How I Went From $18/month to $86,000/month Working From Home

Update 3/16/2017: If you’re looking to increase your blog's income, the FREE guide to Finding Affiliates that Work for You is a MUST GRAB. It even lists all of the top affiliate programs in every niche, organized by commission and topic. Grab it for FREE here for a limited time.

About two and a half years ago, I lived a pretty chaotic life. I quit my career to stay home with my kids, was running a home day care for 50 hours a week, and we were just finishing paying off over $30,000 in debt.

My husband traveled all the time for work and I mostly felt like a single parent.

The word luxury wasn’t in our vocabulary. We were on a super tight budget. We didn’t eat out, we didn’t buy anything that wasn't absolutely necessary, and when we did, we bought it from the thrift store, we didn't even have paper towels in the house (much to the horror of our well meaning friends).

While we were happy, we were also exhausted.

I started a blog on a whim in 2014.

I wanted to teach people how we paid off most of our debt, and how we overcame our severe disorganization to make saving money and living on one income possible.

I wanted more than anything to make blogging my full time job. But, it seemed like a stupid dream. Something about as likely as me becoming a leading actress opposite Channing Tatum. (Sadly, I’ve given up on the Channing Tatum dream.)

My first month, I worked 10 hours a week and made a whopping $18. Which basically equates to about 45 cents per hour. I was totally thrilled with that $18.  I even called my mom weekly with income updates!

However, I didn’t give up, and 27 months later I’m making $86,000 a month from blogging. Which is insane.  INSANE.

So, let’s talk about how I did it. What were the steps that led me from $18/month in blog income to over $86,000 a month?

Want to learn how to start a blog? You can get step by step instructions here. 

There are actually four distinct steps. 

Invest in education.

The absolute best decision that I ever made in my journey to full time blogging was an investment in a class called Elite Blog Academy.

The problem in blogging is that some people do it for YEARS and don’t make money doing it. It’s like busy work. They put in their hours, but they’re not doing the right work. So, they’re just spinning their wheels and not getting anywhere.

I started the blog at the same time I started Elite Blog Academy. I took the class very seriously and I completed every single action step before moving on. It took me 9 months to complete the course.

But, by the end of it, I was making full time income. Then it quickly grew from there.

Elite Blog Academy was really key to me earning full time income from blogging.

In fact, I explained EXACTLY what EBA did for me in this video. 

Blogging as a business can be really overwhelming, and not to knock myself, but I‘m not super smart. I’m not the girl that understands things the first time or learns easily. (“C” students unite!)

Because it wasn’t overwhelming, I really succeeded in Elite Blog Academy. I didn't have to understand how to earn full time income from blogging as a whole, I just had to complete the next step in the class.

When I started the class, I had no idea how bloggers made money. Halfway through the class, I had no idea how bloggers made money. At the end, I not only understood how bloggers made money but I had all of the things I needed to succeed.

I had a platform, I had pageviews, I had an email list, and I had built up trust with my audience.

The problem is that you need to have almost perfect timing (and be willing to invest- it’s not cheap) to get into Elite Blog Academy. It’s only open to enrollment for 5 days out of the year. Your best bet is to join the waiting list here. 

Commit to a year.

Blogging is kind of a weird business. There are a TON of benefits.

• You can start for very little initial investment (about $3.49/month to start a blog and get your website up).
• You can do it on your own time so it’s an easy second job.
• Most people blog as hobby never even realizing that you can make serious money from it, so it’s way to make a living from something you would likely do for free. 

Side note: I don’t mean that growing a blog into a business isn’t hard, it is! It was a long first year! But I do mean that in comparison to my 9 year career in law enforcement or my three years running a home daycare, blogging is ridiculously easy and fun.

The trade-off is that it’s going to take time to make money from this. It’s not something you can start this Friday and be pulling in cash at the end of the month.

Here’s a graphic that shows my income to give you an example. Keep in mind I started in September of 2014, so from then until the chart starts, I made pretty much nothing. 

It’s a risk, don’t get me wrong. You can start a blog and find out that you just aren't great at it and not grow into full-time income. But, you risk very little money and all you risk is time. With a traditional business, you usually need a pretty significant capital investment (read:$$$) in order to make the kind of money I make from blogging, and even then you need to wait several years to pay off loans before your profitable.

The key to my success in blogging was that I committed to one year. No matter what, I would be blogging for 10 hours a week for one year. When I had the flu, I blogged all weekend to make up those hours missed; when we had our daughter, I blogged in the recovery room. (No joke!).

While 10 hours a week seems like a pretty simple thing, in reality people struggle with going to the gym 3 times a week or logging their calories eaten (Which takes, what? 10 minutes?) so as simple as it looked on paper, it was actually pretty difficult to do.

This in one of the biggest reasons that blogs fail. They “fall off the wagon” before they ever see  any income.

There were SO MANY times I wanted to quit during those “45 cent per hour” months.  If I had, I would never had made it to full time income from blogging and I certainly wouldn’t have made this high amount of income.

Having an end date helped me push through those hard months. Being able to say “It’s just for this year, then I’ll stop” gave me an exit strategy that helped me push through. By the time the year was over, I was full time and it was a lot easier.

Calculate your ROI constantly.

ROI means the return on your investment. To me, in its’ most basic form, it means that I always try to do more of what makes me money, and less of what doesn’t and I track that weekly and monthly.

Every week I add up the income earned from each of the income sources for the blog, and compare it to my goal for the month. This gives me an opportunity to get a feel for what the results are of the things I change and to get really familiar with what makes money and what doesn't.

When an opportunity comes up, I try to figure out the potential ROI before I make a decision. And each week, I look at the tasks that I completed for the week and figured out which tasks made the biggest difference to income, and which tasks were things that were wasted time.

Side note: While focusing on ROI is super important, I should point out that building a trust with your audience (and maintaining it) is the foundation of a profitable blog. So everything you do should be serving your audience.

Outsource, outsource, outsource.

I quickly figured out that I had a lot of weaknesses in the blogging world. I am absolutely awful with technology, I can’t type (Seriously… I hunt and peck and it takes forever for me to edit.) I’m fairly bad with grammar and spelling. The list goes on.

I calculate my hourly rate (the profit for the month divided by the hours I work) and then anything I can get someone else to do faster, cheaper, or better… I outsource.

I explain my system of outsourcing and the order that I outsourced here…

Life now…

It’s been an insane two and a half years. At this point, my life looks so different from what it did then. It’s still busy, but it’s good busy, the kind of busy you have when you love what you do.

I work between 20 and 30 hours a week from home, and I totally went to Great Wolf Lodge last weekend on a whim because we could AND we have a super fancy trash can. (Okay, not exactly impressive… but we’re still pretty frugal; old habits die hard).

I guess I’m saying all of this to emphasize: If you’ve ever thought about it, if you’ve ever heard of blogging and wondered if you’d love it. Then try it. Even if you can’t invest in Elite Blog Academy.

Grab the free blog training and just try! You have no idea what you’re capable of. I certainly didn’t. But the only thing I couldn’t stand the idea of is living with regret and not trying.

Update 3/16/2017: If you’re looking to increase your blog's income, the FREE guide to Finding Affiliates that Work for You is a MUST GRAB. It even lists all of the top affiliate programs in every niche, organized by commission and topic. Grab it for FREE here for a limited time.