How She Makes $75,000 A Month From Blogging

Be Strategic About Everything If You Want A Blog That Makes You Money

The striking numbers on the Youtube video titled How I Make $75,000 Per Month Blogging caught my attention when it showed up on my explore page.

I love content like this as they are a wonderful reminder of just what is possible with clarity, determination and a little bit of grit.

With the events of recent years, I have been feeling somewhat overwhelmed with social media in general and also the changing direction of my own business. More and more I have been being pulled towards the idea that I really want to be spending more of my time writing and not doing all of the bazillion other things that are leading me to feel a little bit frazzled.

I have been blogging of a sense, for many years though have never really gone deep with it. It’s always just been an extension of the emails that I write to my audience. Though I’m not afraid to get on camera to film a video or a live session, I know the best way I communicate with my clients and potential new ones is through my words.

I am not the best writer, my spelling is pretty shocking. But as we all know that consistency beats skill time and time again.

I really get the feeling that blogging is making a comeback, or maybe it never really went away, it was just something that I wasn’t solely focused on, so I’d love to hear other perspectives on this.

In this article, I wanted to outline how she is making an incredible $75k a month via more traditional blogging methods, and how I intend to use this on my own blogging journey going forward and hope that it can be insightful to you too.

The Background

Sophie Lee set up her blog By Sophia Lee in 2018, at the time when she was juggling being a full-time college student out of her dorm room. Over the last 4 years, she has built the blog which started out as a blog for college students to help them with decorating, organising and cleaning hacks. She achieved her first $1000 month within the first year.

As she has grown and evolved, so has her blog. Although the original dorm rooms posts are still there, she is now also sharing more on interior design, decorating and making your first apartment look like it’s something worthy of being featured in a magazine.

She didn’t make the money by starting out writing blogs about blogging, she was blogging about the things that she was doing in her own life to make her the best student. It was a business (B) to consumer ( C) blog. I think I personally have grown tired of business coaches and courses selling you on how to earn $$$ doing ____ but they have only ever sold courses about building courses a B to B model.

She found her niche and went all-in on it. It’s only now she is starting to produce more B to B content and sharing her journey on blogging once she had already established a highly profitable business first.

How She Did It

Sophia Lee generated her income through more traditional blogging on a self-hosted WordPress website.

With a clear strategy and progression over the 4 years here is how she did it:

Year 1

She got her blog up and running with a self-hosted WordPress blog after googling how to do it and setting most things up herself.

• Tip 1 — Take some time to make it look clean and professional and invest in a good WordPress theme. She recommends looking on Etsy for this or her personal favourite which is 17th Avenue designs.
• Tip 2 — Focus on getting views to your blog, the easiest way being Pinterest and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO Keywords). She solely used Pinterest for the first 3.5 years of her blog and took it to her first $30k month using Pinterest alone. She aims to have her website traffic coming from 50% Pinterest and 50% google search.

Once you have your page views up you can look at getting accepted to Ad agencies and get ads placed onto your articles. Many ad agencies require minimum page views per month and so it’s essential to get those views up first. She recommends using:

• Google Ads
• Media Vine
• Ad Thrive

Year 2

In her second year, she focused on affiliate marketing. By signing up for affiliate programmes and sharing affiliate links of the products she was using in her blog posts. She started simply with Amazon affiliates which only gives small percentage payments, but because she was driving large numbers to her blog, it still turned into paying out substantial sums.

• Tip — Always focus on the reader. Don’t just write posts to sell people, focus on writing posts that are actually going to help someone, aim to be as helpful as possible.
• Tip — Study your post analytics and get to know what type of article performs best, and write more of those.
• Tip — Learn Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), discover what people are searching for on the internet and create posts around those topics and be strategic about using keywords so that you can rank higher on google search.

Year 3

The blog was now starting to become more about her as the band, and so she started receiving a lot more questions. In this year she delved into growing the blog further via:

• Growing her email list — Through offering out free printables and getting more people on her email list. This way she could turn one time visitors into repeat visitors and could get more return customers onto her blog posts.
• Expanding social channels — Already sustaining a thriving business it was finally time to expand into Instagram and Youtube to be able to create an even deeper connection with her audience.
• Take on employees — Hiring a team so that she could continue expanding with the increased workload.
• Creating courses — To overcome the ever-increasing number of emails asking her how she was doing certain things, instead, she created courses to cover it all and start earning additional income.
• Physical Products — Created a physical planner for college students

All of this is pretty incredible growth from someone who is still only 23 years of age. Now into year 4, she is focusing on interior design, investing in properties and flipping them to grow her business as an interior designer.

My Takeaways

What I am taking from all of this is how strategic each thing was. She focused on one thing, went all-in on it, worked really damn hard on that one thing. She made each stage a success before jumping onto the next thing and something I can definitely take note of.

I get very easily distracted by the next shiny object and so I already have the email list, the products, programmes I sell. I am going to be using these tips, particularly focusing on the SEO aspect to make more progress on my own blogging journey, starting right here with being more consistent on Medium first and foremost before I go in and completely revamp my own website.

I won’t personally be focusing on using ad agencies when I get my new self hosted blog looking a little more professional. For one I don’t particularly enjoy reading blog posts that are cluttered with ads, it’s not something I want for my own reader's experience. Plus I only want to promote products that I actually believe in and use myself.

Going forward my strategy is going to be:

• Consistency with posting on Medium at least twice per week for the next 3 months.
• Get my own blog updated with a nice new theme and stay writing there in my niche of health and wellness.
• Learn more about optimising SEO and Pinterest
• Stay the course until it’s earning a decent income.

I hope that you too found value for your own blogging journey whether that is on your own WordPress blog or here on Medium.

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