Why create a blog ?

To make additional income.

What is a blog (noun)?

A super simplified description of a blog: A blog is a website where there are many articles written and then posted on a particular subject by the website owner. The articles are written hoping the website will get enough visitors to add advertising. Money can be made with that advertising or by selling something on the site that the site owner has created.

How do you create a blog ?

I’ll explain as best as I can. You should do a ton of self-education on blogging because this article is rudimentary and the subject is complicated.

Hopefully, I’m going to explain well enough so that you can understand that blogging could and should be a part of your retirement income.

What is blogging (verb)?

The site you’re on now is a blog: I am working towards writing 300 articles in the next 12 months related to “Starting, growing and selling a house cleaning business when you are over 60.”

I think that what I will write about is interesting enough to a small group of people (people ready to retire but didn’t save), that I will get a lot of visitors coming to my website.

When enough people visit my website, I can advertise on the site and make money. It is also possible that I can create and sell my own products, for example a newsletter.

My starting goal for the site is to make $100. Not per month, just $100. I know that’s doable. I’ll ad more goals as time goes by.

My first big goal is to make $5,000 per month before taxes with my blog.

I know that’s only $60,000/year for a lot of hard work. 300 articles to make $60,000?

But look at it as if you had enough money in the stock market to make you $60,000 in dividends and stock appreciation every year.

How much would your stock portfolio have to be worth to provide you $60,000 a year in earnings? Well, at a 5% return on your stock investments, you would need to own $1,200,000 in stocks. If you were superb at picking stocks and got a 10% return, you would need “only” $600,000 in stock investments.

Now you know that the real value of a successful blogging site is $600,000 to $1,000,000 or a lot more, when related to owning stocks.

How long can you make $5,000/month with your blog?

The answer would be, that with the right topic, pretty much as long as you could keep working on the site. I guess it would depend on your health. 10 years? 20 years? More? Perhaps you could set it up as an inheritance and get even more traction out of it after you’re gone.

How much total income could you make with your blog?

If you were to keep working on the blog, keep it up to date for 20 years, $5,000/month would make you a total income of $1,200,000, not adjusted for inflation, before taxes.

If you combined that income with the income from the investment of the $1,000,000 you make selling your house cleaning business, there is no reason you couldn’t collect a monthly income of at least $10,000/month.

Now let’s add another bit of information to the mix. Selling your blog:

There are investors looking to buy successful blogs. Like a “hands off” house cleaning business investor, they would be buying a stream of income. Currently, the market is paying about 35 to 45 times the average monthly income for a working blog.

So a blog producing $5,000 per month in income might sell for $175,000 to $225,000.

A blog would probably sell for less because additional work needs to be done on a continual basis to insure the income continues.

Personally, I wouldn’t sell my blog for that much money. I would just hang on to it and keep updating it.

I suppose that if you got really sick (terminal) selling the blog at that point could pay the hospital and doctor’s bills.

Aside from that, if you wanted a blog site to sell for a big pay day, then start a second one with that in mind.

How to blog in a nutshell:

Before you start writing: Get a domain name and a website to place your articles on. Not good at websites? Use Wix or other easy to use website builders. If you can use Microsoft word or Google Docs you can use Wix.

Then pick a topic.

I have two blogs and here is what I’ve learned about topics.

Make it easy on yourself and pick something you have a great deal of knowledge in.

Everyone our age has something that they are great at. For example, I am very good at marketing, growing indoor plants, growing exotic cacti, residential property management, fish aquarium keeping, and growing service businesses (house cleaning, in this case).

The first blog I created is about keeping freshwater planted aquariums. I made a bunch of mistakes with this blog and even though it is three years old; I am getting very little traffic and because of that, no income.

Blogging mistakes I made:

Choosing a topic that had a limited number of articles that could be written. I really should have chosen a subject where I could have written 300 articles a year, instead of 60 articles in 3 years.

I also changed the domain name at about month 18. This reset the search engine clock so I am still waiting for Google to give my site rankings for articles I’ve written. To explain this better, Google will only start ranking articles after an article has been online for about 9 months. No search engine ranking, so visitors to your site.

Ranking is where your site shows up on a search. For example a search for basketball. The first site to come up is “NBA” They get most of the clicks from the search. Second is Wikipedia. The lower the ranking, the less traffic a site will receive. If a site article doesn’t show up on page one that site won’t get hardly any visitors wanting to read the article.

So, to get back to my aquarium site, when I changed the domain name my site disappeared from the search engine rankings. No rankings, no visitors, no advertising, no income.

My other blog is this one, “Starting, growing and selling a house cleaning businesses when you’re over 60.” Based on experiences and what I know now I think I can make my first $1 in six months and maybe $500 in 12 months. The second year should be exponentially better. I would hope to make at least $1,000/month, maybe a lot more. By the end-of-year two, I will hopefully have 300 to 450 articles posted on the site.

How to choose and create a successful blog

There are two different blogs subjects

1.  A subject wide open with lots to write about and with a lot of potential visitors, for example a food blog. There will be a huge amount of competition, but there will also be a lot of potential website visitors. You don’t need everyone in order to be successful, just a tiny percentage of that market.

2.  The second type of subject would be one where there is lots to write about, but has a somewhat smaller base of visitors who are a bit more focused on the subject. For example, this blog. House cleaning is a vast area with lots to write about. But few people are targeting “Growing a house cleaning business and selling it for over $1,000,000 when you’re over 60.”

So where does that put you? Well, start a blog.

You need to decide on what you are passionate about that you could write 300 articles about in the next 12 to 24 months and at least another 1,000 articles over 20 years (one per week).

Here is an example of subjects that would work or not work:

Subject: Dogs (yes)

Subject: Irish Setters (probably not)

Subject: Irish Setters and hip dysplasia. (nope)

Subject: Every type of aquarium keeping (yes)

Subject: How to take care of freshwater aquariums (maybe)

Subject: How to keep small, planted aquariums (nope). I picked this one, and it wasn’t a wide enough field to allow me to write 300 articles.

In finishing up, here are a few real life blogs that make money that you might not think would:

Topic: Succulents – Succulentsandsunshine.com

Topic: Period Dramas – Perioddramas.com – Think “Pride and Prejudice”

Topic: Wine and Dining – therooftopguide.com (specializes in roof top bars)

Topic: Legos – thebrickfan.com

Highest earning  blog niches:

Food, Personal finance, lifestyle/mommy and travel.

The website you are on is a personal finance blog.

Soggy Bottoms:

There is so much more information online about blogging. Just do a Google or YouTube search. You will also see how much there is to learn. Don’t let that overwhelm you. Just start as best as you can. If it were me I would pay for a course to teach me what I need to know. That’s what I did.

Here is an excellent site to teach you how to create a blog: https://incomeschool.com/project24/