linkedin you write posts based on

text in a certain format linked to your stuff create a newsletter whatever but it's really important to focus on Google and YouTube mainly Google what we're talking about here with blogging because that's where people buy stuff they Google things they look at blogs and they buy through those affiliate links it's less likely that they're going to scroll passively through Instagram find you and buy through an affiliate link they have to make like seven clicks to do that they have to click in your thing then click your bio click the little link tree thing click another

link then get to the product page then buy something on their phone whether they're not logged in on Safari probably not going to happen versus searching something on Google like the best laptop under a th000 boom bam buy it so Google is the important factor here so when it comes to setting blog monetization milestones we really want to focus just on the inputs and not the outputs so we can't say I'm going to make $5,000 a month within 90 days you can say that you should if you're really aggressive and you want to go the

agency route and sell Services yes but also it's good to focus on the input so things not like I need to get to this traffic level it's more like I need to publish this many articles this month I need to do some Outreach and meet people in the space do this so it's the actions that you take to get you there so with all of that said here is exactly what I would do this year if I was starting from zero I would do keyword research find my Niche so first when you find your Niche

we use something in blog growth engine called The Authority flywheel and there's four aspects of this there's you your expertise the market and advantages so you first have a unique identity only you or you no one else is you so what do you know about what do you like if your face was on a homepage of a website what would you be saying what would you be teaching what message do you want to share with the world then there's your expertise so no you don't have to be an expert in fact you could be an

18-year-old with no college and no formal job experience but you have some level of expertise somewhere you don't have to be an expert it's often interesting sometimes to learn from people who are beginners and are learning as they go when you're writing the content so think about what you know though in your career and your hobbies and things like that then you think about the market so you go back to the keyword research and you look at what things could I rank for what things have low competition and you know good search volume and when

I think about that look for things with were difficulty under five if you're just starting and want to rank for stuff look for a low Dr domain rating site that is on the top 10 results with a Dr of under like 40 that shows that a new site can Rank and then look for search volume you know these tools aren't always accurate so you can look for search volume over a 100 thousands is a lot right I didn't even get into how Google clusters topics together and how a keyword might say a 100 but you're

getting thousands of visits to it so do your keyword research on your Niche think about the market and then in the authority fly there's also any advantages so think about it like do you have any advantages is your brother like a CEO of a company um do you have a bunch of travel photography gear already that you could use for reviews so think about your starting line everyone has a different starting line my starting line was being a middle manager living in Austin Texas at a tech company my main advantage was I knew I worked

with the SEO team and I knew affiliate marketing really well so I knew how to do this thing better than most people did logging right cuz I wouldn't have made millions of dollars from a single website you know if I didn't know how to do it so that was my advantage I didn't have money but I had some experience with SEO and affiliate marketing and I realized the Agency Route was faster so I was able to scale Faster by making 5,000 hiring a writer faster and then it's accelerating the content planning but think about your

advantages so when you do this you write all these things down you think about what you want to cover and this has to be something that you can talk about for years to come so you don't go too narrow you don't say like I want to only talk about travel a travel nurse in Europe it's a little bit too narrow right because there's not enough content your your Revenue ceiling is too low you can start with travel nursing and then go to nursing in general right or if you really like um iPhone accessories maybe you

don't just do iPhone accessories you start with phones in general you talk about smartphones and informational content there so what we call it is living in the middle so you're not you can't go too wide when you're picking your Niche you can't do like gardening and also software you can't do you know uh Woodworking and best credit cards doesn't work Google gets confused you have to stay within one broad category but what you can do in a broad category is narrow it down so for example if you want to talk about saunas right you can

talk about how to clean them infrared wet saunas whatever you can do 20 articles there and you can expand out to like things that are related maybe pools maybe hot tubs maybe things that are and then you become known as this expert in one area right so you don't want to go too wide because the wider you go if you start talking about all kinds of different things you need a lot more Authority for example Forbes can talk about computers and Technology software business credit cards travel blenders even you know whatever they do CU they

have thousands and thousands of Articles hundreds or thousands I don't know how many employees and a domain rating of 90 something so they're super authoritative but if you start doing that you don't stand a chance so building topical Authority in one Niche is the answer but the thing is the good thing is you can take a little bit of pressure off yourself because you don't need to know the perfect Niche at the beginning but you should narrow it down to at least saying I'm going to do you know uh indoor hom Goods or I'm going

to do Outdoor Adventure stuff you know maybe I start with camping or I'm going to do um painting or like art right that way if you start going down a path of like I'm only talking about crocheting it's just not working I don't like it anymore then you can pivot especially when the domain name is your name.com so you pivot you adapt and you overcome by pivoting and changing your strategy over time because the truth is you could be passionate about a lot of things like I'm passionate about you know fantasy football or running or

astronomy well you know whatever uh lots of different stuff but if I have to write about that thing for years I'm not going to really be passionate about anymore doing the thing and writing the thing are two different things and then my interests might change so like I've been talking about blogging on YouTube for couple years now at least I would love to talk more about what I'm doing on YouTube how I'm creating these videos how I'm selling courses the thing is though people on my channel they love blogging right they don't click the videos

about YouTube so I'm kind of creating this thing and pigeon hold myself a little bit there but I could if I wanted to expand to other things we're going to start teaching the agency model and YouTube and all of it right because there's so many ways you can build businesses but being able to Pivot is one of the most important business principles so with all of that said you have to choose your Niche then you do your keyword research come up with like 30 keywords SE uh I would say you know 8020 so 80% uh

informational 20% transactional you could even do a few random thought leadership ones that have no SEO value so Google is also saying don't do all these things just for SEO write a couple random really good articles just from your experience that have you know just really really good articles from you okay so you create a website WordPress is the best one you use Cadence as the theme you use wpx as your web host they're the fastest one easy to use I use them really simple you sign up to them you get into the WordPress dashboard

you can use a theme like Cadence which is free you know your the main expense when you're starting a blog is just hosting hosting your files right having your website Cadence is free you can have a free theme make it look nice you know we have uh tutorials on that as well in blog growth engine like step by step Click by click I can't do it all in this video I might pass out um but you do that you create a WordPress website you then learn how to upload your content so that's adding posts in

creating content in WordPress start your content assembly line so really it's just about learning and like getting acclimated with it with um you know having a process it's going to take you a lot longer to write your first blog post that will uh than it will write your 10th right so over time you just get faster and faster and more efficient and then when you're really efficient then you create a standard standard operating procedure and you train a writer to do it for you and you can use things like slack Loom videos constant training just

help people you need to clone yourself to get them as good as you are uh you create your content assembly line making sure Human Experience shines through picture with products don't have to buy them but you know the more human experience it is the better um if you're writing the affiliate articles make sure to cover your bases cover everything join affiliate programs don't worry if you join don't join them at first just focus on traffic install Google analytics and Google search console you need Google search console for Google to index your site so that's really

important you do that at the very beginning you're telling Google you exist you create a Sit map with something like rank math or yast as a plugin um after that you join some affiliate programs once you you start getting some traffic add the 10 into your spreadsheet first so you know what you're doing then it's just a consistent process of running a Blog do some Outreach for link building you know do some Haro you could just answer hor requests in that regard reach out for some guest posts I have videos on that but it's just

a game of content keep creating content you know there's what i realiz is like there's big media sites that are writing 10 20 30 articles a day on random things so like if you can write a couple articles a week that's good to start good enough to start right but you need to be consistent um ultimately you need to identify Market sweet spots knowing what you can rank for creating a Content assembly line and following the four stages of monetization so with all of that said the long-winded way of saying if you're interested in starting

a blog click the link in the description below 80 minute free training goes over different stuff I might not have talked about here um you will have access if you want to work with me me further through the series of emails but you don't have to do anything everything's free the master class 80-minute master class is free but we will be offering things to you in the email but you don't have to do anything if you don't want to but if you do want to take your blog to the next level definitely sign up for

that because we'll keep you a breast of what's going on in the world of blogging and we'll give you more updates than even we do on YouTube so uh that was a really long video so let me know what you think I hope you liked it if you made it this far I I'm sorry you made through the I don't know how long of boredom to get here but it's really important like if you made it this far at least hopefully you realize either yes I can do this I have a niche that's actually simple

um you can you know HRS cost money it's like $99 a month kind of expensive to do all that keyword research stuff you can do it for free with Google Keyword Planner a little bit here and there you can do a free trial of exploding topics for a dollar or a dollar trial and then cancel within 14 days just make sure you cancel cuz it's like 1,00 bucks if if you don't yearly payment I almost missed that uh Google Trends the only first thing you would buy is web hosting when you're starting and then Surfer

SEO is like the first thing and that's usually $49 a month I think that's like the only expense 49 a month plus your hosting for a while you can do email marketing for free with convert kit you can get convert box a lot of these plugins are really good like WP rocket you could pay for for $50 a year $50 once so it's really cheap it's you know you can get profit margins of 90 plus percent but again we want people you have to realize this is a business if you want to make money with

it you got to treat it like a business so you can't be like I'm going to do this completely for free I'm going to get questions and comments in here can I do this for free can I use Wix can I use wordpress.com can I just use medium or something it's like no if you want to run a business you have to treat it like a business there's no inventory there's no employees there's no rent there's just web hosting and maybe surf for SEO when you start writing and you can track that as losses on

your personal tax taxes or I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole in this video but anyways I hope you uh just for the sake of length I hope you enjoyed it uh please like it and comment anything just for the algorithm because I'm about to fall asleep by making a video this long but you know I think it's hopefully the best free blogging video on YouTube like I don't think there's a better one I hope there's not then I have to make a three-hour video next so uh a like means a lot it

means that you watched it and you know if you did watch it all the way through and you're still here comment with the word hamster and I'll know you actually made it through and if you don't comment hamster and you give me a stupid question I may or may not answer I'm just kidding of course I always answer but make a nice comment of hamster if you've made it this far and you know check out other videos on my channel lots of different stuff to talk about in the world of making money online so I

hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video