It’s a known fact that the Internet has forever changed the way the world consumes information.
Since the “dot com” explosion in the early 2000s, websites became popping up about virtually every topic, niche, hobby, etc. with content being produced by people of all ages.
I personally experienced this first hand with the creation of a professional wrestling website in 1999. Back then, WCW Monday Nitro and WWF Monday Night Raw were watched by more people each week than Monday Night Football!
Since it’s fake (the outcomes rehearsed ahead of time), big media outlets such as ESPN didn’t cover it, setting the stage for a perfect niche website.
So at the tender age of 15, I found myself running a website that was receiving millions of visitors each month. Eventually, I had signed enough ad contracts to where I was making more money than the average person, double my age.
Now this was back in the early ages of the Internet where I had to first learn how to code up a website, put the files on a web server, and then produce my content. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. It took a lot of time followed by lots of trial and error.
Not to mention that in the early 2000s web hosting was much more expensive. For the amount of bandwidth my site consumed, my hosting bill averaged around $600 a month. So there were a lot of moving parts that had to be configured.
Nowadays anyone can start a blog. With the rise of blogging platforms such as WordPress, it only takes a couple dollars a month, along with a couple of clicks of a mouse, to have a website up and running – ready to start producing content. No longer do you have to be a coder or hire a developer to have your own website/blog.
Because of this, competition is a lot fiercer than it used to be and it’s not as simple as “signing a couple ad contracts” to start making money.
A lot of Entrepreneurs have recognized the blogging craze and if you start searching Google, you’ll find a number of different tutorials that teach you how to setup your own blog. However, in my opinion, none of them do a good job showing how to make money or how to monetize your website.
The majority of the tutorials I’ve seen, walk through the exact steps to registering a domain, installing WordPress, choosing a theme, and adding plugins but then leave the monetization up to applying for Google Adsense.
For those of you that have done this, you are well aware that Google Adsense can sometimes feel like watching paint dry. It takes a crap-load of traffic in the right niche to make any amount of money this way.
Sure, it’s possible, but there are lots of other ways to make money with a blog that relying on displaying banner advertisements.
Back in 2011, I started a blog with a partner about Affiliate Marketing. We got really creative with our monetization strategy and it ended up becoming a very successful venture:
I don’t post this to brag, but rather to use as motivation because there wasn’t anything particularly special about my partner and I, besides being experts in the field of affiliate marketing.
The same lies true with my professional wrestling website back in the early 2000s. I created a website around a topic I considered myself an expert in and turned it into a successful venture.
Does every blog make a million dollars? Well no… Just like any business, you will get out of it as much as you’re willing to put in it. But is it possible? Absolutely!
Who would have ever thought that you could make money from a pro wrestling blog? The affiliate marketing niche is full of other bloggers who also have million dollar success stories but also stories of people who start out only to fail when money doesn’t come fast enough and they move on to the next project.
I decided to record a presentation on some tips and tricks to creating a successful blog that you should find useful:
[…] Case Study: How I Made $1.7 Million From A Blog […]