Making $10,000/month with a blog is everybody’s dream. That’s when you’re finally making the big bucks. 6-figures per year!
You’re making a huge amount for relatively little work, especially when you compare it to most real-world careers.
There’s no going into work 8 hours per day, 5 days a week. There’s no annoying office politics to deal with, or irritating coworkers bothering you.
You don’t need to request vacation days or feel bad for missing a few days of work due to illness.
For the most part, a blog business is passive income. If set up properly, it runs 24/7, 365 days out of the year whether you’re actually present or not. The work you do put in is to grow your passive income.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can make $10,000/month with a blog. We’ll run through some numbers and then get into actionable strategy.
The fastest way to grow a blog to $10,000/month
There are a lot of different monetization options you can choose for your blog. I’ve tried all of them extensively.
The quickest, and most effective strategy for growing a new blog to $10K/month is to sell your own products.
Yes, it’s possible to get there using advertising or affiliate marketing, but selling your own products provides the shortest path to big revenue numbers – with the least amount of traffic.
This makes it easy for most people to replicate.
With advertising and affiliate marketing, you need a lot of traffic. You’re not making much per conversion, so you need big traffic numbers.
With selling products, the earnings per conversion can be over 100x greater.
Let’s break down some numbers.
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Breaking down the numbers
Our goal = $10,000/month.
I’m going to go through a few examples. $10,000/month may sound like an impossible figure to reach with your blog at the moment.
But once you see the numbers, you’ll realize that it’s easier than you’re making it out to be. Anybody who works hard, and works effectively, can do it.
Example #1: $100 product
Let’s say we’re selling a $100 product.
$10,000 / $100 = 100 sales – we need to make 100 sales in a month.
100 sales / 30 days = 3.3 sales per day.
So on average, we need to sell 3 of our products per day to make $10,000/month.
Example #2: $300 product
$10,000 / $300 = 33 sales – we need to make 33 sales in a month.
33 sales / 30 days = 1
So on average, we only need to sell 1 of our products per day to hit $10K.
Example #3: $500 product
$10,000 / $500 = 20 sales – we need to make 20 sales in a month.
20 / 30 = 0.6 sales per day.
So really, we only need to sell one product per weekday to hit $10K.
Example #4: $1000 product
$10,000 / $1000 = 10 – we need to make 10 sales in a month.
Calculating per day doesn’t really make sense here, but it’s mind-blowing to realize that you only need to convert 10 people into customers every month to build a 6-figure business.
Email subscribers matter more than traffic
Like I said before, with advertising and affiliate marketing you need a ton of traffic to build it into a 6-figure business. Traffic is key.
But with selling products, traffic is not the most important aspect of your business model. Instead, it’s email subscribers.
99% of your product sales will come from your email list.
How email lists make sales
People rarely land on a blog for the first time and purchase a $500 product right off the bat.
Selling products take time. You need to warm up your leads, building trust and authority first. To do this, you need to contact them more than once.
The best way to do this is with an email list.
Here’s how an email list converts new visitors to customers.
The sales journey of a new blog visitor
Let’s set up an example scenario here to better understand the process (and to make it more interesting).
Let’s say you have a blog about muscle building for guys, and you’ve built a premium product priced at $300.
Jim, our example website visitor, searches Google for some information on how to build muscle quickly.
He lands on your post and reads through it. At the end of the article, he sees an opt-in form where he can subscribe to get updates, and to receive a cheatsheet of the healthiest diets to increase muscle growth.
He subscribes.
He gets a great welcome email thanking him for joining, and let’s him know all the quality material he’ll receive as a new subscriber. He then goes through your opt-in incentive and likes what he sees.
Over the next few weeks, he gets sent high quality free content on different tips and tricks to build muscle quickly.
He now knows you and your blog by name, and associates you as an expert who knows what you’re talking about.
Furthermore, he’s accustomed to seeing emails from you in his inbox. Each time, he’s excited to open what you sent him since it’s been helpful every time.
A few weeks later, you pitch him on your premium training course.
It’s $300, but contains a step-by-step training regime that’s been tested and proved to work. He buys right away.
Because you’ve developed a relationship with him through your email list, you’re not a stranger pitching some random product.
Every part of your interaction with him helped in building up your trust and reputation.
Over time, because of all the free value you’ve provided him, he didn’t hesitate at all to buy your product when it was available.
This is how email lists convert to sales.
Going further
In our example, we only went through the journey of one person, Jim.
But imagine that you’re getting 100 email subscribers per day. That’s 3000 people per month.
That means that every month, 3000 new people are joining your list and going through the exact same path as Jim.
Not everyone will convert to customers right away. With our example of a $300 product, you should get about a 3% conversion rate if you’re doing things properly.
That means for every 100 people who join, 3 of them will convert to customers.
3 x $100 = $300/day.
$300/day x 30 = $9000/month.
Over the year, $9000 x 12 months = $108,000 which is about $10,000/month.
This is a clear example of how you can grow a blog to 6-figures in revenue, and it’s exactly how I grew RankXL to 6-figures in 12 months.
Conclusion
Building a 6-figure blog can seem like an outlandish goal for most people. It sounds crazy, something that only a few people ever achieve.
But if you can build an email list and sell your own products, it’s very possible to scale to $10,000/month. You don’t need that much traffic, and you don’t have to make thousands of sales.
Hi Chris,
This is a great idea. I have been contemplating about it lately. But the problem is I can’t think of any skill I have to make product around that people would be interested to buy (makes me realize I’m just mediocre at everything lol).
What’s your opinion about making an info product where you’re not really an “expert” but you think you can scour the internet/books for all info and make a well-written product about it?
Thanks!
I’ve created a lot of products in areas I have no experience/knowledge in. You can create valuable products through research and really good curation. Doesn’t always have to be something built out of personal expertise.
Yeah, but the point that I don’t understand is how to get 100 subscribers on the hook per day. We run an established business for 7 years, and have 10k subscribers, almost not changing. We have <50 subscribers a month and about the same amount of unsubscribes. Despite a lot of research, I was not able to find a solution for that problem, nor were Fiverr freelancers or the SEO agency we work with able to provide an answer.