How to Work Your Blog to make it Work for You

Blogging is fun

My twinnie and I started our blog as a fun way of doing something different that would see us using our passion for writing. (We both had A* for English and are both teachers). We had a couple of brainstorming sessions and we decided to write about what people, we think, most want to hear about – how to save money, spend little and still enjoy life. The journey has several twists and turns but if we told you it wasn’t fun, we would be lying. Here are some of our highlights below.

 

Yes you do Make Money

We had no intention (or idea even) that just doing a blog can earn you a living. Imagine our surprise then when we earned the first lot of money from our blog. You can read about it here.

We then gave it more serious consideration and after a while, we both reduced our teaching time to part-time hours! We thought why endure full days in the classroom when you can spend your time doing more of what you enjoy and less of what stresses you out? Sure there are some tech issues in setting up and running the blog that we sometimes find challenging. But there’s always help and people are always available, are always right on hand, professional, and super friendly.

You may disagree (you really have no reason to) but we think we have come across the winning formula! What we have done is to set up our blog to work for us, and it does! You can follow the steps here if you want to set up and start your own blog.

So how do we make it work for us? Hold tight. I’ll tell you now:

1. By channeling our writing to what our readers want to hear about, we have gained a decent following. Of course, it does take research as we don’t know everything! Fact is, though, that we are living the frugal lifestyle so we do know and experience what we are writing about. Have you seen our weekly posts about frugal things we’ve done each week?
2. We give freebies to our faithful followers. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but we give. We give frugal lifestyle tips, recipes, (you might be surprised but many people want to know how to cook something they have heard of but don’t know how to!) By the way, you can click here to get a free Jamaican Jerk recipe. We also give away branded merchandise (our brand of course).  Here’s a video showing one of our aprons.
3. With our loyal audience waiting to hear from us, we have them hooked. The next step is to give them more of what they said they wanted in the first place, a chance to spend less and be happy.
4. Next, we joined affiliate programmes that suited our niche and our audience. We looked for brands that we know our audience would know and love. We partnered with: Asda George, Everything Five Pounds, Wowcher, New Look, Hobbycraft, Bonmarche, Twinings Teashop, Superdrug, TK Maxx, Forever 21, iQualTech, Sports Direct. We were then able to share exclusive (sometimes) deals with our followers so they could purchase items as needed from the places we know and love! KA-CHING!
5. They are happy and we are happy too as they’ve purchased a bargain and for each purchase they make, we get a little kickback. I do say little and it is a little, but it’s not a big deal to us. it adds up. We have even set up a Facebook group where we feature ‘deals’. FEEL FREE TO JOIN THE FACEBOOK GROUP IF YOU DONT WANT TO MISS OUT.
6. We are able to share the deals on PINTEREST which by the way is the most awesome social media tool that so many people are missing out on. It’s pretty easy. Pins on Pinterest just need to be rich pins. CLICK HERE AND I WILL SHOW YOU HOW TO MAKE YOUR PINS RICH PINS. If you need further help just put your details in the comments below and I will be more than happy to help.
7. Using TAILWIND to schedule our posts on Pinterest has been a Godsend. Honestly!
8. A lot of bloggers or businesses want their name/brand to be ‘out there’. We help them (at a cost of course), to get this done. So we offer sponsored post opportunities.
9. Some who have blogs don’t trust themselves as writers, so guess what? You’ve guessed it. Yeah and at a cost.
10. One of our crowning achievements was writing a book LIVING LIFE WHILE SQUEEZING LEMONS which is available for sale on AMAZON. Since I know you are interested, you can get your own e-version for free HERE.
11. We also allow companies to run ads on our blog. For that inconvenience, we get a little return.
12. By showing that we are good at our game, others ask for our help, and for a fee, we manage their Pinterest account and receive remuneration.
13. Blogging can be big business and it gives you little spare time in between but when we do have a bit of free time, we spend it doing online surveys which also earns us a living. Even for just trawling the internet, we get free money from QMEE.

So go on, SET UP A BLOG, learn how to monetize it and the sky is the limit, the world is your oyster and all that jazz.

So what do you think of our blogging adventures? We wrote about our second blogiversary here, so you can check it out.

• If you want to start a blog but think you need to get some proper training, you can check out this course. or this one in you’re in the UK
• If you are already blogging and stuck on ideas for blog posts,
• If you find one of your blog posts is going viral, you will want to capitalize on that by sharing it around on social media and asking friends, family, and followers to do the same.
• If you want to improve your Domain Authority by guest posting, you will find some guidelines for guest posting here.