Yup, you read that right! After a year of blogging we have finally accepted an offer to sell our blog. I’m sure you have a ton of questions, but don’t freak out, we will answer all of them.
Before, we get to into the details I want to share one thing with you. April 1st is one of my favorite days of the year. It’s a day full of pranks an laughter, so without further ado APRIL FOOLS!!
The Wicked Wallet has not been sold, however we have reached the 1 year milestone and are going to share everything we have learned about blogging over the last year.
Creating The Wicked Wallet
Starting a blog really is not as hard as one might think. Before creating The Wicked Wallet we had never done anything related to blogging or web design. Everything that we designed/created was learned from reading blog posts like this and watching countless YouTube tutorials. So, if your interested in starting a blog here are the steps that we took to make ours.
First you will need to choose a web server to host your blog. Through our research we found that Bluehost was the most reliable and perfectly suited for beginners so we went with them.
If you choose Bluehost you will have to create an account and choose your payment plan. We personally recommend the basic plan to anyone who is just starting out, it offers you everything that you’ll need and it only costs $3.95/month.
After you choose our Bluehost plan you will then need to decide your domain name. Your domain name is what the title of your website will be.
Choosing a domain name can be stressful because you will soon find out that a lot of name have already been taken. Through our personal research we found that sites that end in .com or .net perform much better than others such as .org or .space. If you can try to have your domain name end with .com.
Now don’t get stressed out and quit if you can’t think of the perfect name right away. Bluehost can create a temporary domain for your website while you brainstorm and design your site.
WordPress
Once your Bluehost account is set up you will be able to select WordPress from your Bluehost dashboard. WordPress is what you will use to design your website and create all of your content. WordPress is extremely user friendly and is very compatible with a ton of other useful tools.
If your interested in learning more about starting a blog then be sure to check out our step-by-step article, How To Start A Blog.
Here is also some YouTube video links that helped us with the design portion:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cbvZf1jIJM&t=4667s
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AZ8GqW5iak
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=701pwm78Q90
Blog Monetization
After a couple weeks of designing The Wicked Wallet and learning our way around Word Press, we then began to create content.
Our goal before launching was to have 10 articles completed. The idea here is that when you launch you want to have some amount of content already on your site. In some ways its like laying the foundation for your blog.
As you do your own research you’ll see some bloggers that recommend having 20, 30, even 50 articles completed before launching your blog. We chose to start with 10 and it worked perfectly for us.
After launching we spent about 3 months establishing our selves and then we began exploring ways to monetize our blog while still maintaining quality content. We began learning about affiliate marketing and google ads.
Affiliate Marketing
What is affiliate Marketing? Affiliate Marketing is when a company or brand pays you a commission for bringing them traffic, leads and sales. We started learning about affiliate marketing from Michelle Schroeder from Making Sense of Cents who earns over $100K per month from her blog.
Michelle has mastered the blogging game and is an absolute wiz when it comes to affiliate marketing. She offers an amazing course in affiliate marketing that teaches you everything you need to know about affiliate marketing and all the nitty-gritty details that are involved in it.
We have taken several courses to improve our blog, from Pinterest courses, to Facebook advertising courses. The Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course is by far the best course we have enrolled in and the knowledge we learned has definitely paid for itself. If your interested in reading about our full review you can do so here: How To Make Over $50,000 A Month Through Affiliate Marketing.
Google Ads
With Google Ads you simply create an account and Google will place non invasive ads on your website.
Every time someone visits a page with ads you will earn a set amount and every time someone clicks on an ad you earn even more. To be completely transparent Google Ads is definitely not the money maker.
There are other advertising companies like Google Ads that pay much more however they are much harder to join. For example, Mediavine is one of those companies and they require your site to be in good standing with Google and for it to have at least 25,000 sessions in a 30 day period.
Email Marketing
Over the last year of blogging we have learned the importance of email marketing. Growing an email list and using it for email marketing is a great way to establish a more personal connection with your viewers and allows you to bring them back to your site more often or share it with friends and family.
There are a number of free email marketing software sites out there such as mailchimp. Those tools are great for starting off but they do have limitations. For instance, mailchimp is only free if you have 2,000 or less contacts and you are only allowed to send 10,000 emails per month.
We personally use Convertkit as our email marketing tool of choice and have really enjoyed our experience with them. Convertkit makes it extremely easy to create forms, popups and landing pages for your site. It’s also very easy to create automated sequence emails that can be sent out in intervals. If your curious to learn more about what Convertkit has to offer then definitely read: Is Convertkit Worth It?. In this article I discuss all the features that Convertkit has to offer and I compare it to other platforms as well.
Social Media Automation
Let’s be honest, automation makes our lives easier. I’m a huge fan of automation and you should be to. Automation allows you to save time that can be used for activities that you enjoy. We quickly learned that manually posting content on social media everyday was a pain to keep up with, so we started to look into other tools like Tailwind and Hootsuite.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a tool that allows you to schedule your instagram posts and pinterest pins ahead of time. With Tailwinds analytic software you will be able to find the best times to post as well as the frequency. Tailwind has positvely impacted our Pinterest Traffic. I would recommend this tool to any serious blogger who wants more traffic.
Just an FYI Tailwind is not free and will cost you between $100-$150 per year.
HootSuite
This is the tool that we use to automate our Facebook page posts. HootSuite offers a number of different paid plans, however we have found that their free plan works perfectly for us.
With HootSuite’s free plan you can schedule up to 30 posts per month on up to 3 different channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We find that 30 scheduled posts works perfectly for our Facebook page and we can always post manually if we want to post more frequently.
Tailwind and HootSuite are both awesome tools that marks our marketing and promotion much more manageable. However, these tools don’t take away all of the work. You still have to create the content that you are going to schedule.
Content Creation
We’ve learned that when it comes to creating content for The Wicked Wallet we do best when we create an editorial calendar.
Typically our editorial calendar has our article topics listed out for the weeks ahead and also has a day for scheduling social media posts for the following month.
Throughout our first year of blogging we have found that our productivity sky rockets when we have our article topics planned out ahead of time. That being said if you want to mirror this strategy then I suggest having a brain storm session and write down every article topic that comes to mind.
At the end of the day content creation is the heart and soul of your blog. Great content brings readers back and they are likely to share with their friends.
An awesome tool for creating Pinterest pins, featured images, and Instagram posts is Canva. They offer both a free and paid version, but the free version offers more than enough. Canva is our go to site for all of our image creation.
Closing Thoughts
This past year of blogging has been quite the experience. We’ve learned so much about the industry, we’ve learned how we best operate, and we’ve been able to connect and work with some amazing people. Our mission with The Wicked Wallet has always been to teach others about personal finance in an easy to understand way, so that they can live life on their terms. Over the past year I believe we were successful in maintaining that mission.
If your interested in starting a blog or if you are currently operating a blog then I hope you learned something from this. Please if you have any questions hit us up in the comment section below.
