www.lotaincome.com is one year old!!!
One year review and what we’ve learned
What I’ve learned in a year of running my blog. www.lotaincome.com is one year old, wow where did that year go! We will review our progress over the past year.
lotaincome.com was created and edited while working full time. Learning all the aspects needed to start and run a blog has been a steep learning curve.
The idea behind lotaincome.com is to develop extra income streams that will help people reach financial freedom. Financial freedom is when you have enough income to cover your costs of living, allowing you to pursue your passions without any worries.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck and are always wondering if they will have enough income to survive. Multiple streams of income will help you by spreading your income over several areas, which helps if one or more streams of income falter.
Another thing I’ve learned by running my blog for a year is
WHY YOU NEED A HOSTED WEBSITE
Free websites are ok for hobbies or personal blogs. If you want to earn money from your website, you need to have your own hosted website.
Many of the free websites don’t allow advertising on your blogs and the free website addresses are long and cumbersome. Whatever name you come up with will have to share it’s address with the free website hosting company’s name. For example https://toomba19.wixsite.com/build-a-better-you toomba19’s website shares the address with wixsite.com.
https://www.lotaincome.com/how-to-make-a-website/ is an example of my hosted website post. This just has my website name www.lotaincome.com.
Two of the best web site hosting companies are Siteground and Bluehost. They both offer easy to use procedures to get your web site up and running very quickly. Both Siteground and Bluehost have easy WordPress installation. WordPress.org is a free and open source CMS (content management system) that is the most popular website management tool in use.
WordPress.org has many themes and plugins that allow you to change your website look and feel. These themes and plugins can be free or paid for. the premium themes are usually supported by their creators.
We use Siteground for our web hosting because they have a reasonable rate which you can pay annually. To get the best rates from Bluehost, you have to pay for 3 years of hosting.
BLOGGING ISN’T AS EASY AS GURUS MAKE OUT
Blogging takes a lot of time if your going to do it right. Researching, writing and editing your posts does take a fair bit of time. If you can write posts easily, you still have to edit the post, proof read it and make sure it gives your audience value.
Then once your post is ready to publish, you have to engage your audience. This may be through social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. a single post will usually take approx 8 hours from start to finish.
Blogging requires commitment to providing your audience with content which is of value to them.
WEBSITES AREN’T EASY MONEY
Earning income from your website is not as easy as many make out. We’ve all seen the impressive claims of making $1000s in their first month of starting a blog. You may be lucky enough to jag a good start, but many of these claims are from bought traffic which can be expensive and not always fruitful.
If you are going to grow your audience organically (without paying for traffic) your results are likely to be quite slow.
This website has earn a whopping $0.04 in 12 months from advertising with Bidvest. Advertising on your website is very dismal unless you have huge traffic coming to your website.
As for affiliate marketing, I have had affiliate links on lotaincome.com since I started and not earn a commission from any of them. You can see these affiliate links on the right hand side of my posts. Once again unless you have mega traffic, you are unlikely to earn much income.
You will notice the adverts from Amazon on lotaincome.com as well. These have produce nil income as well in 12 months.
Therefore don’t start a blog if you want to be rich overnight, it ain’t going to happen. The bloggers you see that are earning a decent income have been at it for many years.
The fair dinkum bloggers out there that are trying to help beginners will tell you that it takes 12 to 24 months before you’ll see a result with regards to earning a income.
FREE RESOURCES
There are many free resources on the web for bloggers.
YouTube is a great source of knowledge for beginner bloggers. From how to setup your website to just about any subject you want to research for your blog as well as providing another source of traffic.
You can setup a YouTube channel for free and drive traffic to your blog through videos you make and upload. I have a YouTube Channel at HERE
Google has some great resources for bloggers, Google Analytics, Google Search console, Google Ad Words. These are great for sorting out where your audience is coming from and helping to develop keywords for SEO.
Canva is great for making all sorts of graphics for Instagram, Pinterest etc.
Of course there are all the social media outlets, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, that let you spread your blog to a wider audience.
Conclusion
What I’ve learned in a year of running my blog www.lotaincome.com . Blogging can be fun if your in it for the right reasons. You are not going to make a fortune overnight, but you if you stick with it, eventually you may see a return on your investment.
Your knowledge and skills will increase as you develop your website, which gives you marketable skills others don’t have and will add another source of income.
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