Advice On How To Create A Financial Blog

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and on this week's Art of Passive Income podcast, we have an interesting guest. He's got an interesting way of making money. It's kind of cool. But I'd be remiss for where we talked to our guests if I didn't properly introduce my co host, the brain, the professor, your flight school sherpa. You know him, you love him. Scott Todd from Scott Todd.net landmodo.com learn anything about anything. Investor ninjas.com Scott Todd how are you, Mark? I'm great.

How are you?

Pulse is still normal, respiration is still fine. I can't complain. Today's guest is a professional blogger, hustler, Internet marketer since 2007, Marc Andre from Vital$mark, how are you?

I'm good, how are you guys?

We're good, we're good. So Mark, give us a little bit about your background. Let's rewind the tape.

Sure. So I started, as you mentioned, in 2007. At the time I was working as an auditor full time. I worked for a finance company and I started a side hustle designing websites. And it wasn't related to my full time job at all. I was just looking to make a little bit of extra money. And right when I got started I decided to set up a blog to try to attract traffic to my website and land clients. And the blog took off pretty quickly and I found that I enjoyed the blogging aspect of it more than the client work. And so I worked on building out a web design blog. And in about a year and a half I was able to leave my full time job and continue to grow that for about six years. I sold that in 2013 and then worked on some photography websites over the next few years. And I've sold those in two different waves. I sold a few sites together in 2016 and then I sold another photography site in 2018. And currently I manage a personal finance blog called VitalDollar.com okay, Scott Todd.

I mean, you know, it's a pretty cool model. You know, it's. I know it's probably a lot of work, right Mark? It's not like you're just throwing stuff up there. I mean, how much time do you spend kind of building a website out before you actually sell?

Really depends. Like the first one I started in 2007, as I mentioned, it was generating like a full time income about a year and a half. And then that income continued to increase. I scaled back my time to where I was working part time hours on it as the income increased. Just because of the somewhat passive nature. I definitely wouldn't call blogging passive, but it's not completely passive, but it does have a passive element to it. Once you have the traffic coming on a daily basis, you have search engine visitors and other traffic coming, you, you can really scale back your efforts. And so that one I maintained then for a few years and sold it in 2013. So I managed that one for about six years. Some of the other sites I've had a shorter turnaround where maybe it's taken me three years or something to get to the point before I sold it.

So, Mark, of all the business models, let's just pick on Amazon, FBA or affiliate marketing. Why the blogging model?

I like blogging because when you have an audience of people who are interested in a particular topic, like when we're talking about blogging here, I'm not really talking about personal blogging where I'm just sitting down and writing about my day or whatever. I feel like whatever comes to mind. My blogs are focused on a specific topic or niche. And so when you have an audience of people who are interested in something specific, there are a lot of different ways to make money. You can make money from ads on your website, you can make money from affiliate programs. You can create and sell digital products or physical products if you want. Most bloggers stick to digital products. You can publish sponsored content. There are just a lot of different ways to make money. And as you have an audience, those, you know, if you add other streams of revenue, you can multiply your income pretty quickly. And then of course there's also the option to sell when you're done, which I've done a few times when I've wanted to move on to something else. So I like blogging because number one, it's what I know, it's what I've done. But you know, like I said, once you have that audience, there's just a lot of potential and a lot of things you can do and it turns out to be a valuable asset that other people are interested in purchasing.

But the caveat then is once you have that audience. So how can Scott and I create an audience and what's the timeline to do that?

Well, it depends on a lot of factors. It depends on how much time you're putting in. And it depends on, you know, just some blogs just take off faster than others. Like my first blog, I started in the summer of 2007. Within a few months. Within two, three months, I was getting, you know, between 25, 50,000 visitors a month. At six months, I was getting 100,000 visitors per month. But honestly, like, that's, that's fast. Most blogs don't grow that quickly. But, you know, for someone who's putting in, say, 10 hours a week within like a year, year and a half, you should be at a point where you have pretty good steady traffic, where you don't have to work quite as hard to get it. Now, you're still going to have work involved with running the blog, unless you're outsourcing everything, which is definitely an option. But, you know, as you. A lot of the work is at the beginning, like really building up your audience and building up your traffic. You have to do a lot at the beginning, and then you can kind of scale back as you grow.

Scott Todd so, Mark, walk me through the process. So you, you come up with an idea like a finance blog, then do you sit down and come up with the keyword research? You go to Google, look at the keywords, find the keywords, and then build out the content to drive the traffic to the keywords?

Yeah, that's one part of it. I have never been someone who bases all of my content around keywords and keyword research because I think you can kind of get a little bit of a jumbled website. Like, if I'm going finance, I may pick one keyword over here related to one topic because it looks like I can rank on the first page and there may be some other keywords related to other topics. You know, if you're only basing your content on keywords that you think you can rank for, a lot of times your content is going to be a little bit scattered. So I like to also write articles just on topics that I think people would be interested in. People, you know, once they're on my website, if it's a topic that's important, it doesn't necessarily have to have the keyword ranking signals or the, you know, the keyword research signals that I'd want to see. I try to base maybe like, say 50% of my content on things that I'm trying to rank for and then the other content I try to build out, you know, just based on the topics. So, for example, one of my sites was a landscape photography blog. And when I was looking at topics, one of the things I thought about was if I was writing a book on landscape photography, what topics would I cover? What would my chapters be? And so then Maybe those chapters I'm writing articles about so that my site can kind of be a comprehensive.

A.

Comprehensive site that covers all the relevant topics, rather than just random scattered topics that were picked based on keyword research.

Very cool. Very cool. So if we're listening to this and we have our own land investing websites, what advice would you give us to increase our traffic?

I think at first you really have to know who your audience is, and I assume, you know, you guys have a pretty good idea. So then at that point you really need to look at what are people looking for. And keyword research is definitely part of that. So I think keyword research is definitely something I would recommend. I think link building can be pretty important too, especially if you're looking for search traffic, because links are a big factor in, you know, in the Google search ranking, in the Google search algorithm. So if you want to increase search traffic, you should be trying to build links. There are a number of different ways that you can do that. You could write articles for other websites, you could go on podcasts, you could, you could use social media, you could write or, you know, create infographics and the type of content that other people link to. So there are a lot of different ways that you can go about attracting links, but that's definitely one. But that's kind of a long term play. Like you're not going to go out and get a link today and see like a huge jump in your search traffic tomorrow, most likely. So I think other things like building an email list is really big. You know, as you get, as you get people to your site, if you can capture them into an email list, they're very likely to come back at some point in the future. Other things like social networking, I would personally not try to use every different social network out there. There's just too many different options. But if you were to pick one or maybe two at the most that you think are really good with your audience, like say you have an audience and you think that you think your target audience hangs out on a site like LinkedIn, then you know, that could be a really good source of traffic. Basically just, you know, instead of trying to focus on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and LinkedIn, just focus on LinkedIn, if that's where your audience is, and build up your profile and, you know, try to funnel traffic back to your site.

All right, well, just as a reminder to everybody, today's podcast is sponsored by Flight School. Learn how the next 16 weeks can literally change your life. Go up the mountain of Land Investing with Scott Todd. Schedule a call with Zen Master Mike Zaino or Dude buddy, the Nightcap OG Scott Bossman. Just go tolandgeek.com training Scott Todd, what are your thoughts?

You know, I look at this and like I'm looking at the website that we're talking about right now, the Vital Dollar. And you know, like the thing that I look at and the thing I feel like when I go there is like whenever I land and Mark, I'm not trying to slam you here. I'm really not. I'm just like, like, I don't know, I look at these like what I think is cool about what you do is the fact that like you're, you're going out there and you're putting out content and you're just producing, right? Like you're just producing the content. That's really a cool thing to do, like from a user. Like when I get to these websites, like I was looking at an article there that talked about like how to sell on Etsy for example, that you have up there, which is, which is cool, it's like from last summer. And you know, it talks about like, okay, go create your Etsy account. That's cool. And then like I always feel like, I always feel like I get to websites like this. It's written at this high level and it doesn't dig deep on like, man, I really do want to create an Etsy business. Like how do I do this? You teach me how to start up but like it lacks the depth of it. On your websites, do you ever go deep in the topics? Like, like go deeper on the Etsy stuff for example or because it's like very high level stuff, right? Like do you ever go deeper in that?

Yeah. So I mean if you wanted to take a more niche approach, like you could set up an entire website about selling on Etsy or selling handmade goods or selling printables or whatever it is. That's one approach. I have had a few websites like that. Not those haven't been my biggest or most successful sites, to be honest. You know, there's pros and cons of going both ways. Obviously the, you know, the tighter focused, more niche based sites are going to, like you said, they're going to allow you to go deeper. More general sites are going to give you higher traffic opportunities, you know, higher potential. That's not to say that a more general site like mine is going to have higher traffic than any niche site, but in general, you know, you have more topics that you can cover if you are like, for example, if you're doing keyword research on topics related to selling on Etsy, there's, you know, at some point you're going to, you're going to run out of, you know, of keywords that hit certain search volumes. Like on personal finance, say you were looking for keywords that have at least 1,000 searches per month so that you can get high traffic. There's a huge number of keywords and phrases that would fall into that category. So the traffic potential for a general website is going to be a little bit higher. So yeah, there's pros and cons. I would say that, you know, of my sites that were a little bit more successful, the one that was a little bit more niche focused was, was focused on landscape photography. So that one did go a little bit more into in depth than some of the others. But um, but yeah, there's pros and cons to going either way.

You know, Mark, I look at this, I like look at this website and like to me this would be prime. Like if you're gonna do this, like if I were gonna go do this, if I were gonna go down this path, what I would do is like I would just go hire Vas just to write the content. Well, first of all, I'm not a writer. Like I don't, I hate writing. Like I'd rather do video or something else. But like I would just go hire Vas just to be like, listen you, you guys just load this stuff up. I need three articles a week. Just do it. Tell people how to write Etsy and I open an account with Etsy, give them some ideas on what to sell and move on to the next topic. And like to me that would be like the best use of my time at least. I don't know, it just seems like a no brainer in that aspect.

Yeah, there are definitely. I outsource some of my content. I also write some myself. There are some people who outsource everything and don't write anything. I. Right now I'm outsourcing about 50% of my content and about 50% is produced by me. So you know, there are people who do it both ways. There's some people who write everything. There are some people who outsource everything. It does, you know, the best use of your time definitely does factor into it. And you know, that's why I outsource some. I do, I like the writing aspect of it and to some extent it's not, you know, I do it for work. It's not, you know, necessarily, you know, all pleasure or anything, but I do enjoy. I don't want to run a blog where I don't write any of the content personally. So that's my approach is to do a mix of the two so that I'm not spending all my time writing, but then I'm also still involved in the content.

And, and then Mark, from a financial point of view, let's say that we do really well with our blog and it takes us 18 months to build up our audience. What can we expect as far as a monthly recurring revenue as a range.

It'S really all over the place. I mean there are some bloggers who make six figures a month. There are obviously a lot that don't make much of anything. You know, my blogs have made anywhere from, you know, some smaller ones a few thousand dollars up to $25,000 a month in profit. So you know, it really can range depending on your level of success. You know the topic that you're in, some, some niches, industries have higher income potential than others. Some people aren't necessarily looking for a huge income. They may be starting a site that they're looking to, you know, to make $500 a month and, and you know, just be able to run it mostly on autopilot by outsourcing content and just you know, having it as a, as a source of passive income for you know, a smaller amount. So you know, it depends on your goals. But personally I look to make, you know, a few thousand dollars to you know, 10, $20,000 per month as a full time income.

All right, very interesting. Well I thought this was an interesting topic, Scott Todd, we don't, I think we don't have. You might have been our first blogger, Mark Andre.

Yeah, yeah, very interesting.

So we're not at that point where we're gonna ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the auto passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What do you got?

Sure. Well, my tip is based around online business. So if you were looking to start an online business like mine, my tip would be to focus on networking and really get to know other people in your niche or industry. And the resource that I use every day for that is slack. So I'm in a couple of slack groups with other people, other marketers and you know, building your. There's so many different ways that you can improve your business by focusing on networking and getting connected.

Awesome. Awesome. Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Mark? Check out this. I'll put it in the chat. Here, check this out too. Is how would you like to have, I don't know, some daily sales motivation?

I'd love to have daily sales motivation.

All right, so check out my tip of the week which is at close.comsales-motivation forward slash. So close.comsales motivation. Get your email address in there. You're going to get daily sales motivation. You know, maybe it makes a difference for you.

All right, I'm signing up right now. Very cool. Get a new 60 second sales motivation video with an inspiring quote and a quick action item to crush your day. Done. All right. Wes Schaefer would love this tip.

It's probably his website. Overall.

We know.

Yeah, exactly. It probably is Wes's site. All right, well, my tip of the week is learn more about Mark and what a template of a good blog that you can monetize looks like. Just go to vitaldollar.com vitaldollar.com Mark. Andre, are we good?

Yeah.

Scott. Todd, are we good?

We're good, Mark.

Well, I want to thank the listeners and remind them the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like a mark Andrew from VitalDollar.com is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got to rate, you've got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review to supportlandgeek.com we're going to send you for free the $97 wholetailing course how to Double youe Money. 30 days or less. So please do that. It really helps us. Alright, Scott, you ready to do this?

I am, yeah.

One, two, three. Let freedom ring. Not bad, not bad, not bad. All right, thanks everybody.