Can you make money blogging every single month, even with a small audience?

Good morning lovely dreamers, and welcome to another blogging lesson here on Dreaming of Butterflies! 

Today's blog post is going to be a slightly longer one, just because there's a lot of info about our journey as bloggers and all the important lessons that we've learned along the way that we want to share with you, so grab your favourite drink, get comfortable, and enjoy.

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10+ Important blogging lessons you learn when you start a blog

There are quite a few lessons that you can (and need to) learn when you first start blogging, but one of the most important ones is the one that motivates and drives most bloggers. 

From the small to the big ones (even if they don't admit it), everyone wants one thing. And that is how to make money from a blog.

We were always open about this, and we're always going to admit it.

When we first said "OK, we're going to do this", we knew that we would only be doing it if we could make some money with it. It didn’t have to be much (and still doesn’t have to be), it just had to be something. To make our efforts worth something.

At the time, when we first began, we were living in Spain, and the only one with a steady job was Andy, I only had some photo gigs once in a while, and we couldn't live the life we wanted - filled with travel and good local food.

Living on one income is manageable, and you can live a comfortable life, but it still requires some sacrifices, that definitely include less travel and less eating out.

While browsing Pinterest one day, I started coming across pins about making money online, writing, and blogging as a profitable side hustle. 

I had a brief experience with writing articles for someone else right before starting our blogging journey, just to see if I could do it, and I liked writing so much, that it fuelled me even more.

But creativity will only get you this far.

Actually making money from your blog takes some experimenting, learning a ton of new skills and last but not least, some serious planning. We’ll talk about all of that and more today. 

But enough with the chit-chatting! Let’s get to it!

How to make money blogging every single month, even with a small audience

To make it easier for you to understand and digest this information, as always, we’ve made a list! And this is what we’re going through together today:

1. When can you start making money with your blog?
2. Learn How Blogs make money
3. Use Pinterest and social media to grow your audience (and make money)
4. Create freebies and start growing a mailing list
5. Create a blogging system that works for you

When can you start making money with your blog?

Making money from a small blog is possible, and from day 1, IF you focus on 3 main things before you launch:

• Finding your niche & audience

Finding your niche sometimes is super easy, but sometimes it can take a while to figure it out, so don’t despair.

What we recommend to do when you’re starting out is to create a list of topics you love to talk about, that you know you can expand on and keep on talking about for quite a while, but most importantly, that people will want to read about.

Remember: your blog is not about *you*, it’s about your audience. After all, your readers are the ones that will help you make money with your blog.

Now you have to take that list and try to find a link between those topics.

The key to blogging success is to try to find *that thing* that makes your blog special, that makes your blog interesting and useful for your specific audience.   

On our blog, for example, we started with Lifestyle, fixating on life hacks and “pain points”. In time, it evolved into a “self-improvement, lifestyle with a geeky twist blog”, tailored specifically for one type of audience, but with *us* sprinkled through.

• Finding your voice, your tone, your style

Some of us bloggers are not professional writers just need a space to share our thoughts and build our audience for our new book. We’re just simple people, trying to help others while making some space in our brains. (No, just me? Oh, okay then). 

And that is perfectly fine.

Having a blog does not require any degrees or special education, and as long as what you share is quality information that has a positive impact on people’s lives, you're on the right track.

You will notice, however, that your writing style will change over time, as you keep practising it. You’ll get better at opening up to your readers, your vocabulary will improve and your true personality will shine through more and more with each blog post.

What you need to focus on in the beginning is to make sure that you are friendly enough that people can get to know you and relate to you and your story, but distanced enough that your audience is always first. Less “I do this”, more “you might want to try this” if you know what I mean.

• Starting to build it even before the launch

To be able to monetise it, and from day 1 of launch, you will need to have a few articles posted and ready to read on your blog when you officially launch it, not just one or two, we recommend around 20 to 30 to start off.

It might sound a bit insane, but keep in mind that if you want to be approved for Google AdSense and Media.net’s ad programs, they have to see that you are serious about blogging, and are actively building it.

And as soon as your blog is out there, you must focus on finding the most appropriate ways to monetize it (see no. 2 below).

Also, a blog has no value without an audience, so growing a following online before you launch is a good way to assure success in your quest of creating an income through your blog from day 1.

 Learn How Blogs make money

Each blog is different, so not everyone uses all of these to make money, and this influences how much income you bring home at the end of each month.

The most popular ways of making money with a blog are:

• Affiliates

These affiliates can be any one of your personal favourite brands that you can link to through Amazon’s Affiliate Program, to new and exciting brands that you could find from Affiliate Marketplaces like ShareASale to independent websites and even other bloggers’ affiliate programs as well.

If you don’t know how to start with affiliates, we recommend going through your home and computer and making lists of all the categories relevant to your particular niche, and all the brands you already use and love.

Next, just do a little research and see if they have an affiliate program on their own (simply google something like “brand name affiliate program” and see what comes up), or look for them on an affiliate market or program. 

All that’s left for you to do next is to integrate those products into your writing, but without being too “salesy”. Talk about how you solved problem “x” with product “y”, for example.

• Ads

For beginners, Google AdSense and Media.net are two of the biggest ad providers that can help you create some revenue from the first day of launch. It’s an easy and great way of generating your first passive income through the blog, while you master the other ways you can make money.

But please keep in mind that this only works if there is constant traffic to your website (see point 4 for that).

• Sponsors

Another great way to make some money, and one that is definitely preferred by most bloggers, is definitely doing some sponsored work. This means that someone else, either a brand or your fans pay you to write some content specifically for them.

Throughout the years, we’ve learned that you can make a great deal of money, even with a small online presence, if you just open yourself and your brand up to:

1. Brand collaborations

This can be with a brand you know and love, that is not necessarily a HUGE brand (as they tend to ask for a big following from you as well), but with small brands, or new brands that could be just right for your audience.

Just make sure to do your research and be 100% okay with linking your blog and your brand with theirs. 

If you are not honest about how you feel, and you’re only doing it for the money, your followers will know this, and you might end up losing in the long run.

2. Premium subscribers

If you have even more content that is more valuable than what you want to share for free, but you’re not quite there at the point to put it in an e-Book and sell it like that just yet, why not create a secret library for your subscribers?

This can be done directly on your blog, with a password-protected section and links to PayPal for payments, or you can build it someplace else entirely, like on buymeacoffee.com.  

• Products

And now, the big one: selling your own products. This is by far the best way to earn money through your blog. 

And depending on what type of products you want to sell and the quality of your work (always ALWAYS aim for HIGH QUALITY when you create products), your income can go from 1000$ per month to 30 times that (or even more). 

Here we’re talking about products like:

•  digital stuff (printables and printable bundles, e-Books, courses, planners, and so on), 
• physical products (jewellery, paintings, photos, 3D printed wedding favours),  

or if you’re really creative, but can’t make your own but know someone who can help with that (psst! Printful), print on demand products (from t-shirts, pillow covers, mugs, to leggings, etc.)

Keep in mind that these products need to be specific to your niche and actually help in some way your readers’ lives. That (and a good marketing strategy) is how you bring in more business and more sales, so focus on creating good products and learn the basics of social media marketing to help you build up interest for your business (see point 4).

• Services

In some cases, depending on your niche and what you want to achieve with your blog (why you made your blog, basically), you might want to use it to talk about some of your services.

This is very useful if you are a photographer, videographer, a wedding planner, a coach, any type of artist that creates personalised items, but also a designer (like a web designer), a web developer, a virtual assistant, a freelance writer and copywriter, and even a psychologist or a therapist.

As you probably figured by now, services can be used by anyone who has any useful skills, expertise and experience in any field to bring in more business through your blog. 

• Donations

Another great way to make some money with your blog is through donations. For this, the most important “ingredient” you’ll need is a very loving and giving audience. 

If your content is good, your traffic is good, your focus needs to be on your audience if you want them to donate more than their time to you. And last but not least, a platform through which to get those donations, like buymeacoffe.com, for example.

Use Pinterest and social media to grow your audience 

Never expect people to just come to you. Not in the beginning at least. 

You might have the best content, an awesome service or products to sell, and no one might ever find that out, simply because you’re not using the appropriate ways to bring readers to your content.

What you need to do is go back to the beginning, look at your audience and your niche, and find out where they like to spend their time online. 

Are they on Pinterest? TikTok? Instagram? Are they fighting on Twitter, lost in Facebook Groups, or debating stuff on Reddit? Or using YouTube as an entertainment and education platform?

Where your audience is, there is where you need to be ASAP. 

And Pinterest. Definitely on Pinterest. Why? It’s simple. Pinterest is like a visual Google, where you can find an answer for almost every problem you or your audience might have. 

To this day, more than 90% of our blog’s visitors come through Pinterest.

What you need to learn is how to create pins that go viral, and how to use Pinterest to your advantage (psst! It’s a mix of Group Boards and Tailwind). 

Through Pinterest Group Boards and using Tailwind to manage them and constantly create a buzz, you’ll be able to get traffic to your blog fast, and also have more and more eyes on your content.

You can find relevant Group Boards on Pingroupie, but whatever your niche may be, please please please stay away from low-quality groups, where people just post whatever they want and no one reposts. They do you more harm than good.

After you’ve finished setting up your Pinterest, move on to your audience’s favourite Social Media platform, learn everything you can about it, and start building a following and a relationship with your audience there. 

Create freebies and start growing a mailing list

An email list is the bread and butter of a blogger. Think of it this way. If your audience gave you their personal information (name and email), that means they are definitely interested in what you’re saying, and they definitely want more from you.

Freebies are the best way to get people interested in what you want to sell them, and they are like an amuse-bouche for a great dinner. It makes them hungry for extra information, and if they join your mailing list because of those freebies, they definitely want more. 

These freebies can be, for example, a chapter of your next eBook, one product from a bundle, or the first lesson of your next course. Get creative with them, but don’t give away too much!

Create a blogging system that works for you

After you’ve decided which hosting and writing platform you are going to use for your blog (it may be WordPress and Bluehost or Webflow, depending on what you want to achieve), and you’ve actually started blogging, you have to create a working schedule, a system, to help you be consistent and organised.

Because you know by now that bloggers have to wear MANY hats. 

And keep in mind that you won’t make money with your blog unless you keep on building on it, and are constantly creating buzz around it, so having an overall plan and working on it every single day is CRUCIAL.

Create a list of your blogging tasks. Ours looks something like this:

• Write down ideas & Research topics 
• Plan content 
• Do the work
  1. Write SEO friendly posts
  2. Proofread
  3. Create Pins and other Social Media promo content
  4. Share share share!
  5. Write emails and keep on growing your mailing list

But yours might look different, and that’s perfectly okay! Just make sure to work on one thing at a time.

Next, create a working schedule specific to you and your lifestyle. The important thing to do is to constantly work on your blog, and treat it as a real business, if you want to make real money from it, not just the occasional pennies. 

You might want to plan ahead and use the last days of the month to write down ideas and research topics for the month(s) to come, then prepare your content. 

Then when your blog posts are done and proofread, focus on the social media part. Get inspired by the top “dealers” in your niche, but please don’t copy and paste what they are doing. 

Use them as inspiration for your content, see what people like or don’t like about what they are doing, and use that to bring your own content to life.

And again: consistency is key.

If you’re organised well, you can use 2 days per month to create all the social media content you need for the next month (by shooting the photos and videos and editing them), and create a schedule for your weekly posts.

Whatever you choose to do, just make sure you are consistent, and you keep working at it. Consistency is the key to success after all!

Aaaaaaaand that’s all for today, lovely dreamers! If you’ve enjoyed our ramblings about how to make money blogging every single month, even with a small audience, and you found any value in what we said here, please make sure to share it, pin it, tweet it! We would surely appreciate it!

QOTD: What’s your favourite way of making money with your blog?