It IS realistic to be able to make income blogging and you do not have to be Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) to be able to start making a full-time living online?
Our latest new venture is selling training course materials for freelance and corporate trainers on Symondsresearch.com and this has turned into an annual 5-figure income blog and it’s growing at pace! Would you like to start a blog that makes over £30,000 (or USD$40,000) a year and lets you be free from working for someone else?
So in this post, I want to show you an example of:
- turning an idea into a blog that makes you income
- in a realistic manner that is achievable by anyone including you!
- with realistic time-frames and real-world issues considered and factored in (finding enough time, for example, is often a barrier to getting started and moving forward)
Here on PromarketingOnline, we blog about blogging and so, by looking at one of our other sites/businesses, I want to show you that we also practice what we preach. A real example to show you how you also can make money online and in a way that really is achievable.
Table of Contents
How the Blogging Income for Symondsresearch.com Has Grown
Let’s be truthful with how blogging and making money online works.
Firstly, there are many people who fail ever really to make anything more than a few pounds or dollars. Others, i.e. in the super-blogger category, make £50,000+ a month (but very few ever achieve this).
If you believe you can be a £50k a month blogger, absolutely go for it as some of you will achieve it.
For most of us though, making enough to be able to be comfortable to quit your job and be self-employed and make say £30,000 a year from blogging, is very possible and it is what we are on track to achieve for the training materials business, Symondsresearch.com as a side business.
So, in this post, this is our journey and the reality for many bloggers in terms of growth. Furthermore, we will update this post every few months in case you want to follow our blogging journey as inspiration to also grow your own business.
You can start making income a whole lot faster than we have with Symondsresearch.com. The reason is that with Symondsresearch.com we started it knowing that it would be a very labor-intensive blog business.
Many other niches will require much less work.
Why? Because the digital items that we are selling are very detailed and include many documents such as detailed PowerPoint slides, trainer’s manuals, participants’ manuals, certificates, and so on.
Given that Valeria (now Dr Valeria Lo Iacono) has a Ph.D. and has taught at several universities, and given she loves education and teaching, she wanted to start a blog around the topic of education. Hence Symondsresearch.com was born.
Blogging, as you can see on the latest posts page on Symondsresearch is absolutely core to how the blog is marketed.
Valeria writes long blog posts that are genuinely useful and helpful for corporate trainers and for teachers, and, so combined with a strong presence on Pinterest, the traffic is beginning to flow to the site.
Quick Insight into Symonds Research as a Business
The key source of income for Symonds Research is generated from the sale of digital products.
These digital products are training course materials and below is an example of the ‘Mental well-being training course materials’ package.
So, for Symonds Research, all of the files for each training materials course are digital (PDFs, MS Word documents, and PowerPoint) and delivered electronically as one zip file.
People make a purchase on the site and then they are immediately sent the link by email to download their electronic files.
Many bloggers make money from affiliate income, meaning that they have links on their site to other people’s products, and, from any sales, they make a commission.
Even though affiliate income is a brilliant way to make money as a blogger, for Symonds Research we have just focused for now on income from direct sales of the training materials packages. We like to do things the hard way 🙂
The packages are created by Dr. Valeria Lo Iacono and who has worked as a researcher at Exeter University in the UK, in addition to her Ph.D. and teaching.
So creating training course-ware is the perfect business.
It is in truth though very labor-intensive and it takes a lot of groundwork.
For this reason, you will see in the income diagram above that this was actually quite a slow business in terms of how long it took for income to pass £100 a month.
What Role Does Blogging Play in the Business
Blogging is very much the core of the business in how we market the business and how the business exists online.
Firstly, we use WordPress as the content management system and pay for hosting, rather than free hosting from a site such as Wix. (Check out our recent post on Free versus paid hosting and it will all become clear).
WordPress, in essence, is a blogging platform, designed for you to easily add lots of content, i.e. blog posts.
We try and add content at least once a week on Symonds Training so that we can try and draw in visitors to the site for EVERY related term connected to ‘corporate training’, ’employee training’, ‘online teaching’, and a bunch of other terms.
Rather than add a post every day of 100 or 200 words, we focus on posts that are 1500+ words and that hopefully offer really good information and guidance for our readers. We genuinely try to help the readers so that we build their trust and in the hope that they return often to our site.
One of the ways in which blogging has really helped us on Symonds Training recently, for example, is the new posts we have added on ‘Online Teaching’.
A lot of people seem to have been searching for information about online teaching and so blogging has helped us draw some of these people onto our site.
If you can have a high-quality well-written post on your site that covers each main term relating to your blog and business online, you will have a greater chance to capture your target customers.
How Does It Make Money
First of all, through blogging, we have built the number of visitors to Symonds Training and then worked to build trust (as discussed above).
You Need to Build Trust First and Foremost
If you expect other people to get out their credit cards and spend money buying something online from you, you need to prove to them that you are trustable.
As a genuine business and with the skills and expertise to match, on Symonds Research we have made an effort to do several things to build trust with our customers. For example, we have:
- Added a list of some of the clients we have had onto the bottom of the homepage
- Made sure we have an ‘About’ page and detailed Valeria’s academic expertise and experience in education
- We are starting to also add testimonials from happy customers.
How the Sales Started
I want to be very transparent with you and hence I will show you the reality.
Compared to what we read about the amazing amount of money other bloggers make when they start, we did rubbish! 🙂 We barely made £1500 in the first year.
When you hear the stories of some bloggers and how they make tends of thousands each month in their first year, it seems to be a very dynamic few. In year two though, we have turned a corner and our patience is really starting to pay off.
And what will the growth look like in another year’s time? I’ll post diagram updates in the future on this page!
What Next for Symonds Research – Targets and Goals
The plans? In the next 12 months, our target is to:
- Make £2500 consistently every month across the course of a year on this side business.
- We will create more digital products, i.e. double the number we offer.
- Furthermore, we will work to significantly drive more traffic to the site and one way we will do this is with the introduction of the new YouTube channel.
The Sales and Income
The core of the business is to reach out to anyone who provides training workshops, classes, and seminars. This is the target market for the training course materials.
Without meaning to do a sales pitch here, I just want to explain how it works and why people want to buy the training materials we offer. For your own online business, you need to give people a good reason to want to buy your digital product/s.
With our digital products (training course materials) it can be hugely beneficial to trainers to buy them because the materials:
- Save trainers literally a lot of work in research and development. Fully researching a topic and developing the Powerpoint PPT slides and presentation and all the documents such as the participants’ workbooks is very time-consuming to do oneself.
- Are customizable so that the teacher or trainer can brand the materials with their own name or business as they teach.
The income we get from Symonds Training is 100% from the sale of training course materials.
So you could say that we are doing things the hard way as you can often make money much more easily by earning from affiliate income.
How You Can Start a Blog and Start Making Money Online
To get started, I recommend following these steps:
Stage 1 – Choose a Niche
Stage 2 – Get Started
Read our post on ‘How to Start a Blog’ below:
How Much Money Can You Make Blogging Realistically?
There are certainly some bloggers who start making a stunning level of income within 3 – 6 months.
Some bloggers make just enough to cover their costs (such as to cover the hosting and domain name and make a little more).
Some bloggers make a decent living.
Others, such as CreateandGo, make over $100,00 a month.
It’s really up to you.
Digital Products You Can Sell Online
Let me give you some ideas of the types of digital products or items you could sell. Some ideas are:
- an eBook on your chosen niche/specialist topic. So it might be a 90-page eBook on how to train cats.
- A planner (designed as PDF). An example is a 90-Day planner to lose weight.
- An online course. So you could use a site such as teachable.com to create a course and then promote it via your blog.
- An online manual (i.e. How to Build a Greenhouse)
- A travel guide (such as a Disabled Travellers Guide to Paris)
- Templates that others can use (such as Pinterest templates)
- Photographs (you can sell your photos as stock photos that others then use on their own sites)
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