Back in April of 2020, I wrote a post all about how I started a new site during quarantine. I started this new project at a time when this website, Goats On The road (our baby for the past 8 years), was suffering greatly due to COVID.
Saying it like that makes it sound as though this site actually had COVID.
While it certainly wasn’t that serious, we did suffer some pretty intense losses in traffic and income on this blog (luckily it has mostly recovered now).
It wasn’t so much viewing the income and traffic drop that hurt (although that was a bit uncomfortable I’m not going to lie), it was the thought that our pride and joy, a site we had poured our heart and soul into for nearly a decade, was seemingly dying best in front of us.
Working on my new blog while locked down in Portugal
But this post isn’t a “woe is me” tale of a travel blogger complaining about having no traffic when there are people in much worse situations.
Nope.
This is a story of a project I started during those dark moments in our blogging career.
A project that breathed new life into our company minds and gave me and Dariece new purpose and goals during a time when there wasn’t much else to do but stay inside and work on the laptops.
I know that a lot of people who read this blog either have their own website/blog or have always thought of starting one.
So I hope this extensive case study will be the inspiration (or the kick in the butt) that so numerous people need to get a new side hustle started.
In this article, I’m going to share with you the progression of the new blog I started a year ago, much the way we did a few years back with our post about Goats On The Road’s progression called “From hobby To Career: The evolution of Our Blog“.
I’ll show you my traffic and income each month and discuss how I was able to grow the site from $0 to $8,483 per month in just 12 months.
I’ll also show you how you can replicate my successes (and avoid common failures) with your own new project, ought to you choose to start a blog today (if you do want to start one, Click here to get my totally free blogging course).
Note: I share my particular income from my site to inspire others to hopefully start turning their passions into profit through blogging. If you’re not interested in blogging or online entrepreneurship, then this post isn’t for you. check out other amazing travel jobs in our sustaining travel section.
Why Did I start a new Blog?
I’ve been preaching to my students in my Beginner blogger course and my totally free SEO training Course for years that it’s possible to build a new site and grow it to the point that it can earn a good income in a year.
But when I tell it to people who aren’t in my courses, I always had the same pushback.
“Easy for you to say. You started your site 8 years ago when there were hardly any blogs online and there was no competition.”
My rebuttal was always that while the competition is higher these days, so is the opportunity.
With so numerous new companies starting to understand the value of being featured on blogs, it’s simpler than ever to grow and monetize.
Nevertheless, deep down I was also curious to know if I really could create a successful site again. all of those naysayers really got into my head!
I was thinking…
“What if Goats On The road was just a fluke?”
We have had quite a few of our blogging students from our courses use our SEO blog growth techniques to grow their sites and quit their jobs to blog full-time, so I knew that the techniques I use still work for new blogs, but I had to show it to myself.
And so, in the middle of March 2020 I started a new site around another topic that I’m passionate about (not travel), and on April 1st, 2020, I published my first post.
How Did I pick a Niche?
This is one of the most essential steps when starting a new blog or website. Every blog needs a niche. Gone are the days of blogging about anything you want to blog about, and still get enough traffic to earn a living.
You need to have a niche.
And I don’t imply just “travel”, or “tech”, or “cooking”. You need to niche down even more than that and be much more specific.
Even Goats On The road wasn’t successful when we were just about travel, so we eventually niched down into remote work and remote jobs that can fund a permanent digital nomad lifestyle.
The passions To profit Method
For my next site, I knew that I needed to be in a niche that I was passionate about.
A lot of people will start a site about anything they see as monetizable, like “bestyogapants.com”, even though they’ve never done a ‘downward dog’.
While that’s absolutely fine and I’m not knocking it, I knew that if I was going to go all-in on this new site, it had to be something that I was interested in, and something that I can earn an income from.
So I went through a few of the hobbies and interests that I have and after a pretty extensive market study, I picked one.
Initial Market Study
Even though I had picked a niche that was quite specific, I needed to make sure of two things.
People were actually searching in Google for this topic
The phrases they searched into Google were potentially lucrative
After a lot of work diving into the competition and the volume of search terms, I knew it was a viable niche to get into.
Monetization Strategy
If I were starting a site just as a hobby to share my stories with pals and family, choosing keywords and then planning a monetization technique wouldn’t matter.
But as I was building this site as a business, I needed to know how I was going to earn that income.
Monetization Methods:
Ads: These days in-content ads (like the ones you see on this page) have become so well-optimized that they are typically a monetization technique in themselves. There are thousands of sites (particularly in the home cooking niche) that earn terrific money with little or no other monetization technique besides lots of traffic and in-content ads. While this was part of my strategy, I certainly planned on diversifying.
Amazon: even though Amazon slashed their commissions at the very start of COVID (had they not, my new site would be over $10,000 per month today), I knew that I could still make a good income from Amazon so it was my #1 affiliate strategy.
Backup Affiliates: Amazon seems to slash their affiliate commissions every 2-3 years, so I needed other affiliates as a backup. I searched around in my niche and fortunately found quite a few. They never convert as well as Amazon because everyone is much more comfortable ordering with their Prime account, but they have higher commissions and longer cookie durations that could bridge the gap a bit ought to Amazon commissions get lowered again.
Sponsors: I knew that the big companies in my space had some money to spend on advertising so I knew that I could get them on board once I had enough traffic and sales numbers. hopefully on an ongoing monthly basis.
YouTube: I hadn’t planned on this from the get-go, but after a couple of months working on the blog, I chose to start a YouTube channel for it as well and hopefully monetize that down the road.
Starting The Website
Starting and developing a site is really easy and this only took me a few hours in total.
I purchased my domain name, paid for hosting ($106 for 3 years using this discount with Bluehost), and picked a beautiful-looking design template for my new site.
Voila, after a few tweaks here and there, I had my site up and running using Elementor. The site is practically the exact same design and set-up now as it was the day I started it.
The Goal
It’s always essential to imagine goals when starting any new project and for me with a new blog/business, I always have a purpose goal and a monetary goal.
Purpose Goal
The purpose of this new site was to share my passion with my readers and hopefully help them to be much more sustainable. I also had a couple of traffic goals which helped me to guarantee that I was reaching enough people to have an impact.
My traffic goal for this new site was 25,000 sessions after the first year. I actually doubled that — which is fantastic.
Monetary Goal
There are numerous ways to monetize a site or blog in every niche. When it concerned monetization with this site I had two goals in mind. The “Acceptable” goal and the “Best Case” goal.
Acceptable goal ($1,500 / month): I told myself that I would be pleased if this site made $1,500+ per month after one year. That would show that you can earn a minimalist life-supporting income from blogging in a year. And, when living in a much more inexpensive country, that money goes pretty far.
Best case goal ($3,000 / month): While I’d be pleased with $1,500, I really wanted this site to earn $3,000 per month or much more after a year. I figured at that point it’s pretty much a full-time-job-replacing income in 12 months and that would be amazing.
Hiring Writers
I know a lot of people are going to read this and think that it’s a substantial investment to hire writers, and it is.
If you’re thinking of starting your first blog, you’ll probably skip this step because you can write all of the messages yourself, as long as you know how to write a terrific blog post.
My new site averages around 5 messages published per week. These messages have an average word count of around 2,000 words.
Using the productivity techniques and tools I instruct in my Beginner blogger Course, it’s quite possible to complete a 2,000-word post in 2 hours.
This implies that if you were to write for yourself instead of paying for writers, you would have to spend an extra 10 hours per week working on your new blog.
In my case, even if I wrote all of the messages myself, I’d still be working fewer than 20 hours per week on this site.
But I didn’t have the luxury of time!
I’m also running 3 other sites and 2 blogging courses which take up the rest of my working hours each week (plus I plan to travel non-stop when it’s possible to do so).
So, I chose to hire writers for two reasons:
Like I said… I didn’t have time.
I could hire people who have much more proficiency than me.
So where did I find these writers? I found them in 2 ways.
Upwork
Upwork is the largest community of freelancers anywhere online.
I typed in my niche into the search box on Upwork and found about 10 results that looked like they’d fit the bill, which wasn’t a lot considering there are over 18 million freelancers on the platform.
I didn’t just hire them best away. I created extensive blog post templates to make sure they follow all of the steps to write terrific SEO blog posts.
My plan was to have them follow these templates closely, so I sent them examples to have a look at. If they figured they would be able to fill the design template with their own expertise, they’d relocation onto the next step.
Next, I interviewed each of the writers just by chatting back and forth with them on Upwork. primarily I wanted to make sure they were complete experts on the topics I was covering and I needed to decide which of them would write which content.
Eventually, I narrowed down 4 writers who started working with us.
? pro Tip: building a motivated and faithful team is essential. I credit report a lot of the success of this company with the group of experts I was able to put together. If you are hiring people for your business, don’t rush it. The team is the foundation of the company you are creating.
Here’s a little hack. If you’re searching for writers for your blog, type into Google the niche and then a totally free blogging platform like blogger.com or wordpress.org (ie: “Paintball blog blogger.com”).
Then look at their blogs, read a few messages and if they seem like a good fit, you can contact them to hire them.
The reason I add a totally free blogging platform like Blogger.com into the search is that this implies that they aren’t blogging full-time already. If someone is already blogging full-time and earning income, they probably don’t have spare time to freelance.
By finding bloggers on Blogger.com, WordPress.org, and the like, I was able to find hobby bloggers who were interested in earning a bit of side money blogging about things they were already writing about for free.
This is how I found a few of my writers and it’s worked out very well for me.
The blog gets Rolling
After a couple of weeks with my four new writers, we get into the swing of things. They submit 3 messages each every Friday and I spend my weekend editing the messages and scheduling them.
The publication calendar When We were at Max Publication
When I wasn’t editing blog posts, I was reaching out to other sites in my niche and contacts I had through blogging on Goats On The road to do guest messages and get my new blog’s name out there.
In total, I did about 35 guest post