These Highest Paid Bloggers Started from Nothing and Now Earn over $100K/Month. Here’s How - How to Make Money on Medium: 5 Ways to Get Paid

Niche Sites, AI for Bloggers, Course Hosting Platforms and More

These Highest Paid Bloggers Started from Nothing and Now Earn over $100K/Month. Here’s How - How to Make Money on Medium: 5 Ways to Get Paid

Let’s face it. Many of us are stuck in business pretty much most of the time.

I wanna remind you that it’s totally normal. But the only thing that can get you out of a rut is action.

Messy action.

Action that doesn’t make sense.

Action that might be in a totally new direction.

Action on an old project.

Action related to a program you invested in but never got to.

Any action, really…

It gets you moving. It makes you excited again. Your brain starts coming up with ideas and connecting seemingly unrelated things.

This is what can help you when you’re bored with your business, or overworked, or having a bad month or a bad year.

So in today’s episode, I wanna share some fun things I’ve been doing lately.

I think you’ll enjoy it as what you’ll hear is different than anything I’ve covered before.

I’ll discuss 2 big topics in the blogging industry that I haven’t dived into before – niche sites and artificial intelligence. If you’ve been thinking of trying any of these or adding an extra income to your blogging business, you might come up with some interesting ideas after this episode.

Keep in mind that these are projects that take months or up to a year to see any significant results. I mean starting a new niche site and seeing some traction, or using AI in your content and seeing the overall effect it can have on your business and income.

Nothing is a quick way to make money. We’re talking about ideas that take time to implement, but which can then earn you passive income forever. Or, alternatively, you can sell your blog for profit, and even create new niche sites solely for that purpose.

passive income blog boss graphic

Let’s get into the details.

Niche Sites

A lot of my time lately was invested into building niche sites. For a start, my second site – Bold Business School – which was created as a promo website for my program with the same name, now also has a blog. For it, my goal was to create content using ChatGPT and optimize it to eventually bring traffic to the site and monetize it in different ways.

This is the first time I’m using AI for anything and I’m actually loving it. I took a course and am learning from one of the experts on the topic – Pete from DoYouEvenBlog. It was super easy to get started, though, and to feel comfortable using the tool.

Now, it’s like I have a team of writers and I’m the editor. It’s all about doing keyword research, giving ChatGPT the right prompts, reviewing the content and making edits to it before publishing it.

One disadvantage of AI will always be the lack of human factor. But with some changes to the content, you can easily add that. Not to mention that you can prep ChatGPT to sound more like you. It’s getting better and better at that.

So I’m using the tool for blogging in a few ways. To come up with blog post title ideas, to create outlines for articles, drafts for a whole blog post, or only a section for an article that I can add to an existing piece when I update it.

I can imagine how you can also use it for course content and many other things, but this is how I do it right now. 

So if up until that point something was stopping you from giving AI a try and you think it’s not the right way to create content, I’m here to encourage you to give it a try. Here’s an example of a blogger who grew an AI site to $25K/month in 1 year.

You still create new content, it’s not copied from anyone else. And you get to edit it as much as you want and even make it sound like you wrote it.

This allows you to create more content in less time.

And let’s not forget that as bloggers, we gotta keep up with what’s going on in the industry. The rise of AI tools means that now any creator can produce a lot more content. If you don’t wanna be left behind, you might consider jumping on the trend.

Add to the the fact that one of Google’s recent updates states that it’s all about quality content, regardless of whether it’s created by people or machines. This is the green light bloggers needed to make tools like ChatGPT a part of their business.

However, I won’t really be creating AI content for my main site Let’s Reach Success now. I’m doing it for my secondary site and wanna see how it goes.

Traffic is already growing. I’m using what I call the ideal blog traffic formula – organic traffic and traffic from Pinterest.

This is also one big experiment for me. To see how long it takes to rank AI content, to grow a niche site which is actually on broader topics such as side hustles, making money online but also anything related to the course business, and to monetize a new site in different ways.

Currently, I’m promoting my products on it, mainly my program Bold Business School. I have opt-in forms so I’m getting people on my list from there. I joined Amazon Associates and am adding Amazon affiliate links.

I’m also testing ads. I joined Ezoic – a popular ad network that allows brand new blogs to join. But the set up was so complicated and the user experience so unpleasant, that I don’t think I’ll stick to it.

Right now I’m testing Google AdSense, although I know it’s not an ideal monetization opportunity and it’s actually the first time I’m working with Google ads. It will take time to see traction so I can’t just test a new ad network every week. I’ll leave AdSense for some time now and see how it goes.

It’s also possible that ads only ruin the user experience and don’t earn enough, so then it’s better to focus on growing the traffic and the other income streams.

My latest niche site

Next to that, I started an actual niche site, on a more specific topic and which doesn’t have any content yet. It’s the first time I build a site that I might sell for profit later on, but I don’t need to decide that now.

It will be about the content, not me or my products. The articles will also be created using ChatGPT and the focus will be on monetizing with Amazon affiliate links. 

I believe we should give new sites at least a year to see if there’s any real potential, if the choice of niche, content strategy, revenue models and anything else is right, and to decide whether we want to continue growing it or move onto something else.

Sadly, many bloggers give up only after a few months of starting a website. But that’s way too soon even for search engines to pay any attention to your domain.

New Course Platform

Last month I moved to a new course platform – Podia.

I’ve been using Teachable ever since I created my first course many years ago, but it was time for a change. I share why exactly and what inspired that decision, as well as how much it saves me in business expenses, in the last episode of the podcast.

So last month I purchased an annual plan with Podia, the team did the migration for me (only for 5 products) and I started migrating my other offers to it.

I haven’t yet shared the new links with the students, this will be happening in November together will a million other tasks related to it. I will create product sales pages, replace all existing Teachable links with the new ones, review all course content and sales pages one last time, test buttons, set things up in ConvertKit so new students can be tagged based on the course they are in, and so on.

This is fun and it brings this whole new energy into my course business. I also love the design of Podia. The sales pages look really nice and so do the course lessons. Both as a student and as a creator I’m enjoying it much more than Teachable.

Also thanks to this move to a new platform, I took the time to re-evaluate my product suite. I took some important decisions such as removing my affiliate program, and retiring offers such as Blog Coaching and the Master Blogger Bundle.

Membership Site

One of the things Podia is best known for is memberships and communities, and my next big update has to do with this type of product. It’s one of the main reasons why I switched course hosting platforms.

So I’ve been thinking about starting a community and membership site for a long time now – these 2 go together really well. But often it’s not time to turn my ideas into reality the moment I come up with them. So I stayed with this one for a year or maybe even two. And now the time has come.

Not just that, but I created the vision for this offer, who exactly it’s for, how things will be structured inside, and came up with its name, created the membership inside Podia, and set up the waitlist because it will first be released to people on the waitlist. That will happen next month, in December. And only after that will I reveal the community to everything else so they can join.

So, it’s called Fearless Bloggers, and it’s many things. 

It’s a community for bloggers (new, intermediate and advanced) to come together and learn, connect and level up.

It’s a monthly membership that gives you behind the scenes content and my latest and greatest strategies.

It’s a virtual playground that allows you to share your latest blog content and get feedback on it, get motivated thanks to the action others in the group are taking, and brainstorm ideas.

And last but not least, it’s a safe, loving and empowering space to share what’s on your mind, ask me questions, feel less lonely, and find hope in the rollercoaster that is business.

Needless to say I’m very excited about this because it’s also about creating the community of bloggers that I wanna be part of. Fearless Bloggers is meant to become a safe and empowering space for bloggers to talk, share, get access to blogging strategies and trends, and stay accountable.

Also, it’s the place where I’ll be sharing monthly blog income reports.

That’s an old tradition that I’m bringing back and only members of the community will see the exact numbers in my business as well as what I’m working on in more detail than I’ve ever revealed before.

I’ll also share the progress with both of my niche sites, any traffic and monetization strategies I try, any new content I publish across all my platforms including which is AI-written and which blog posts are sponsored, and so on. 

I actually already created the membership and posted my October income report. So by the time the first members join, there will be 2 monthly updates waiting for them, as well as 2 fun bonuses. One of them is called Niche Site Success and it’s a video series in which you’ll learn how to build a niche site, create content for it using AI, and monetize your new blog quickly. 

You can see how, as usual, I’m documenting my journey and combining the different things I work on.

So, that’s my update for you this week. What have you been up to?

It’s never too late to start taking action in your business.

Some ideas include:

  • using a new tool;
  • retiring old offers or outlining new ones;
  • taking your content to the next level;
  • starting a podcast;
  • taking a course;
  • upping your Pinterest game to get traffic to your blog (if you need help with that, I have a masterclass called Pinterest Boost just for bloggers);
  • monetizing in a new way;
  • creating a blogging schedule and sticking to it;
  • using AI to create more content in less time, outline blog posts, get their first draft ready in seconds (literally!), generate blog post ideas, etc.

What will it be?

Prefer to listen to this article? Tune into the episode below:

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