There is no bad time to become a blogger. Simply the sooner you start, the larger a blog can grow. In this article, we’re going to show you how to start a money-making blog in under 5 minutes.
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
The secret sauce separating hobbyists and full-time professional bloggers are SEO tools like SEMrush. This SEMrush Review covers how it works.
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
This is the second time I ever tried Teespring, but my first time writing a Teespring Review. As a designer, this is a fun way to earn extra money by designing fun tee shirts and other gear. You essentially design funny/clever t-shirts and then market them to be sold.
Teespring is a legit website where you can design custom tee shirts and other apparel such as hoodies, socks, mugs etc. using their proprietary online design software. Once you create a custom design, you can share a link with your friends who can buy your t-shirt design directly on Teespring. The money, printing and shipping are all handled by Teespring.
The difference between Teespring and other custom t-shirt design places is the shirts aren’t actually made until you have a minimum order.
This way you don’t have to buy a bunch of shirts you’re not sure will sell or not. Thus filling your garage full of crappy shirts. All you do is create the design and TeeSpring handles all the orders, payments and shipping once a minimum amount of shirts are sold. Then you as the designer get a small profit off the orders sold.
Absolutely! We’ve personally used Teespring and found numerous positive reviews about the company. They’ve been around for years and built up a solid reputation. Even Forbes mentioned them as a great way to make money by selling well-made t-shirts and other gear.
The biggest bonus to Teespring (and why I wanted to write this Teespring Review) is that once you get the minimum amount of orders. You as the designer get a cut of the profits for creating the design!
Teespring handles all the heavy work (collecting money, printing, shipping), but since you are the one that created the shirt design and marketed it, you get a portion of the money made. Of course, Teespring takes their share, but you get yours too.
It’s a unique sidehuslte if you’re a creative type that can create some clever t-shirts and market them.
Head over to Teespring and hit “Start Designing”. It’ll ask you to create an account with them. It’s just the basic name, email, and password. They don’t ask for any payment information when your first setting up an account or first creating a shirt design.
You’ll then be asked to “Pick Your Canvas”. They have a number of options since they originally started. You can create unique/clever designs on a wide variety of items including:
I am going to focus on t-shirts for this Teespring Review since that’s what they’re famous for.
I select apparel. This takes you immediately to their online design software where you can create a completely unique t-shirt design from scratch.
It’s a bit intimidating, I just created a basic word print design (I find inspiration from Amazon’s funny shirts). I obviously didn’t get too crazy, but you have a lot of options for what you can do including uploading your own custom designs.
I was impressed with the variety in Teespring’s online software program, it really was impressive. It’ll work great for beginners if you don’t have your own design software like Adobe Illustrator. This is what their online software looks like.
Once you finish a design, Teespring will let you set the price for how much you want to sell the shirt for. You could set the price for $50 per shirt if you’d like. It may be more than people want to buy a shirt for, but it’s up to you.
You’ll start off with Teespring’s recommended sell price.
In addition to what you set the price at, Teespring will show you how much of a profit you’ll make based on the number of shirts and the selling price. So simple economics, the higher price you set and the more you sell, the more profit you’ll make. In the Teespring Review example below, if 7 shirts are purchased, I would make $70 or $7 per shirt if I sell for $23.99.
After you set the price, you will create a profile on your new shirt design. This is what people will see when they view your shirt on Teespring.
Take some time with this. Giving your campaign/shirt description a clever description can really help sell shirts to people on the fence.
If you want to check out the t-shirt design I did for this Teespring Review, go to Teespring.com/i-am-a-blogger-teeshirt where you’ll have the option to buy. It’s very basic. I like to set the bar low for you to create your own amazing shirt design!
That’s it. Now anyone can see your shirt and buy it. The biggest thing from here is sending the link to your friends, post on your blog or share with your social network to buy the new shirt.
A popular strategy I’ve seen, create a clever t-shirt idea for a specific niche of people. For instance, the famous “Don’t worry I’m a ______” tagline. To give an example, I’ve seen “Don’t worry I’m a Nurse” and people created specific facebook ads for people who listed their occupation as “Nurse”. I believe it’s been really successful.
I like the idea of Teespring. It allows you to quickly create a custom t-shirt design to share with all your friends for them to buy. However, it doesn’t seem to be set up for a permanent side hustle. There are a lot of better/easier ways to earn more money.
Once you create the t-shirt design, it takes A LOT of effort and marketing dollars to get those shirts to sell. So unless you have a particular network of people who are willing to buy a specific t-shirt, I wouldn’t recommend this as a permanent side hustle.
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
Yes, it’s Day 137 of when we started the Epic Niche Site Battle. A competition to see who could build a better niche affiliate website between myself and Barnabas over at SerialBoss.com. So far I’m doing well considering.
The rules were simple, we would start on January 1st of 2018 and see who could build a better site. This meant who’s site could get more visitors, earn more money and gain more email sign-ups would be the winner. This is in addition to both of us running our other main blogs to show how difficult it is to balance side gigs like this. Time management is key.
I officially launched my affiliate website on Day 68 of this year. I’m not revealing the name of this site since we don’t want to affect traffic rankings, but you’ll just have to believe me that it’s up.
What I can tell you is that it’s an affiliate website centered around holiday gift ideas. The main page is loaded with awesome gift ideas and the blog post (only 1 so far) is focused on “List Posts” which normally do well with SEO. The idea is the more people who visit the site, more sales are made and that’s how the site generates income.
I’ll admit I haven’t been able to put in much effort into this affiliate site since its creation on Day 80 because most of my attention has been focused on WalletSquirrel.com, but without too much initial marketing. It’s somehow found steady traffic.
This is the visitor trend since it starts on March 10th. It picked up about 45 views a day on average since its start. Honestly, that isn’t great, but considering how little attention I’ve given this site (maybe 1 hour since the start), it’s better than I thought. Especially with a bounce rate for an affiliate site.
So with an average of 45 views a day, you can’t expect this website to gain much money. All of my income is through affiliate links which are perfect for me. I’ve noticed I make a lot more on affiliate links than banner ads. Plus I really hate the look of banner ads, so I didn’t include any on this new site.
It’s only had a few sales, but most of the income is merchants paying me for the clicks through the links I have on the affiliate website. I’ve been using Viglink for all my affiliate marketing tracking. Since March 10th, this affiliate site has made $5.90. Wahoo, I gained some pennies. =)
Yes, $5.90 isn’t much but considering the 1 hour I’ve put into this site since starting it on March 10th, it’s pretty great. Plus that income is pretty consistently $0.40 a day. That’s actually really impressive since its so consistent. It gives me a lot of motivation that it will do well if given more attention.
One thing I can absolutely do better on is collecting email address. I only have one email opt-in form on the contact page. So far this has only collected 10 email addresses. That’s pretty awful. There are plenty of tricks I’ve learned recently on Wallet Squirrel to gain more email addresses. I’m looking forward to trying all of these.
Just curious, are you tempted to sign up for Wallet Squirrel’s email list from our Opt-In form below? If not, why not?
Even though I’ve trailed off on my effort for this new affiliate site, I’m still way ahead of Barabas who just got his site up last week. ;P
However, I’ve only written one blog post on my affiliate website and he’s already written 10. We took different approaches with him writing a bunch of content first then publishing the website. I did the opposite by adding content after the website was launched. It’s funny how people do things differently.
I’ll compare the stats of our websites side by side once he has had a chance to market his site a bit more. In the meantime though, I’m ramping up to write 3 more blog posts and started using SEMrush to do some awesome keyword research and backlinking to make the site more popular. Stay tuned to see how we compare against each other!
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
What To Write About: Anything with a Top 10 Tagline
How Much Can You Make: $100 per 1,800 word article (via PayPal)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 8.02M monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
Listverse is full of (you guessed it) lists! Top 10 lists and such are a great attention grabber for readers and Listverse pays for articles with at least 10 list points. They will easily shell out $100 for good quality list articles. If you have a great idea for an attention-grabbing list, submit your list idea to Listverse for consideration. It may be a quick way to get paid to write articles, making $100 per article on our list of websites that pay you for writing. Just make sure that you do your research on your lists, avoid easy grammar issues and create a really attention-grabbing headline.
What To Write About: History, Science, Innovation, Arts & Culture, etc. (Smithsonian stuff)
How Much Can You Make: $1,000 per article
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 9.81M monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
How ambitious are you? The Smithsonian is a big deal and one of the more prestegious websites that pay you fro writing. So you may be surprised to hear they do accept submissions from freelance writers. Although you need to provide at least 3 links to previous writing examples, and if you don’t have good ones, you should move on. If you do have all of that, you should “pitch” an idea for an article you have. Don’t worry about having crazy good photographs, they’ll provide the photography your article needs, you just need to supply the 250-300 worded idea and eventually final article if approved.
What To Write About: Anything
How Much Can You Make: Pennies Per Page View (via ads)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 3.18M monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
HubPages is an online community that writes about anything and everything. Once you sign up for free, you can write about whatever your passionate about. Your article will have ads on them and you’ll receive a portion of that revenue while you get paid to write articles. The more popular your articles are, the more money you’ll make. This is similar to having your own blog, but HubPages host your articles for you in return for a small portion of the ad revenue your articles produce.
What To Write About: Topics They Ask For
How Much Can You Make: Up to $40 for a 500 word article (depending on writing level)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 591.52K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
How iWriter works is that people pay iWriter to write articles for them. So a client will pay iWriter to write an article on “Baking Bread”, for example. Then iWriter will send the request to its army of writers (you) and you’ll take the job. The client will pay iWriter and iWriter will pay you in return. The more great articles you write, the more you’ll earn from iWriter based on their 4 tier (Standard, Premium, Elite & Elite Plus) writer levels. Once you receive Elite Plus level, you’ll be paid $40 for a 500-word article. You’ll pay will depend on the level of writer you are and the number of articles you write. What’s nice is you can accept/decline as many articles as you can write from the comfort of your own home. This is nice because the email request will come in with different topics where you can get paid to write articles.
What To Write About: How To Articles for coding, web design, Adobe Products, anything graphic
How Much Can You Make: $200 per tutorial (increases the more you submit)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 19.74M monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
Tuts+ is a site I used to visit all the time when learning Photoshop. They have some great tutorials by some awesome teachers, so this probably isn’t for new writers, but people who can prove they’ve written similar tutorials for well-known websites. This makes them one of the top websites that pay you for writing, paying around $200 (starting out) for How-To’s. There are opportunities to create written and video how-to-tutorials. Just make sure you have the depth of experience to back up what you’re teaching. Here is a list of tutorials they’re looking for people to teach.
What To Write About: Tips to help out bloggers (blogs, social media, making money online)
How Much Can You Make: $100 – $200 per article
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 303.49K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
The Income Diary is a website focused on helping new bloggers to set up their site, write content and monetize it for future revenue. Since this is a specific niche, there is much similar content that currently exists on the site. While you may be able to earn $200, it is a very difficult way to get paid to write articles and get your content accepted. However if you have an idea that you think fits well with their audience, submit your idea and they’ll tell you if it’s worthy. Otherwise don’t bother writing an entire article until your idea is accepted. If you do get your article idea accepted, you should jump for joy because they are one of the top paying websites that pay you for writing.
What To Write About: Trip Ideas, Destinations, Hotels (travel stuff)
How Much Can You Make: $1 a word (articles range from 400 – 2,000 words)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 6.03M monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
With an audience of 1 million viewers per month, Travel + Leisure receives many writer submissions so they’re looking for high-quality articles from writers with previous writing experience. If you’re interested in writing for them, go over their website and understand what type of articles are published. Then go over to their contact page and email them a short email with your “pitch”, don’t bother writing your full article. If they like your idea, they’ll email you back with the guidelines they want. About 95% of the articles on their site are from freelance writers so you may have a shot. They’re one of the few proven websites that pay you for writing.
What To Write About: Volunteering, Work, Living and Studying Abroad
How Much Can You Make: $50 – $150 (for a 1,250-2,000 word article)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 422.94K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
While not the most aesthetically pleasing website, these guys have tons of articles submitted by people around the world relating to volunteering, working and living abroad. So much so that their “Travel Writer Guidelines for Submissions” page is heavily detailed on what they’re looking from their writers. Overall this is a great place to share that amazing study abroad adventure you had in college and share all those little secrets you learned along the way like don’t buy cheap outlet plug converts or how to use hotel key cards as knives for your PBJ sandwiches. If you have any of those wacky travel stories, consider this one of the first websites that pay you for writing that you try.
What To Write About: Things important to adults going back to college
How Much Can You Make: $55+ (for a 1,000-1,500 word article)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 386.82k monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
This is an old-school website but maintains high popularity for people interested in going back to college later in life. This site makes money by ads and selling leads to college recruiters. So articles about sharing your personal story about going back to college or how your thinking about going back to college may be ideal. This may be a great place to get paid to write articles if you’ve ever considered going back to school.
What To Write About: Getting paid to travel whether it’s writing, photography, tours, etc.
How Much Can You Make: $50 – $200 (for a 300-600 word article)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): less than 10K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
This is an interesting writing topic because The Travel Writers Life showcases popular ways people are making money while traveling. So you won’t find any fluffy travel stories here. It’s more about how you paid for your study abroad apartment by working at your landlords banana stand. If you have any stories where you made a little money while traveling, this is a great place to share your story on one of the few websites that pay yforfro writing.
What To Write About: Wide range of topics from life style, culture to family and night-life
How Much Can You Make: $20 – $60
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 3.35M monthly visitors
Since this is such a popular website they receive numerous writing solicitations and thus don’t have to offer much money for people looking to get paid to write articles. While they don’t pay much, this may be a good place to start if you’re a beginner writer. If you’re looking to try it out, you’ll have to create a profile on their contributor page and send them your article idea. It’ll take them a month or two to review it and if you don’t hear back, don’t take it personally they get a lot of ideas. Try submiting another idea. When it comes to larger websites like this, it’s a numbers game. Luckily you have the option to write about a wide range of topics on their websites that pay you for writing.
What To Write About: Web development related to code, content, design, process, business, etc.
How Much Can You Make: $50 – $200 (1,500 word articles avg.)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 543.71K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
This is a very niche website related to website development. If this topic interests you, send their team your pitch idea (ideally in a Google Doc) for review. They review all ideas once a week and rarely accept pitches on the first draft. However they’ll likely help you develop your idea further making it worthy of their website. They’re currently looking for new writers so if you have a story to share regarding web development or user experience, shoot them an email.
What To Write About: All things WordPress Website related
How Much Can You Make: $50 (They give you a list of topics with prices)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 712.64K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
These guys have one of the most efficient ways to get new writers. Beyond their super easy sign-up page where you submit your credentials, they give you a list of topics to write about and how much they’ll pay for each one. It looks like someone on their team realized keywords they want to rank for and added that list for potential writers to write about. Most of the articles they currently have posted only pay $50 per article, but they claim up to $150. Keep in mind, most of the articles they are looking for are related to how to code WordPress websites, so it may be a little niche for most people. If you have the WordPress knowlege though, it’s one of first websites that pay you for writing you should consider.
What To Write About: Trip Ideas, Destinations, Travel Adventures (travel stuff)
How Much Can You Make: $50 per article (articles range from 1,200 – 2,000 words)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 160.98K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
This is a site I really enjoyed right after researching. It’s a very indie type travel site where it encourages really exploring your travel destinations over high-end resorts. If you have a travel story/idea that you want to pitch, send it to them after you check out their article guidelines to get paid to write articles. Most of is it pretty basic, but something to keep in mind. If you’re not sure your work is good enough to submit, try their “Guest Post” guide where your article won’t be paid for, but you can submit it in front of their audience. It’s a great way to gain travel writing exposure without much pressure on our list of websites that pay you for writing.
What To Write About: All things related to retiring overseas (cost, living, places, etc.)
How Much Can You Make: $75 – $400
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 712.64K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
International Living has both a blog/newsletter (they call it a Postcard) and monthly magazine that they’re looking for contributing writers to get paid to write articles. If your article gets accepted to the Postcard, it’s worth around $75 while the monthly magazine is worth $250 for 840 words and $400 for 1,400 words. If you’re curious what to write about, they love inspirational stories about retiring abroad in your dream location (use SEMrush for popular keyword ideas). They want to know how your money will stretch longer in other countries and how that affects healthcare and other lifestyles. If you’ve ever been thinking about retiring in a small tropical country or somewhere cooler, maybe this is one of the websites that pay you for writing for you.
What To Write About: Anything Pop Culture with a funny twist
How Much Can You Make: $100 – $200
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 19.24M monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
While most websites actively look for experienced writers, Cracked is all about encouraging new writers to submit ideas with lots of different ways to contribute and get paid to write articles. You can write the long lists they’re known for like “26 Sexy Halloween Costumes That Shouldn’t Exist” or creating funny graphics they can use on their social media accounts. They are heavily reliant on content writers like you can contribute to their online publication. If you think you have a sarcastic or satire writing personality, definitely register as a writer for them and jump into the hilarious world of Cracked. This is one of the most popular websites that pay you for writing on our list.
What To Write About: Articles About Great Photography
How Much Can You Make: Likely Around $50, not listed
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 151.96K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
This is a really open category, photography. Everyone has tried photography at some point in their life. It’s pretty easy to point and click to great a great image. Either to sell via stock photography, share with your friends or hang up in a gallery. The point is, most people have a photography lesson learned or story to share and Photodoto is the perfect place for topics such as Photography Inspiration, Tips, Gear or post-production. Take a shot at this website to write a guest post, they seem to be very excited to hear about pitch ideas.
What To Write About: Anything to help people save time and money (stretch your dollar)
How Much Can You Make: $0.10 per word (Most articles 500-700 words)
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 151.96K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
Now, this is a site we can get behind, another personal finance website! If you have some great ways to save money/time this is the place but keep in mind, The Dollar Stretcher has been in circulation since January 1998. They have TONS of articles on how to save money so if you’re going to pitch them you need to be creative, inventive and very specific. They ask you don’t pitch them “7 ways to save on groceries“, but rather “7 ways to save money on ground beef”. If you email them your pitch and don’t hear anything, they likely already have similar content and didn’t bother responding. Try pitching again being more creative, everyone does something cool to save money. It’s a great way to get paid to write articles if you’re able to niche down into specific money saving ideas.
What To Write About: DIY Home Improvement / Interior Design Projects
How Much Can You Make: Likely Around $50, you set your price.
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): 271.60K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
Yay I’ve been looking for a good DIY site where I can get paid to write articles. Curby started as one man’s journey doing home improvement projects and grew into a vibrate community of 271 thousand visits a month focusing on cool home improvement and interior design projects inspiring people. Now they’re one of the top websites that pay you for writing about home improvement projects. If you have a home improvement project that all your friends just rave about, consider pitching Curby to see if it’s a good idea for their site and get paid!
What To Write About: Life of a Pet Owner (tips, hacks, pet stories, etc.)
How Much Can You Make: $75 per article
Monthly Visitors (SimilarWeb): less than 10K monthly visitors
How To Become A Writer: Sign Up Here
Many websites that pay writers are related to web development or travel so it’s great to see sites like this that pay for articles that most people have experience with, like pets. This site focuses on connecting pet owners through their site and social media. More importantly, they help animal shelters and rescues connect with a wide range of pet owners for possible adoption. Blog Paws really tries to capture the reality of life with pets and can use writers that can help others navigate that world. If you’re a pet owner that can’t stop talking about how great it is to be a pet owner, this may be a perfect place to get paid to write articles on our list of websites that pay you for writing in 2018.
Writing for others is a quick way to get paid writing and build up your own portfolio. However, you’re working for other people and making THEM money. Consider using our guide to Starting Your Own Blog That Makes Money on Day 1! This is a nice alternative utilizing your writing creativity. Having your own website allows you to display a portfolio of your writing work and earn money for yourself from the awesome content you create!
Hope you like our blueprint for starting to get paid to write articles! We absolutely love websites that pay you for writing, helping fellow freelance writers and side-hustlers. While writing this and looking at the criteria these websites are looking for in contributing writers, it’s actually a really easy way to earn extra money. Most of these websites paying between $50 – $150 per article even for beginners, you could write an article every day for a month (30 days) and make $3,000.
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
Today is day 67 of when I first started my latest Affiliate Website. The sad part is though I still haven’t “officially” launched the site yet. So I wanted to give you an update where I’m at currently, as someone who is trying to balance creating a website from scratch, and continuing to live life.
The good news is the website is live with a great design and concept I still like. So far I’ve added a few products to sell on the homepage and I have one blog post done. Yes, only one….
The biggest thing with me is to figure out the processes I need to do to complete each task. Luckily I have done everything from adding new products to creating the style/look I want for the blog posts. Now that I have these throughout, experimented with and complete. To move forward, I just need to create content and fit it to the standards I’ve created thus far.
While I’ve had 67 days to work on the new website, in reality, I’ve only had about 2 weekends. This is because I do other things in my life in addition to my affiliate website. For example, I write regular content for Wallet Squirrel (this website), as well as write guest posts for other bloggers in hopes to gain links back to this site, Wallet Squirrel. This is where most of my free time goes, either to Wallet Squirrel or the new Affiliate Website.
I started this Epic Niche Site Battle with Barnabas of SerialBoss. We continue to chat on LinkedIn to see how the other is doing. He’s in the same boat of feeling overwhelmed by two websites but we continue to make strides.
I expect to have my website completely launched and starting my marketing campaigns this weekend. Wish me luck!
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
If you’ve seen our little pop-up or emails, we made a deal with our readers. We promised if you signed up for our email list, we’d do a drawing and a lucky person would win $100 to start investing. We’re doing this!
Remember these pop-ups?
Lots of websites do different give-a-ways to encourage people to join their email newsletter. We wanted to try this, but actually, do something cool.
We didn’t want to create a “90 Ways To Save Money” pdf to give away or anything like that for new sign-ups. Frankly it was overdone and in reality, the easiest way to save money is not to spend it. There, that’s my free pdf.
So I asked myself, what do our readers actually want. Well, they want more money to invest with and pay off bills. So what if we gave (PayPal) someone $100 to use to invest. If they used that money to invest, it would grow to a lot more than $100.
I liked this idea.
It was easy, if you signed up for our email list at any point, and still a member by the end of 2017, you would be eligible to win. We would do a drawing at the end of 2017 (actually this week) and whoever was selected, we would PayPal you $100 to do whatever they wanted.
Yes, you could use that $100 to invest, pay down bills or buy new shoes. We obviously can’t control what you will spend that money on, but we will STRONGLY encourage you to invest it. Investing is cool!
Either buy stocks with the Robinhood App, have all your investing done automatically with Betterment or lend it and make interest with Lending Club. It’s completely up to you!
I’m going to do something no one ever does. Share how many email subscribers they have. It’s a bit scary sharing this because if it doesn’t seem like a lot, you can easily judge us based on how many other people subscribe. So vulnerable moment, go!
We currently have 290 email subscribers to Wallet Squirrel. All of them are eligible to win the $100!
To select a winner, I went to Mailchimp and reviewed the complete list of email addresses we had. This is how I discovered we had 290 email sign-ups. That is freaking awesome!!!!!
Then I went to Google’s Random Generator, basically, just typed “Random Number Generator” in Google, try it here! At the top of the page, there is a generator where you enter the min/max amount and hit “GENERATE. I got “17”.
So at this point, I scrolled down Mailchimp’s list to locate number #17.
I’m now shooting them an email to let them know they won! Plus to see if this email works for their Paypal account. So check your email because I may have money for you!
Not even close, I REALLY like this idea. It’s a great way to encourage people to sign up for our email list and everyone gets a chance to win some money to do what you want (investing suggested). =P
In 2018, we’re doing this again but it’s for a chance to win $200 at the end of the year. Sign up and enter!
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
Recently I’ve committed to building an epic Amazon Affiliate Website in a new competition we’re calling the Epic Niche Site Battle. A contest over a year to see who can build a better niche website. The competition started January 1st, 2018 and this is the entire outline of how I plan to create an awesome Amazon Affiliate Website under $300.
What do I want my website to do or sell? Do I want to be an entertainment website where people go to be happy and find cool stuff, or do I want to be an authority website where people visit to learn words of wisdom from someone who knows more than them? Or do I want to create another blog that shares silly stories?
There are a lot of choices here, but I wanted to do an entertainment website. I like being fun and frankly if it’s going to be another website to manage. I NEED this to be fun!
Specifically, I chose to niche down to a fun, witty and entertaining website on Holidays. I like holidays because people spend money (or at least expected to spend money) during these times of the year. So I’m going to create an entertainment website based on the traditional things people buy for the holidays. Cool right!
Cost – $0 to think of cool niche ideas.
This part takes time, give yourself plenty of time, like 3 months to come up with a clever domain name for your website. Usually, you want your website/business name or purpose to be reflected in the domain name. You want this to be memorable, easy to type, shorter is better and capable of building a brand around.
I spent 3 months thinking about a domain name. Yes, the Epic Niche Site Battle started 10 days ago, but I could still think of my website beforehand. To think about my holiday website, I came up with over 237 different domain names, slowly fine-tuning them, and emphasizing keywords that made sense to my brand. Those 237 domain names were just the ones that were available when I researched them on GoDaddy.com, there were hundreds more I tried that were unavailable. I went a little insane finding the right domain name.
This is how I felt…..
Eventually, I find a domain name that I absolutely loved! This is personally important to me because if I don’t like it, I won’t be motivated to work on it every week. If you’re not passionate about something, you WILL quit halfway through when the going gets tough. I don’t plan to quit.
Cost – $12 Domain Name + $12 Domain Privacy
*Always buy domain privacy, otherwise you’ll get calls/emails daily from companies trying to sell your new website different services. It’s like telemarketers on steroids.
This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I’m a graphic kind of guy and I NEED an awesome logo to rally behind. Honestly, I started to think about how the website logo will look when researching domain names. I wanted to create more than just a name in a silly font, I want to create a whole brand.
Once I had my domain name chosen, I started to research different creative logos on websites like Logopond.com and in Google Search Images. I typed in my keywords and compared what other company logos looked like. I started from there and fine-tuned until I had something that looked different, creative, but familiar.
I had about 5 pages of tiny thumbnail logos sketched out.
I needed and created something that looked professional. I used Adobe Illustrator to create it myself, but you could hire a freelance graphic designer off Upwork.com of Fiverr.com. It just depends how much money you want to spend. I personally hate spending money, so the more I can do myself, the better.
Cost – $0 if you do it yourself, I did.
Right before I create a website, I go through and start claiming all my social media platforms for the new company name. Chances are that if your domain name is unique enough, it should be available. If not, at least a similar enough name should be.
I’m currently going through and claiming a Gmail account for my new company (people trust Gmail), along with a Facebook Page, Pinterest Page, Instagram, and Twitter Profile. I’m doing this now so I at least have all of these claimed in the digital world.
I will use the graphic I created for my logo, as the profile photo for the new social media accounts. =P
You may not need/use all of these in the beginning, but having them for safekeeping is a nice reassurance moving forward.
Cost – $0 for the basic accounts.
I personally use WordPress for all my websites. It’s frankly easy to use, flexible and I like the simplicity. This new website will also be on WordPress. Most websites are.
Setting up a website is easier than you think. I personally use Bluehost (you can use whoever you want) to set up all my websites because they have a 1-click button that sets up a WordPress website for you, if that’s scary, here is a detailed post on how to start a blog written for some friends. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. We’re happy to help!
Full disclosure, I use Bluehost for all my websites. I’m a big fan. If you want to learn more or use Bluehost, I would LOVE if you used my Bluehost Affiliate Code to check it out. It really means a lot to us!
Cost – $202.32 for 2 years of Bluehost hosting.
*You can absolutely do only 1 year, but there is a better discount the longer you go. I also paid for the Site Backup Pro (in case I accidentally delete something) and SiteLock Security (in case my website gets hacked). Overall $202.32 for two years is pretty awesome! If your website hasn’t made that back in 2 years, we should chat.
So I went to the same place I buy all my WordPress themes (Themeforest) and searched their hundreds of demo WordPress Themes to find the right one that made sense for my Amazon Affiliate Website. This is the style and look your website will have. I needed a clean looking blog (it’s great for SEO) and I needed a warm looking homepage. I found something flexible and looked professional after a couple hours searching.
I’m a big fan of websites that look professional. If your website looks like it was made by a 5th grader, it will be instantly judged and people will feel uncomfortable. Take the time to give your website a nice look upfront and it will pay dividends for the success of your website. WordPress themes are a great way to give your Amazon Affiliate Website a professional look for a cheap price tag.
All you do with your WordPress Theme is hit “Upload Theme” once you create your WordPress website. It’ll then give you the look and feel of what you saw in the demo theme from Themeforest.
Cost – $60 for a WordPress theme from Themeforest.
There is an infinite number of plugins you can add to your site, but the more you do, the slower your site can run and Google hates slow sites, read Adam’s experience here with decreasing website load times. Here are 6 free plug-ins I add to all of my WordPress Amazon Affiliate Websites to keep them fast, looking good and efficient.
Cost – $0 for all of these plugins.
I want my website to be easily manageable, so I’m going to initially set up my Amazon Affiliate Website to be pretty simple. I’m having essentially 3 pages.
These pages are:
I thought about separating the About Me and Contact Page, but they essentially are the same thing, I’ll have a contact form on my About Me page. In my head, the website is more manageable with 3 different pages (plus future blog posts).
I’m currently setting up these 3 pages and loading the homepage with products to sell for the upcoming holiday. Once these 3 pages are done, you’re website is almost done.
Cost – $0, just takes time.
In most cases, your website will be found by SEO or Search Engine Optimization blog posts. You’ll likely market your website in other ways, but most times blogs are found on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Here is Wallet Squirrel’s SEO strategy.
This is where the hard work comes! Every one of my blog posts must follow the 5 rules I discovered during my research on 50 Amazon Affiliate Website Examples Making Money in a Niche. There were the 5 important variables when investigating blog posts on these successful Amazon Affiliate Websites.
Lastly, always do your research and NEVER suggest/promote products you dislike or don’t agree with just for money. People will ALWAYS see through that.
I’m trying to create 4-5 awesome blog posts for my initial launch. Don’t worry about publishing these all at once. This just gives Google more time to crawl these pages and bookmark them for future Google Searches. After that, I’ll create a new post weekly or bi-weekly. Honestly whatever feels better with my time constraints. Either way, quality blog posts are better with Amazon Affiliate Websites.
Cost – $0 unless you pay someone else to write articles for you, but I write all my articles myself.
After I finish my 3 website pages and 4-5 blog posts. I’ll be ready to launch my website!
This involves more than making it visible to the world. You need to get people to the website. Here are some ideas on how to promote your website and increase web traffic.
Cost – $0 You don’t have to spend anything on marketing the website if you don’t want to. Find free ways to promote your website before resorting to paying for a press release or PR companies. Don’t ever try to pay for links to your website, Google may penalize you for this.
Remember the old shampoo commercials of rinse and repeat? That’s how Amazon Affiliate Websites work. Your goal is to attract as many visitors as possible, help them, and send them onward to Amazon to buy a product.
The more you write new content and market your website, the more visitors you’ll bring in and the more products you’ll sell.
Total Cost to Start an Amazon Affiliate Website – $274.32
I just laid out my entire Amazon Affiliate Website template for you to copy. If you follow this outline and track my progress, you’ll find some success for your new website.
I’m currently in Step 8, setting up my Amazon Affiliate Website now. It’s going really well! I should be at Step 9 or Step 10 by the end of January, having only spent $274.32 total. That should easily be made back in the next couple of months, I’ll continue to track and post my progress!
Leave me a comment on how your website is doing and I’ll continue to leave updates on how the Epic Niche Site Battle is going!
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
“Let’s do this!” is how I responded to a LinkedIn message from Barnabas of TheDadWallet.com & SerialBoss.com.
Back in May, Barnabas reached out to Wallet Squirrel following up on all our talk about building a niche website. He’s been wanting to do the same thing and he suggested we do something like Pat Flynn’s Niche Site Duel and compete to see who could make the better niche website.
F*#k, I freaked out. This is the first time I’m going against a real blogger and sharing every step of the process. What if my ideas suck?
Although terrified, I REALLY want to do this. I want to build something awesome with everything I’ve learned the last year. So I accepted the challenge of what we’re calling the “Epic Niche Site Battle”!
In an older post, I gave 50 Examples of Amazon Affiliate Websites. Essentially a niche site is a website that caters to a particular narrow group of people with a common interest. For example, people who own large fish tanks could be a particular niche. You could totally have a website about that!
You can also monetize these niche websites and have them make money for you. I’ll admit, that’s my motivation to start this. I’m hoping to build a passive income with this new website and use that money to buy more dividend stocks.
Barnabas and I sat down (via Google Hangouts) to lay out how the competition works.
Duration: We are giving each other 1 year to build & grow our niche sites. Starting on January 1st of 2018 we’re starting our site and giving comprehensive reports quarterly on both our blogs (walletsquirrel.com & serialboss.com). We each may add additional posts, but we have to share all of our stats every three months. Whoever has better key metrics at the end of the year wins.
What We’re Competing On: We’re both building niche sites to help us grow our incomes, so making money is key but not the only factor. We are tracking 4 key metrics we both felt were vital to the success of a niche website.
Updates: We’ll share our updates quarterly with January 4th as our first post. Damn that’s soon!
Rules: The only rules we came up with were:
That’s it. All else is fair to build the ultimate niche website!
Full Transparency: We’re sharing EVERYTHING (good times and bad) except the domain names. We want to be as transparent as possible since we want to help others build niche websites and show how it’s done, but we’ve both heard horror stories of people using similar domain names and stealing traffic from new sites after the keyword research has been done.
I may share my domain name at the end of the competition, once established, but it’s up to Barnabas to share his or not. For now, we’ll call our respective sites the Wallet Squirrel Niche Site and the Serial Boss Niche Site.
So far my previous niche site experience leaves room for improvement. In the past I’ve built 4 unsuccessful niche websites, but each one got better.
That’s right, I’ve built 4 awful niche sites in the past. It’s time to build something awesome!
Starting when I was 24 I built my first niche site reviewing online universities, it was called Top5OnlineUniversities.com. It was awful because I wrote generic school descriptions and only made money with AdSense. I hated myself for building something so lame. So I quit after a year.
At age 25 I built a website called LanguageMindMaps.com (it’s not up anymore). I wanted to use my graphic design talent to create mind maps of typical conversations in different languages to help people visually learn new languages. It was better looking but I had no way to really monetize it and knew nothing about marketing. It failed because no one was searching for the term language mind maps.
At age 26 I built a deodorant niche website that started doing well for the keyword search, but it lacked ways to monetize the website. Plus I wasn’t exactly thrilled to tell people I had a website on deodorant. So since I wasn’t excited to market it, I lost interest and it died.
At age 27 Adam (of Wallet Squirrel) and I built a Halloween Costume website. This was something that looked cool, had great keyword research and did really well. However, it was just a seasonal website so the rest of the year I lacked interest in maintaining it since it only turned a profit once a year. That lack of motivation destroyed me and I game up. By the time Halloween came around again we didn’t have the keyword strength and lost tons of traffic. It’s slowly been dying.
Now! I plan to build something that’s graphically cool, that I’m excited to share with other people, has awesome keyword strength with a topic I can write about throughout the year. These are the guiding factors for my new niche site.
It was pretty funny when we shared our initial strategies, they were very different approaches. So we’ll get to see two common strategies in action.
I wanted to go with a traditional affiliate site where the purpose is to rank high for a particular keyword then get my audience from my niche website to a product as fast as possible. When people use my tracking codes, I get a portion of the sale if they buy anything. So my strategy is to gain traffic through keyword targeting and quickly get them to a product site quickly. The idea being the more people I get to a product site, the more products that will sell.
Barnabas with SerialBoss has a bit different strategy. He plans to make most his income from Google AdSense rather than affiliate sales. So he is focusing on ranking highly in Google in a particular niche and gain revenue through visual AdSense ads.
Overall: I anticipate I may make more money first, but he is playing the long game by trying to become the premier expert in a particular niche field. If he can rank highly for one particular keyword, it’s easier to start expanding into other similar keywords and significantly grow his traffic.
I’m currently in the pregame phase. I’ve built a few niche sites in the past, but none have been overly successful. I really have no idea what I’m going to do. I know I’m going to build an affiliate niche website and it’s going to follow rules I stated above from past lessons learned, but I don’t know exactly what it will be yet. I don’t even have a domain name in mind.
So I’m currently rapidly typing domain names into GoDaddy to see what’s available and sounds good. Rapidly strategizing in my head because on January 1st we’re going fulling speed!
The main Epic Niche Site Battle is between Barnabas and I, but anyone is welcome to join in. Does anyone want to join us building a completely new niche website in January? Sign up for my email newsletter below to follow the action!
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
I get it, you have a website or starting a new website and you’re asking yourself How to Monetize a Blog? I did the same thing 5 years ago when I started my first affiliate website. Since then I’ve come a long way monetizing websites with affiliate marketing. While the designs and websites have changed, I’ve always monetized my blogs the same way.
*If you’re not familiar with Affiliate Marketing keep reading, if you know all about it, skip to “1 Easy Way to Monetize Your Blog”.
Affiliate Marketing is the idea that when a visitor is on your website and clicks an outbound link to Amazon or Toys R’ Us from your website and buys something, you receive a commission of that sale.
Most bloggers do this because they are then earning a commission on products they already have or heavily recommend. Amazon encourages this because they are receiving customers they wouldn’t have gotten without your website. Everyone wins.
It’s super simple, Affiliate Marketing links just look like regular hyperlinks. Here are some examples:
All of these are affiliate marketing links. If you clicked on them and bought any of those items. I would make a commission and it’s simple to set up. Here’s how to do it for your site.
It’s super easy to start monetizing your blog and it can be set up in minutes! The easiest way to start affiliate marketing is to partner with an affiliate marketing company.
Secret: 1 Easy Way to Monetize your blog is to sign up with an Affiliate Marketing company that turns every outbound link on your website into an affiliate marketing link automatically that you can earn a commission on.
There a lot of different affiliate marketing companies out there, but I’m sharing my personal experience with Viglink which has made monetizing my blogs insanely easy. I’ve used them the last 5 years. They have a great WordPress plugin that turns every outbound link into an affiliate link. Plus they partner with over 2,000 merchants, so nearly every online store (Amazon, Target, Etsy, Finish Line, etc.) will pay you a commission through the Viglink network.
I use Viglink for Affiliate Marketing, here’s how.
Step 1 – Sign up with Viglink
Go to Viglink and fill out their forms.
Step 2 – Install the Viglink Plugin on your WordPress Blog
Do a search for the “Viglink Plugin”, activate the plugin and insert your account code from your Viglink account.
Step 3 – Add links to your website and get paid
Now any regular link going to any of Viglink’s partner merchants (2,000+ of them) on your website are an affiliate link automatically. Just check your Viglink Account to see how many times people click on your links and if those clicks turned into sales, paying you a commission.
It’s that easy, you can monetize any blog in 5 minutes.
Most companies will pay you a percentage of the sale made. Each company within an affiliate marketing company is different. For example within Viglink, Amazon will pay 1% – 4.5% commission depending on the product category. Yet also in Viglink, 1-800 Flowers will pay an 8% commission. Usually the larger the company, the smaller the commission.
You’ll make more money the higher priced items you have on your site. For example, a 4% commission on an $11,312 Outdoor Inflatable Movie Screen is a lot different from a $30 Stainless Steel Kitchen Set. FYI 4% of that inflatable movie screen would be a $452.28 commission for you.
It’s a balancing act of having high priced items that could give you a higher commission vs lower priced items which the average person is more likely to buy.
I think if you worked with Amazon directly through their Amazon Associates program, you may make a slightly better commission on each sale. However, you would be limited to only making money with Amazon.
Working with an affiliate marketing company like Viglink, you can sell Amazon products and products from 2,000+ other companies (here are the companies). You may lose a bit of the commission for the ease of dealing with only one platform. In my experience where I link to products all over the web, it’s worth it.
I talk about Viglink just because I use them and like them. There are other companies that offer affiliate marketing like Clickbank, Skimlinks, LinkBridge and more. I’m just going off personal experience.
I always prefer Affiliate Marketing over Website Ads because ads are hugely distracting. Website Ads blink, flash and sometimes don’t even relate to the content your reading.
Affiliate Marketing simply creates a hyperlink in the content you’ve already written. It’s not any more obtrusive than any other link you create on your blog versus ads like on the right sidebar, over on the right there. =)
Personally: I use Google AdSense for Ads in addition to Affiliate Marketing, but if I had to choose one, I’d stick with Affiliate Marketing. Most of my Google Adsense revenue is in cents from views of the ads, I rarely see people click on the ads. However, I see a lot more people click on my Affiliate Links and those lead to sales which pay a lot more.
You don’t have to use Viglink, but you should at least be signed up with some affiliate marketing company from Day 1 of your blog to start monetizing it. It’s a non-obtrusive way to monetize your blog, earning extra money on products you’re already recommending.
Let me know if you have any questions about monetizing your blog this way!
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
