8 income ideas for beginner bloggers (how I make $70K/month)

hey guys welcome to silicon valley girl today we're going to talk about how creators make money when they are small and how you can make money with a small blog but before we start i just wanted to introduce the term i don't know if you've heard of it but it is called creator economy and i think it's a buzzword here in silicon valley in 2021. you know if you have a buzzword in your startup that means you have high chances of raising money when we first came to silicon valley in 2015 buzzwords were drones ai and chatbots and we were kidding that if you wanted to raise money for your startup you needed to create a drone that oh there was also cbd a drone that delivers cbd via chatbot and uses ai to determine who's the best client etc so creator economy is this new buzzword and i'm actually super happy to be a part of creator economy because when i started on youtube and when i started doing youtube videos here in silicon valley most of my friends are like yeah that's cool but we're gonna continue building our startups and now people are suddenly realizing that the economy is moving from you know just starting your own business to starting a business around your creativity and uh if you just start a business as an entrepreneur you know that there are so many lawyers who would help you incorporate there are so many cpas who understand what's going on you know you're going to use quickbooks for your accounting matters you know that you could use brex as a credit card and you know where to go to ask for a loan for example to start your business when we're talking about creating as a business like i tried to find a cpa who would understand tax rules around youtube bloggers and i found one but it looked like so we worked for a year but it looked like he was also amateur because he didn't understand some things and i had to go back to like a normal cpa and we just use uh different cases from hollywood to determine what can be deducted and what cannot same with lawyers like i asked them for different things that they could help me with and they're like i've never done that before but i could try there are so many apps and services that are emerging these days to help creators build businesses to help creators make a living and i think the new american dream is not you know buying a house and buying car but actually building a business around what you love to do and this love can be creating content and i just feel amazed by what's going on right now and what we've seen recently is that we're moving from creator being someone who has millions of followers like we all look up to big bloggers big influencers but i think we're moving to a world where we would have a lot more creators or influencers or whatever you call them there is slight difference i think but anyways we're moving to a world where we're gonna have a lot of creators like every person who has something to say would become a creator but you would not necessarily need to have hundreds of thousands of followers to make a living from creating content you would just need your niche audience and i've recently read this article that was talking about whether founders should create content for their startups to attract customers or to raise money and the guy said like imagine you have 10 000 followers on twitter but their interests are all over the place they're interested in kittens they're interested in travel etc and compare it with a profile on twitter that only has two followers paul graham and elon musk like which profile would help you raise more money of course the second one so we're moving to a reality where it's important who follows you not how many people follow you and if you develop trust with your audience if you develop this niche where people who follow you are interested in the same topic as you there are so many other ways to monetize your blog even if you have less than a thousand followers even if you're not receiving your adsense revenue which starts at 1 000 followers and 4 000 hours of watch time on your channel and if we take my income what's happening these days is on average in the past three months i made around 70k gross income and by the way guys it took me six years to get here and this doesn't include all the taxes that i paid and does include expenses that i have to run a company so it includes a lot of different things but anyways out of these 70k i get around 17k from google adsense the rest comes from building a business around my audience in this video i wanted to share what you can do and which apps you could use to monetize your audience i'm going to start with another super inspiring example i'm taking this on-deck course for course creators and we have very very interesting guests and what i see these days is a lot of people create uh courses on notion and rome and there is a guy who has a notion youtube channel he has less than 10 000 views on each video but he launched the course on notion so his channel is about notion he launched the course and notion the course costs around 750 and he was able to get 400 signups when he launched it that means three hundred thousand dollars on a channel that posts less than four videos a month less than ten thousand views per video isn't that amazing like i imagine his adsense revenue is somewhere around maybe i don't know a thousand dollars a month maximum maybe even less so when you think of creating a course there are several platforms that you can use i use kajabi for my youtube creators course and by the way if you guys want to start on youtube and take my course and see my journey and learn hacks from me i have three different channels in two different languages the link will be below you can use thinkific they've just gone public you can also use teachable and i see a lot of influencers actually use teachable and udemy and i know there are a lot of people working on course platforms for creators so there are more to come the second way you can monetize is actually creating a community within your community on patreon and i love the story of patreon they actually valued at 4 billion dollars they've recently raised another round and i love this story patreon was created by a youtube creator who struggled to monetize with adsense and he was like youtube is not paying enough for me to focus on my art and support my family and i don't want to work many jobs and do youtube as a part-time i want to do it full-time so i created patreon there are so many ways you can monetize through patreon you could create content that is additional to whatever you're creating you could do live streams you could do private chats with you there are so many options there another way to monetize your blog is through hosting webinars and they could be either free or paid when i first organized my paid webinar it was actually back in 2018 i was inspired by another influencer who shared that she made like 20k from just one paid webinar i was like maybe i should try and i organized this webinar and we were able to make around ten thousand dollars and it wasn't topic of like building a business and i was so surprised that it's actually such a powerful tool first you can do one offs with like paid registrations it's up to you how you price your webinar but i i put a really low price tag because i already had more followers back then but if you're a smaller blog you can put a higher price tag and also webinars free webinars is a great start of the funnel if you're actually selling a course because you can create a webinar and then run it every day as a class and invite your audience to attend your webinar like every day at 7 00 pm where you talk about particular topic and then in the end you sell your product but it's also very important to be very straightforward with your audience whenever i hold free webinars i always tell my audience i'm gonna talk about this i'm gonna help you start a blog i'm gonna help you do this but also in the end i'm gonna announce my course so that you set expectations right because i think people are really tired of you know a lot of people creating a webinar and saying i'm gonna deliver that much value but then you come to this webinar it's just selling and selling and selling so my criteria for a successful webinar would be 15 minutes of very heavy intense educational content and then 10 to 20 minutes q a and selling your product and the sponsor of this video is webinar geek it's a software that actually helps you create amazing webinars helps you host everything helps you record them and launch them over and over again and this is something that i would highly recommend for everyone who is looking to create an online event webinar geek not only helps you host events it also helps you with marketing because you would want to send an email to people who attended your webinar you would also want to follow up with people who registered but never attended and webinar geek allows you to do that webinar geek also has analytics tools that actually help you realize where people dropped off because people say that in order to create a good webinar where people watch up to the very end and actually convert you need to reiterate maybe 10 times maybe 20 times and with webinar geek you will be able to analyze every single webinar see what's going on see where people dropped off improve reiterate do it once again and land on your perfect webinar register for a 14 day free trial in which you can try all the premium features for free check out the webinar geek link below another cool thing that's emerging and i really love it it's called substack substack is this platform where you can send emails to your followers a lot of people think email is dead because we're bombarded by emails from companies and when companies send out emails they're mostly promotional and they're very regular like i shopped at target the other day and now i get like three emails from them every single day that is overwhelming but when you subscribe to a newsletter from a person you expect this personal touch and i'm experimenting with my newsletter for creators as well by the way sign up if you're interested in this topic and i don't do it regularly i do it when i have time and when i have something to talk about and the emails are mostly text so mostly value and you can also put a paywall on your newsletters you can do one for free and you can do the rest behind the paywall and there is a guy who i follow on twitter his name is lenny rachelski 65 000 followers he's supposed to get well he's not like a huge huge creator he's supposed to get like what 50 57 likes 67 likes and he makes he shared i think over five hundred thousand dollars on his uh sub stack and he also launched a course recently and i think the price point would be around like a thousand per participant so again it's not about how many followers you have it's about who follows you and he developed this amazing trust within his twitter for being a great product guy because he used to work at airbnb and he used to create products himself and people follow him and they are ready to base so they really trust him and this is what blogging is about these days another app that i really like to use for my digital products and this is another way creators monetize is by creating a pdf or workbook or whatever you call it planner you can create different digital products but i use platforms called pay hip which is like super super intuitive you upload your file you create a landing page and boom you start selling and there is also another platform called ecwid created by russians but it's actually international they are based in san diego and it's also another thing that you can do as a creator with less than a thousand followers brand deals what we're also seeing is that companies get a lot more profit by advertising with smaller creators because again there is more trust and uh if you ask me and there are there have been several surveys where people were asked whether they would buy from a celebrity versus would they buy from a smaller creator i would definitely buy from a swallow creator because you know i know that i know kim kardashian gets paid a lot and she gets so many different contracts and i can't really tell whether she's genuine in recommending something when she's getting paid for it i just think smaller creators are more relatable and we tend to buy more from them we tend to trust them more and conversion rates are better and if you're looking for brand deals there are several platforms i could talk about you can also research podcorn tribe group.co paid and popularpays.com another way to monetize your blog is through affiliate links this is where i'm not super successful at because i make around 400 like compared to what i make from courses and brand deals this is not much i make three to four hundred dollars every month but what i see is that people trust me with choosing what to read they don't really trust me with makeup because when i post an affiliate link to makeup it's like they buy but they don't buy too much most of my affiliate income comes from recommending toefl and gmat books on my lingo marina channel again it's all about trust so you can register as an affiliate on amazon you can register as an affiliate at you know all the stores where you're shopping most of them would have an affiliate program but i feel that registering with amazon and then adding genius on top of that genius just helps you redirect people to the right amazon store based on where they're watching from because we're so international all of us these days and genius helped me raise my revenue by maybe forty percent i know lee abdel makes what like twenty thousand dollars an affiliate because his keyboard has been pretty successful that's amazing right and the last but not the least couple more apps that i wanted to highlight in this video only fans for creators who focus on content that tends to be blocked or banned on instagram and facebook or youtube content related to sex etc i actually have on my course i have a lot of people who specialize in sex education or they specialize in you know relationships and when they post something that is related to sex they get demonetized sometimes they get banned and they don't want that to happen they want to continue posting this content but they also have to support themselves so only fans has created this amazing app where you have to pay before you watch content and you automatically sign up for your favorite creators updates another app that allows you to create content for a specific group of people is fundo i actually tried it myself it's created by youtube this is where you can host paid live events like if you want to host a webinar or if you want to talk about some particular topic but you don't want to post it out there and you want to make some money on it fondo uh would help you organize such event there is also an app called luma that helps you organize paid events that helps you create this beautiful creator page if you uh check out my instagram profile i actually use them to create my own what is the creator landing page where a link to my videos where i link to to the events where i link to my newsletters check it out on my instagram profile i wanted to wrap up this video by saying it's an amazing time to be alive it's an amazing time to be a creator because there are so many opportunities these days to focus on what you're actually passionate about and use apps that will make your life so much easier as a creator to support yourself and your family because in the end creating content is not about making money it's about creating content it's about bringing value and these apps and these companies help you focus on what you're the best at and delegate the rest without having to hire tens and dozens of people thank you guys so much for watching this video up to the very end i hope you enjoyed it if you're not yet subscribed this channel hit the red button subscribe and i will see you very soon in my next videos bye-bye