Six-Figure Income Blogging

Introduction

Becoming a ProBlogger: Darren’s Story of Blogging
During the first year of my blogging career, I worked three jobs simultaneously, studied part-time, and blogged on the side.

A common misconception that first-time readers arriving at ProBlogger.net have is that the six-figure income I’ve earned from blogging was something that I achieved overnight. It wasn’t.

Though blogging has enabled a growing number of people to earn an income, the process is rarely a quick one. For this reason I’d like to share my own story of blogging — from hobbyist to full-time blogger.

So, grab a coffee, make yourself comfortable, and relax — this could take a little while.

Once Upon a Time...

In November, 2002, when I first hit “Publish” on my original (and short-lived) blog, I did so believing that this “blogging thing,” which I’d only just heard of that day, would be nothing more than a bit of fun.

I started this blog for a number of reasons, but it was largely out of curiosity, the idea of having a new hobby, and the hope that perhaps I might meet some new people with similar interests to mine.

At the time I was working three jobs.

My Three Jobs
My main job at the time was as a minister of a church, three days per week. It was a part-time job (I was not “the” minister but one of four working in a team), and my responsibility was to work with young people.

I was engaged to be married (to Vanessa, or “V,” as I call her) and trying to save for a wedding and pay off a car loan and college fees, so I had also taken on a number of part-time jobs (minister’s wages are not fantastic at the best of times, but part-time they are even less spectacular).

My second job was working for an online department store. Although that might sound interesting and useful for what was to come in blogging, it was not. I was the warehouse “dog’s-body,” and my job consisted largely of sweeping, cleaning, lifting boxes, packing orders, and other menial and boring tasks. Still, it helped pay the rent.

My third job was as a casual laborer. I was on-call with an employment agency and did all kinds of temping work ranging from mind-numbing production-line work on a conveyor belt to helping to assemble circuses (don’t ask).

Alongside these jobs I was finishing off my theology degree part-time — a long-term endeavor which took 10 years to complete.

This was my life that fateful day when I first got the taste for blogging.

Hobby Blogger
I’d like to say that at the moment I hit “Publish” on my first blog that the earth shook and a light from heaven came down and I was suddenly transformed into a full-time blogger — but as we all know, it usually doesn’t happen that way, and it didn’t for me.

In fact, for the first 12 or so months of my blogging very little changed. If anything, I became busier as a result of taking on an extra subject at college and leaving my job as a minister to lead a team starting a new, “emerging church.”
Blogging at this time was a hobby and a way to connect with others who were thinking through issues of the “emerging church.”
My blog LivingRoom (www.livingroom.org.au/blog) became reasonably popular in emerging-church circles that year, and my site-hosting and ISP costs (I was still on dial-up) began to escalate.

It was after about a year of blogging that I accidentally started Digital Photography Blog; it was originally a photoblog, but no one looked at my images, and the review that I wrote of my camera got a lot of traffic. In an attempt to help cover my hosting costs, I decided to add some AdSense ads and the Amazon Affiliate program to this blog. I just wanted to cover expenses.

I quickly discovered that my hope of covering my costs was realistic, not simply because of AdSense, but also because I put it on an established blog that was getting several thousand readers per day (this is important to keep in mind).

Even with established traffic the earnings in the early days were not high. In my first month (October, 2003), I averaged about $1.40 per day, and that was with lots of curiosity clicks from my readers; by November, I’d hit $3 a day.

The money was minimal, but it covered my costs, and I began to wonder if with the extra few dollars a month I might be able to save up for a new computer (up to this point I was blogging on dial-up from a six-year-old PC that worked most days). My other lofty goal was to save for a professional blog design.

December saw daily earnings hit $6 per day, January $9, February $10, and March $15 — hardly big dollars, but I began to wonder what would happen if I saw the same sorts of increases in income over a longer period of time. By that I don’t mean adding $2 to $3 to the daily average per month, but what would happen if I could sustain 30-, 40-, or even 50-percent growth each month?

I began to think in terms of exponential growth.

Part-Time Blogger
Around this time, I had a little more time on my hands and was in need of another part-time job.

My study was winding down (I finally graduated), and other jobs ended. “V” (my wife by now) began to hint that maybe I should start looking for another part-time job (rightfully so), and we decided that when I finished my degree at the end of June, I’d need to get serious about finding another two days of work per week. All this time I was secretly doing the calculations in my mind to see how much I’d need to earn per day to be able to call blogging my part-time job.

April’s earnings came in and averaged around $20 per day, and I realized that I just might have myself a part-time job already. The beauty of blogging income is that it earns you money seven days per week, so I totaled $140 per week.

I began to work harder (largely after hours and late into the night), with the hope of getting earnings up high enough to convince “V” to let me pass on getting a “real” part-time job and to concentrate on blogging.

The work paid off: In May earnings hit $32 per day, and by the end of June, I’d broken $1,000 in a month for the first time and was bringing in $48 per day.

It was crunch-time, and “V” and I had to consider our next move. I could probably keep growing things each month by working after hours on blogging and go find another job — or I could put the two free days that had been taken up by study into blogging and see if I could make a go of it.

I decided to put six more months of effort into blogging to see where it would end up. At the end of the six months, “V” and I would assess the situation again — the threat of getting a “real job” still loomed. I also got my new computer and the professional blog design that I’d been eyeing.

I’ll pause here in my story to say that this was a bit of a freaky moment for both “V” and me. Neither of us had started a small business, and though I’ve always had something of an entrepreneurial spirit, we are both fairly conservative people in many ways. Although the figures indicated that there was potential on many other levels, it just seemed plain weird.

I mean, who makes their income blogging? Needless to say, we didn’t tell many people of our decision, and when we did tell a few family and friends, there were plenty of raised eyebrows and lots of comments like, “That’s nice, but are you going to get a real job?” and, “How’s your little hobby business going?”
I’ll stop going into the monthly earnings at this point except to say that investing the two days per week into blogging proved to be one of the best decisions we made. I will stress that this decision came after I’d already been blogging for 19 months and after establishing a number of blogs that were earning reasonable money.

Quitting jobs is not something I recommend people just do off-the-cuff in their early days of blogging. Work up over time, because though it worked out for me, there are plenty of others for whom it has taken a lot longer, and some for whom it just hasn’t worked at all.

Throughout the second half of 2004, I continued to put two days per week into blogging while maintaining another three days a week of other work (some church work and some warehousing). It was more than two days per week in practice because I continued to work long hours in the evenings to keep things moving forward, and at times worked literally around the clock (like during the Olympics when I partnered with another blogger to run a blog on the games).

This was a time when I began numerous blogs (I had 20 at one point) and experimented with many different income streams and advertising systems. It was during this time that I also started blogging seriously about blogging and had an active blog-tips section on my LivingRoom blog. This didn’t go down too well with some of my readers there, and so I decided to move all of those tips to a new blog called ProBlogger.net. It launched on September 23, 2004.

Full-Time Blogger — Eventually
By mid December of 2004 we had pretty much decided that 2005 would see me go full-time as a blogger. I’d already ditched most of my warehousing work because the earnings from blogging had continued to rise, and my paid church work had ended as we transitioned the church to a voluntary leadership model.

All was going well, with some amazing figures in terms of earnings in November and December, until what felt a little like disaster happened in mid December. Google did one of its notorious updates where some bloggers go way up in search results and others go way down — I was in the latter group and most of my blogs virtually disappeared from Google, taking with them almost three-quarters of my traffic and earnings. Ouch!

Things looked a little uncertain for the first time in more than six months, and I wondered if the next Google update would see things back to where they were or get worse. The Google update in mid December left us at a level where we could still get by, but it was time for a contingency plan. I even went out and got another part-time job for a while.

The next Google update brought things back to a level just under what they were before. The experience did teach me many lessons, including the importance of diversifying your interests, not relying only on search-engine traffic, and expecting the unexpected when working online.
2005 was a massive year. I worked the part-time job that I’d got during the “Google crash” and worked full-time on my blogging (a juggling act, but both were worthwhile). I continued to diversify my efforts, which resulted in new blogs and partnerships, including developing a course called Six Figure Blogging with another blogger, Andy Wibbels. The name for the course came as I realized that I’d in fact grown my blogging to a point where I earned more than $100,000 per year from the medium — a staggering realization.

Since 2005 the business has continued to evolve with a number of developments including:
• Starting a blog network — b5media — with a small group of other bloggers — b5media began as a handful of blogs networked together but grew to be over 300 blogs which employed hundreds of blogs from around the world. The business took on $2 million of venture-capital investment in 2006 and has continued to grow.

• Launching of TwiTip.com — With the rise in Twitter I saw an opportunity to create a Twitter Tips blog.

• Moving into ebook publishing — As I saw the economy begin to decline in 2008 I started making plans for diversifying my income by selling products of my own. In 2009, I launched two ebooks from my main two blogs: “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” and “The Essential Portrait Guide.” In 2010, I launched a second photography ebook called “Photo Nuts and Bolts.” Numerous other e-books are currently in production.

• ProBlogger community — As another diversification move, I started ProBlogger.com, a community companion site for ProBlogger.net. This paid membership site has grown to well over 2000 members and is a place where bloggers gather to take the principles taught on the free blog further.



Lessons from My Journey
So why am I telling this story? Is it just a self-gratification thing? I have enjoyed reminiscing, but there’s more to it than that. The main reason I wanted to tell the story is because I think it’s important to keep emphasizing a number of points:
1. Blogging for an income takes time. Although there are stories of people making good money from blogs faster than I have (I’ve been at it since 2002, remember), there are many others whose growth has been slower. I’ve had my share of luck, have worked insane hours, and I started out at a time when blogging was a lot less competitive than it is now. All of these things have contributed to my success. It took me more than 1.5 years to be able to call blogging a part-time job, and another year before I went full-time. Building up to going pro as a blogger takes time.

2. Take it one step at a time. Unless you have a massive pile of cash somewhere or a sugar daddy (or mommy) to cover your expenses, you need to approach blogging professionally one step at a time. My approach was to always have a backup plan and to increase the time I dedicated to blogging only gradually as it started to show me earnings that justified it. My wife and I decided what level of income I needed to earn and agreed that as long as blogging was bringing in less than that, I would need other work. We put a time limit on it. If income hadn’t reached the level we wanted within that time frame, I would have been looking for work. Though this might sound a little rigid or a bit of a downer, I didn’t want to run off ahead of “V” in my own direction without our decisions being joint ones that we were both comfortable with. “V” has been incredibly supportive in all this and has allowed me