I am recording a few thoughts on the podcast Untapped with Natalie Sisson, episode 46 Six Figure Steps to Building a Profitable Blog. So, this episode was published on December 4, 2019. In this episode, Natalie Sisson has a conversation with the blogger Kate Kordsmeier of the blog Root + Revel.
Kate first started off as a full-time freelance journalist about 10 years ago. After confronting her biases and assumptions about blogging and bloggers she found her way into the blog space. Around his time she started to have some health complications dealing with symptoms of polycystic ovarian syndrome, leaky gut syndrome and hypothyroidism which she managed to leverage into a six-figure business.
Place Ads on Your Blog from the Beginning
Kate didn’t really get into her content creation strategy, other than she wrote about health related to what she was going through, but she did discuss her different ways of monetizing her blog. From the very start, she monetized her blog by adding ads. Partially into the first year or maybe in the second year started affiliate marketing. She started off with Amazon, then reached out directly to brands to start working with them. She recommends that if you go into affiliate marketing, it’s best to work with brands, whose products you’ve actually tried and trust. So that increased her income.
Reach Out to Brands to Write Sponsored Posts
Kate’s next monetization strategy was to write sponsored posts once she got around 10,000 views per month. She reached out to companies directly and charged them $200 per post. She had an ephipany though; she knew of other bloggers who had only 2,000 views per month, but were $100 per post. Knowing that, that gave her confidence that she could charge what she was charging. At the time of the podcast publication (December 2019), I think she said she was charging, maybe $2,000 per post or something like that.
Create Your Own Products
In her third year, she began creating her own products and she just recently launched an online course. The course consists of her talking about how she built her blog, and how she was able to build into a six-figure blog and she proposes to help people reach that number much faster than she did.
Final Notes
Though Kate placed ads on her first blog, on another one, she chose not to in order to preserve the look of the blog. She also invested in her education by taking courses from other people and learned different blogging strategies from them. If her course exists, it may be worth checking out.
Thoughts originally recorded on June 29, 2022 and transcribed using https://otter.ai
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