I Launched A Health & Wellness Blog 6 Months Ago, It Just Got Monetised
Was It Worth The Time & Effort
Back in October of 2021, I wrote the article How She Makes $75,000 A Month From Blogging after I had started my journey here on Medium. I had no idea that blogs were still so huge and that this type of income was possible.
Right then I felt the pull to make big changes to the way that I was already doing blogging and indeed doing business as a health coach.
This decision was made back before I had hit my first $100 here on Medium. In fact, the above article was my first $100+ article and the one that started to get the ball rolling on this platform.
Though I had been writing blogs for years. There was no strategy behind it, I simply wrote about whatever I wanted and knew very little about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
I have since gone down a rabbit hole of all things blogging, from articles here on Medium, Youtube, Courses and Ebooks. I discovered that there is a lot more to creating a successful blog than stringing a few words together and putting it out into the world.
How It Started
I’m grateful for my writing journey here on Medium, it’s encouraged me to become a better writer, to become far more intentional about my topics and to spend more time with my writing, slowing it down and exploring my own style. I've experienced viral articles and the buzz that comes with that, and the articles that just, well flop.
Though Medium has never been my only source of income, it’s given me some nice bonus months but it’s incredibly inconsistent, but then so have I been with my writing.
Creating my own personal blog has meant that I am able to work towards finding my rhythm with writing and the potential of getting more return from each article as I repurpose the health-related articles onto my personal blog too.
I’m all for making my work go further. Smarter, not harder, right!
I had an existing blog that was about 15 years old. It was dated and there were issues with it that I didn’t have the technical know-how to be able to fix.
So I decided to start again from scratch. I thought it would also serve as a good experiment to see how long it would take to actually monetise.
I have very basic tech skills, though I am familiar with the platform WordPress.
So in early 2022, my new blog was born.
The Resources I Have Used
These resources have helped me the most to get things up and running. I believe I have sometimes learnt more from the free resources than the paid, but the paid resources are better for being able to learn and implement in a more strategic order. For me, that is more than worth the money that I have spent.
Free Resources
- Medium — There is so much information right here within this platform, though I know it is still officially paid if you are a member, but you could read 3 articles a month for free. Some of my favourite writers on blogging include Jenn Leach, Abena Talks and Victoria Kurichenko.
I have started to compile a list of some of my favourite blogging articles here:
Paid Resources
- Sophia Lee Perfecting Blogging Course ** — $139 (but I bought it as part of a bundle $249and got the perfecting Pinterest too, which I am yet to dive into)
- The Blog Startup by Meera Kothand **— £2.22 on Amazon Kindle
- Blog Accelerator: Earn $4000 a Month From Your Blog in 12 Months — eBook from Abena Talks — You can choose how much you want to pay for this book.
- RankIQ ** — $49 per month — Tool to help you easily find high search, low competition keywords. I’m still really getting into this as I find it much harder to write for pre-prescribed SEO-focused keywords. But this tool helps to cut down time on finding the ones that you can be most likely to rank for.
The Set Up
Here is what I used to set up the blog and how much each thing cost.
- 17th Avenue Premium WordPress Theme **— $99 = £76.93
- Domain name registration with GoDaddy — £5.99
- SSL Certificate Go Daddy — €83.99 = £69.89
- Jetpack Plugin — $9 per month = £7.87
How Much I Earnt At First Stage of Monetisation
In this part, I’m not including the money I earnt from selling my coaching programme. As that has been ongoing for some time and can’t accurately attribute it to the new website.
This includes only money from affiliates and ads placed on my website, as these are the new income sources and the ones that I want to work on building along side a new product suite to compliment my coaching work.
These amounts are minuscule, but like when I started writing here on Medium, the $0.24 that I earned in the partner programme showed me that it was indeed possible. Now my highest month here on Medium is north of $1,500.
So whilst the money right now is pretty small, I’m not discrediting its significance.
I hope you are ready to have your socks blown off!!!
- £2.07 — Amazon Affiliates
- £0.01 — WordAds
So a whopping £2.08 for the month of July with just 695 views.
Lessons Learnt
As I read this back I feel I have made out that it was super easy to get the blog up and running. It was not.
Getting the theme set up, and connecting the website to my email provider (a slight coding error here was incredibly frustrating), installing the SSL certificate was beyond my basic capabilities and I had to call in help on a few things I really struggled with to get working. All the how-to’s on google search was just not helping.
Luckily I have a good network around me and found some people who very kindly helped me get the issues sorted for free. But it all took way longer than I would have liked, but time was the price I paid to get a blog set up and running for just £160.68
In all, it probably would have been more cost-effective to sit and write more whilst I paid someone else to set everything up. But at the time, that was money I just didn’t have, so I did what I had to do.
I set about re-purposing some of my best-performing medium articles and transferred them over to the new site. I currently have 30 posts live, and though it’s still a work in progress, I’m happy with the outcome so far.
I’m now beginning to work through the courses and ebooks I purchased and am learning more about this business of blogging and how to do it right.
And by doing it right I mean making SEO a priority.
I already had an existing audience a small email list of 2,500 plus my social media accounts. This meant I got a few readers trickling in from the get-go, but there is still such a long way to go to get anywhere near the page views or income of what you would consider a successful blog.
Ranking for SEO can take time and now is all about laying the foundations, though I have just started to see a few views coming in from google searches.
Going forward I will be
- Prioritising high search, low competition keywords in most articles.
- Though a lot of bloggers make a big chunk of their money through ads, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to place them on my website as I often find them annoying when reading others' blogs. WordAds is WordPress’s own advertising function and I like that there is just one small ad placed at the bottom of posts. So I’ll leave it on there but I don’t have big expectations for this revenue stream.
- Expanding my product suite as I have lots of ideas for digital products, physical products and short self-study courses.
- There is still the post-every-day advice out there to really get a blog up and going, but I know that’s not a sustainable rate for me. I’ll be working on creating 2–3 good-quality longer-form posts per week.
I’m always excited to see a new project come to life and will be interesting to see how my blogging journey evolves as I continue to improve.
Do you have any more blogging tips or advice? Anything I may have missed?
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