Paul Haarman: How I Made My First Million With A Small Blog!

If you’re starting out on your blogging journey, you will want to know how this blog made its first million. I am writing this post to share what I have learnt so that new bloggers can become profitable faster than me. Today, my husband and I earn more than $20K USD per month from our small self hosted blog! And it is still growing… 

But before we begin, here are some questions answered:

What is a “small blog”? 

My definition of a small blog is any blog that has fewer than 100 000 visitors per day. It doesn’t matter if the site brings in hundreds or thousands of visitors each day. If it’s below 100 000 visitors then I call it small.

How old is your blog?

Our blog is 16 months old at the time of writing this post. It was younger than 7 months when I started monetizing it. How young you ask? 3 months to be exact… Yes, I got my first sale within three months! 

Why am I sharing all of this on a public blog that gets hundreds of thousands of visitors per month? Because if you have followed me for some time now, by now you know that the only way to succeed online – in any business- is simple: just do what works! And yes, what worked for us will work for you too so keep reading… If you are ready, let’s get into it! 

Here are 10 things you will need to know in order to make money with your blog: Paul Haarman

1. Build a quality blog that is relevant and solves problems for people.  It’s not about how many ads you can fit onto your page (Adsense isn’t what makes most bloggers rich). It’s not about having the shiniest theme or the most techie-looking website either! If you want to make money online, pick topics with mass appeal. As my husband likes to say: “It’s all about the traffic”.

2. Be consistent with publishing new content regularly and promote it well – this is where most bloggers fail. You must invest time and effort into growing an audience by promoting your content on various platforms such as Facebook groups- which brings us to the next point:

3. Create a Facebook page and use it to promote your blog posts and future content so that you can build an email list. Think of your blog as a funnel: by using Facebook, you will be able to capture leads which you can market products and services to later on… But we’ll get into all of this in just a few minutes 🙂

4. Use Google Analytics or any other tracking software such as OptinMonster, SumoMe (my personal favorite) or Thrive Themes to track conversions and sales from each post. This is what tells us whether our efforts are working or not! If you don’t know how to do any of the above, I have created a free course for new bloggers here.

5. To make money with your blog, you will need to learn how to promote affiliate offers or create your own products and services. There are many options out there but the best ones for most bloggers are information products (e-books) and web hosting because they require less effort than physical products which take time to ship.

6. Don’t spam! Spamming is against Google’s terms of service which means that if you engage in spammy activities such as auto following people on Twitter then Google might penalize your blog thereby destroying all of your hard work… Do NOT do this!!

7. Guest blogging is one way to get more traffic but it’s not a gold mine either so doesn’t expect immediate results… But here is a secret: most people don’t know how to write good guest posts and many bloggers (like we did) fail at it. You can make things easier for yourself by getting access to lists of blogs in your niche that accept affiliate offers and start promoting those instead. This way you will get traffic quickly without having to spend hours trying to find the right blog to approach…

8. When you create content, ask yourself: What value am I providing? How can my readers benefit from this?

9. Like it or not, the only way to really succeed online is through joint ventures with other bloggers so try reaching out and build relationships with successful people who share common interests as you! Another idea is sharing resources such as tools, software and other products that your readers might find useful such as this post :).

10. Finally, the most important rule: be patient! This is not a get rich quick method so doesn’t expect immediate results… It takes time to build an audience and online success doesn’t come overnight. Have faith in what you’re doing and just keep pushing forward.

Conclusion by Paul Haarman:

There you have it: 10 things you need to know if you want to make money with your blog. If this post was helpful, please share it on social media and be sure to leave a comment in the box below!