Our Journey to Earning $15,000 Monthly from a Modest Blog [Guest Contribution]

This week, I’m thrilled to share an inspiring guest post from Russell and Maleah of Unconventional Prosperity. They make a substantial full-time income from their small blogs, showing that massive traffic isn’t essential for blogging success.

Whether you already have a blog or are thinking of starting one, this post will help you rethink your monetization strategy and guide you towards successful affiliate marketing.

Here’s Russell:

My wife and I earn between $10,000 and $20,000 monthly from our small blogs, which attract about 30,000 visitors per month. We began blogging four years ago to make some extra money and never expected it to become our full-time job. Here are a few reasons we love being online entrepreneurs:

– We can work from home and build our dream business, spending more time with family.
– Blogging allows us the freedom to live anywhere and travel whenever we want.
– It’s enjoyable and a great way to make friends worldwide.
– The income potential is limitless.
– Though blogging is hard work, it can become a passive income source with the right systems, freeing up time to enjoy life. Most bloggers continue working on their business because it’s fun and satisfying.

Why You Don’t Need Millions of Visitors to Make Money

Many top bloggers have millions of visitors each month, which is beneficial but not necessary for making a full-time income. In this article, I’ll show you how we make five figures a month with a relatively small audience. Our approach to monetization is a bit unconventional. We don’t use:

– An email list of potential customers.
– Many blog subscribers (fewer than 100).
– Our own products.
– Paid ads or traffic.
– Sponsored posts.

We hope to provide ideas for making money from a blog, even if it’s already generating income for you.

How We Make Money – Affiliate Marketing

Our primary income source is affiliate commissions. This method is more lucrative per visitor than on-page ads and is more passive than writing sponsored posts. Affiliate marketing works when a visitor clicks a special link and buys something, earning us a commission. We promote products we use and believe in.

The key to making $15,000+ with about 30,000 visitors per month is promoting high-ticket products and services that genuinely help people. We focus on services priced between $500 and $10,000, earning 30% to 50% per sale.

People Will Buy Expensive Products

We initially worried that people wouldn’t spend thousands on products and services, but we were wrong. The right audience will buy anything that solves their problems, whether it’s making more money or losing weight. We tested a few high-ticket products and were amazed to sell several for $10,000 each, earning $3,000 commissions. Since then, we’ve focused on selling expensive educational products about making money online.

Our Strategy for Selling High-Ticket Products

The two key aspects of selling expensive products are having the right audience and an effective sales funnel. Potential customers need to be ‘courted’ by the company through free webinars, extensive email follow-ups, and lots of free value before buying an expensive product. Trust is crucial before people spend large amounts of money.

Building a high-conversion sales funnel takes testing, money, and expertise. Instead of creating our own, we promote products with excellent sales funnels already in place. We let the companies do the hard work in selling, and we focus on sending them high-quality leads.

We look for products that meet these criteria:
– High quality with the potential to improve customers’ lives.
– Expensive but valuable, with at least 30% affiliate commissions.
– Excellent sales funnels that offer great value, like free webinars requiring email submissions for follow-ups.

When we find a good product, we usually buy it if we haven’t already used it. This helps us write genuine reviews and ensure it’s high quality. We focus on digital courses about stock trading, a passion of mine, which are often life-changing and quite expensive.

We also consider the product’s popularity, the company’s legitimacy, and whether the product will remain valuable for years.

Our Promotional Tactics for Expensive Affiliate Products

We write comprehensive, honest reviews of the products or services we promote. This approach works well for expensive products because potential buyers want to read detailed information and other people’s thoughts before purchasing.

Best Traffic Source for Us

We get most of our traffic from Google search. Users actively searching for reviews on expensive products are more likely to convert than social media traffic. We’ve tested multiple traffic sources from different social media sites, and the audience can significantly impact sales. For example, Twitter is great for selling stock trading courses but terrible for work-at-home courses. Pinterest is fantastic for selling work-at-home courses for aspiring freelancers.

These articles may not be our best-written ones, but they’ve generated over $50,000 in sales in the last few months. Both articles include links to free webinars early on, encouraging readers to sign up and learn valuable information.

Conclusions

I hope this article inspires you to start promoting affiliate products that can earn you $2,000 per sale instead of $20. Selling high-quality premium products is easier than most people think. If you’re struggling to grow your blog traffic and income, consider selling high-ticket products to boost your affiliate income.

Good luck!

Russell and Maleah

Biography

Russell and Maleah own Unconventional Prosperity, a personal finance blog. They achieved financial freedom in their early thirties and aim to help others do the same.