5 Months to Grow a Blog to Pay for a Nanny

The idea that this will create money is all fine and good.. and it is obviously needed as a method of measure IE Success or Failure. However, with something like this in particular, I can only see the dollar amount as an overall detriment. And I am not saying this in a negative manor towards the thread, I am more directing this at YOU, the guy behind the blog if that makes sense?

The part of the post above that catches my eye is "I am fascinated and currently going through." which translates to "Follow me on my journey to...." and THAT makes good blog material.

Think of the blog as a daily journal of THAT path... and not the actual path ( this thread creating a blog ), and magical things could happen. The moment you get in your head and start thinking what should I write whoa is me I dont have enough readers and panic panic panic sets in.. the house of cards will fall.

If all else fails you can always read ( https://www.warriorforum.com/warrior...days-ebay.html ) and be at $1000 a month in no time. - Sorry for shameless plug but i am doing this to maybe release some of the stress from you knowing there is a plan B or C that could be developed quickly.

This WILL WORK, as long as you keep it from being work... let the idea and process of buying a business be the work, and the blog just documenting the journey and I would say this has the chance of getting legs.

Hope that Helps!

Thank you for sharing your story. And setting a clear, realistic goal is a great start. I hope you keep us updated on your progress.

Your blog will be about a journey, and when you will blog from the start that will be very interesting and appealing to many.
When I started 20+ years ago it was a struggle and if I could have learned from others at that time to see and follow step by step what they did, where they succeeded, and what went wrong I would be happy to follow that blog.

Go for it!

I love this!!!! Thank you so much for the insight!

Wow Tnob, my hats off to you, you will soon have 4 kids under 5 years old. Not easy! Persevere through, I wish you all the best on your journey with this!

I would not do that at all on a money making site - save that for private FB pages.


Or you could go to 'privacy protected' images and make it a feature of the blog - photos from the back, from the side of the child with head turned away, etc. It might be a unique approach - finding ways to show your family without revealing them to strangers online.


You could have a photo of little hands playing with a new toy - and a convenient link to the toy.....or a video of the diapered butt of a little one as they run away or show an older child as he rides away on his bike or pulls his sister in a wagon. There are ways to feature your own children without 'revealing' your children that are so much better than the tacky 'blurring'.


Looking forward to your next steps and updates.

Week 0 update. I said I would start this on April 5th so that I could get some feed back from you here first. Now that I have had some time to think about how to start this, and research around, I thought I would give a brief update.

Monetize made a good point about making sure that there are in fact affiliates that I can promote. I did do this, yay. However, I did not take much time to research the keywords on ahrefs and what not.

After doing that this week, I became discouraged to learn that the keywords I had in my mind are actually not very high traffic key words at all. The volume for the closest key words I would want to rank with are less than 4,000. Whomp whomp.

But that's okay. I have committed to this project, and I want to continue. Already I have learned alot just by starting.

So far I have purchased the domain. Started the WP site and link the domain. I actually started working on a couple of posts. I started following some WP template posts that they give you to start out with a blog (like "introduce yourself"). So I am doing it. Kinda crazy.

Thank you all again. I will get back on next week to post some feedback relating to the path.

Kickoff! Week One

I have decided to combine a few different methods of building a blog and taking pieces from each. One I am using from here is savidge's post on Starting in IM. In particular I have used the following:

1) Identifying the longer tail keywords. My main keyword would be "Online business" which generates 25.27 Billion results. So I added the longer tail "Buying Online Business" which knocks the results down to 1.25 Billion. Then "Buying Online Business <keyword>" and finally "Buying Online Business <identifier> <keyword>" This gets it down to 18.5 Million results.

2) Begin writing posts! I am mapping out general blog post topics, writing about them a little at a time every day, and then editing them when I am ready to post. (I saw a formal instruction on this technique somewhere but can't find it again).

With those 2 things, I will begin writing this week and have my first posts up next week. Getting excited!

Week 3

Traffic: 0
Revenue: $0

A lot has happened in the first 3 weeks of starting this. I had some kind of stomach bug that put me out for 3 days, I attended the first in-person conference in a year for 3 days, and I found out the twins are girls! So I will have 4 girls! Now I am even more motivated to make this work so that I can start saving for 4 weddings. Someone suggested I buy a wedding venue now so I can just use it for them one day lol.

Truth/Vulnerability time: I have not done much yet. I got sucked into a video series on how to build a blog. I fell into the trap of trying to find the best keywords and looking at strategies from "experts" on youtube. These rabbit holes took most of my spare time for the first 2 weeks.

Then, I thought why not take a stab at the divi theme for WP. Several people have recommended it and it started showing up in my ads, so I pulled the trigger. This lead me down another rabbit hole of trying to learn how to make divi work facepalm.

Through all of that, I had only written 1 article and the outline to a few more. Worst of all, the 1 article was still not published, because I couldn't get the theme to work as I wanted it.

So today I made the decision to just nix the divi for now, go with something that works and that I know how to manipulate, and get the content going. I can make tweaks to form and aesthetics another day, that's future tnob's problem.

Today I wrote some more articles. My goal for next week is to revert the site back to a more standard theme and publish the first few articles. Which leads me to my next question savidge4 :

Is it better to write a bunch of articles at once and release them all shotgun style? Or should I setup a schedule to release them weekly or something? I'm sure there are pros and cons to both, but just looking for some guidance there.

Of course you can hire writers - but that's very likely at this point to put you off course deciding how to hire, what to tell them, how to evaluate, what to pay etc. At the moment, I think that's time wasted. Write the first blog posts yourself - YOU know what you want this blog to be - YOU set the tone by what YOU say on this blog.

$1k/month from a new blog in five months is a high bar for someone new....but that's fine.

I'd suggest you set limits for yourself - that you write at least 2-3 blog posts per day and until that is completed for the day - you don't post on forums (except for this thread perhaps) or watch videos. You may not like to write but your posts on this forum show you have the ability to write...

You gave yourself five months....and that was a month ago. How time flies!

Week 4 update

Traffic: 2 Visitors
Revenue: $0

Starting off the week I had 2 goals based on Warrior's input:

1) Write Content
2) Learn enough Divi to get my site published

I succeeded in both! Still, nothing to write home about, but I am glad that I focused and got it done.

I have started writing several blog posts with different interlinking articles. I have published 2 of those and plan to release at least 2 new articles/week.

I appreciate the feedback I am getting from you guys. It really motivates me and truly helps me understand myself and my own weaknesses better.

Next week my goals are to continue writing more and more posts in the backlog, and setting up a schedule to release and edit posts.

Side note, my blog is about buying online businesses, and I have successfully purchased the first, and I am negotiating the contract for a second. Crazy how this path has helped me get working on that as well. Each of those businesses should generate well over $1,000/month for me.

Cheers

Good for you. With writing, more than anything else I've found, the trick to doing it is simply getting started.



The two things I've found (working online) that generate their own 'motivation' are getting links and writing content. The longer you procrastinate, the harder it seems to be. Once you settle in and start working on it, it's not hard to create the habit of doing it on a regular basis.

Week 7 Update

Traffic: 0 new
Revenue: $0

It has been 3 weeks since my last update and I have been busy! I have been writing my blog post backlog, building it up.

I have come to terms with the fact that my path goal was very lofty. With all of the other things I have going on in my life, making $1,000 from this site has not been at the forefront. Though I have been writing articles, I have not done anything else towards reaching my path goal.

As I mentioned in my last update, I have acquired a new business, and that has had most of my attention in my free time as of late. An interesting thing though, the blog and the business I acquired have the same or very similar target audience. So I will be able to have affiliate links on my blog to my other business. Getting excited about that for the future.

My last goals were to:
1) continue writing blog posts
2) Come up with a posting schedule.

I did write more blog posts, but not as many as I would have liked. Therefore this week I will add a number attached to the goal.

I failed at setting a schedule for publishing posts. I still want to get a few more written and have a better understanding of the order in which I will release them.


My goals for the coming weeks are:

1) Continue writing more blog posts (accumulate 30)
2) Decide on 2 days/week to publish posts and begin publishing them.

We are all pressed for time. Try to spend at least
an hour a day on your project, even if you have to
get up early or stay up late or eat at your computer
or whatever it takes. Your blog might not make
$1,000 a month right away but eventually it will!

Great thread! Keep writing and when it catches momentum, new possibilities will merge.
Thanks for posting!

Hello all,

I'm new to this thread, but love the interaction. I'm interested in seeing tnob's progress as of now.

Week 13 Update

Traffic: 0 new
Revenue: $0

It has been 6 weeks since I have updated this thread, and a lot has happened since. As you can see, I have still made no money and have had no traffic. Although, I have had some people like my posts, so not sure I understand how they did that.

I will start with the website progress (or lack thereof). I did gain some momentum in weeks 8 and 9 and wrote the first drafts of 22 articles. I have still not published them or finished editing them.

In week 9, I signed up for a popular blog teaching school in order to gain some guidance in building out the blog. I stopped writing and started focusing on the course and going through its teachings. Some of the teachings required doing some search analysis to find what good blog topics/questions/posts/answers would be good to focus on. At this point, I got a bit discouraged because it seemed that the topic of my blog did not have hardly any searches/views/trends. (The school suggests using google trends as a way to verify traffic).

This made me take a step back and look at what I was doing. I had all these questions:
-Am I making the right blog?
-Will people land on my page?
-Will I ever be able to monetize?

I started digging into search analysis of several other topics with which I had an interest. This lead me down a rabbit hole for several days. Eventually I realized that I need to just focus and continue on the process. I realized that no matter what blog topic I pick, I would still have the same thoughts, so just do it.

In week 10, I accompanied my wife to an ultrasound for the twins (the whole reason I started this). In the ultrasound, we learned that Twin A was 22% smaller than B, which isn't a great thing. The doctors really scared us and made it seem like the twins could come at any moment. From that day, I have done absolutely 0 on the blog.

I started preparing my other businesses for my absence, started getting all of the honey-dos my wife had been begging me to finish at the house, and focused on growing some of my other businesses more. Also during that time, my mother-in-law who lives 20 minutes away, decided to retire and that she would help us out with the twins.

I back up to say when the doc told us about Twin A being smaller, it really freaked us out. We had so many questions and so many worries that it was hard to think about my tiny blog. So when my mother-in-law retired to help out, it really made me rethink my priorities. Honestly, the blog just did not take precedence.

So now, 3 weeks later, Twin A measured 16% smaller than B (which is a vast improvement), they are still in the womb, and they are now projected to arrive in 3 weeks. My mother-in-law's help has made me rethink the goal of this path. With her help, and btw my mom also is retired and lives 10 minutes away, we will not be hiring a nanny, we will just abuse our own moms.

So, all of that to say that I don't know where to go from here and would like your advice. I still want to make the blog. I think my original goal was overly ambitious anyways. So I am trying to figure out a new goal to get this blog up and running.

Right now my plan is to continue with the blog school and follow their process of building out the blog (which is a 24 month process). So, I am asking of you, what income goals, traffic goals, or other that you think are reasonable expectations that I could achieve?

Cheers and thanks for following.

Hello all. It has been ~7 months since my last post, so I wanted to update everyone.

Following my last post, my wife's doctor said that she needed to induce her to have the babies asap. On July 22nd, 2021, our twins Callie and Chloe were born at 33 weeks premature!

To keep a very long story short: Chloe was released from NICU within 3 weeks. She came home healthy and normal. She ended up getting RSV in October, was admitted to the PICU and put on a ventilator. One night, she coded (heart stopped) and they had to administer CPR for 3 minutes. She came back and fortunately made what we are told is a relatively speedy recovery over the next 6 days. Today she is normal and perfect doing very well!

Callie was born missing cranial nerves 9 & 10 on the left side of her brain. She ended up staying in NICU for 107 days. (So in October we had one twin in NICU and one in PICU it was awful). Because of Callie's nerves, her main issue is that she cannot swallow. Because of this, she can't eat, and secretions from saliva build up in the back of her throat and she basically drowns on her own spit.

While in NICU, she had a surgically implanted g-button for feeding, and later she had a tracheostomy. She now lives with the trach and g-button and is on constant oxygen. She requires 24-7 supervision, because we have to suction her trach many times an hour to suck out those secretions. She is developmentally delayed alot, and we do not know what all will be impacted by this. Nor do we have a diagnosis for what she has. She is doing very well at home considering all of her special needs!

Soooo, instead of continuing on with this path and the blog I started before the twins were born, I ended up basically taking on a second full time job trying to get Callie accepted into a medicaid program for medically dependent children. The total charges to our private insurance for all the twins stuff last year was $1.4M!! But they wouldn't pay for us to have home health nursing. So we got on this medicaid program (last month) that now pays for us to have a home nurse for Callie 24/7. (Still looking for a few nurses to fill in).

Also, someone set up a GoFundMe for us and despite my pride we let them. That ended up raising ~$19,000 and helped us pay some nurses who helped us out until we got medicaid.

So now my goal of starting this blog to help pay for a nanny, has turned into we have medicaid to pay for a full time nurse lol.

All the while our older 2 girls (5 years old and almost 2 years old) get sick all the time and yesterday my wife and I both tested positive for COVID. fun times.

With all of this going on, this blog and path that I started has been pushed to the very back burner. I do not think that I will get back on it anytime soon. But I wanted to update everyone as to why I just dropped off of here and let you know that I really appreciate all of you for your feedback and support.

I do intend to get back involved in this community with some other things I am working on, so I will see you in the threads!

tnob

Thanks for updating us - what a rough few months you've had. The thing about plans and wishes is that too often real life intrudes. Very smart to focus on getting medical insurance/aid you need....sounds to me like you have your priorities straight.



Best of luck to your family going forward...and hope we see you here

as you have time.


kay

A great plan indeed and congratulations on expanding the family, this is so nice to here, especially in these crazy times we are living at. As for you blogging strategy, I would say that you managed to make a good plan and this is really something that could help you earn desired amount of money on a monthly basis, you just need to be consistent and persistent with it. Affiliate links will help you earn extra profit through comissions, and blog articles themselves will attract a wide audience, so it's a good combination. Good luck with everything.