How To Make $10k Per Month Online

2023-07-30 00:00:00 Make Money Online

Once again I’m sharing my notes from a Niche Pursuits podcast that interview Aisha Preece. She shares her secrets on how to make $10k per month online with her niche websites. I like her business acumen and style a lot, she reminds me of some of the people I used to work with in a scrappy startup. There’s to learn from these notes and you should read them carefully.

Introduction

Aisha has a background in Law and Finance
She made a lot of mistakes in the beginning but now her website portfolio makes $10k a month
She attributes this success to a solid process for building sites and writing content
She uses both active and passive means to generate income
She started her first blog / side hustle when working in Finance
Wanted to work remotely and control her own destiny
Quit her job and started writing freelance
Set up first blog in 2017, did nothing with it
Friend passed away overnight and that shook her out of her analysis to paralysis
Set her dream to start a blog and help people and earn a living
In 2020 learned SEO, first site went to 7k page views to 100k page views in 7 months
In 2022 it all came together and now she earns $10k
Realized that her first site was a bad niche

Running a Niche Website & SEO

Don’t make the mistake of being overwhelmed and not getting things done
If you’re not seeing results don’t believe you are a failure, we live and die by Google SERP, it might take time
Her biggest mistake in the beginning was not knowing SEO and not listening to successful bloggers in her chosen niche
Moral of the story, if you want this to work, you need to treat it like a business
You need to to allocate work and time to make it grow
In 2019 took the “right” action after the death of a friend, that was a pivotal life event for her to focus on the right things
You can take risks and still fail, but that cushy job isn’t safe either - you could still get made redundant
Making money online is about implementing the right strategy
Her first blog is in the finance niche, a very competitive but very lucrative niche
She made sure that her About Me reflected here experience, and credentials at the bottom, EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
That side currently has 223 articles (that’s it?!?!) that focus on finance and earning money online
It’s 90% info, 10% affiliates but every article is monetized
The monetization comes from ads (20%) and affiliates (80%)

Active Income

Started a course on how to become a freelance writer
Monetized by doing workshops, marketed them on Instagram
Learned into active income sources: Writing a course, creating a digital product,
When the pandemic hit, a lot of travel work dried up for her (she worked as a freelance writer after her finance job)
Realized that people learn on Instagram
You can really monetize it if you have the right audience
Now her monetization includes ads, affiliates, and niche products

Strategies for Site

Struggled at the beginning to get traffic, then took an SEO course and followed it exactly.
Fixed site speed to get to less than 4 second loading time by changing theme
At that time she had 30 articles and added 40 more, she updated 20 articles with SEO optimization
Her pageviews skyrocketed to 100,000
Then she used ahrefs.com to do competitive analysis and write better content and provide better value over her competitors (key trick).
Once she had her template for success, she just puts amps it up.
Targets low-competition keywords and runs them through keysearch.co (affordable)
Focuses on topical authority and focuses on keyword clusters
What Topical Authority looks in a competitive niche?
Take the keyword and add modifiers, for example use: “rock climbing” + “women”, “men”, “teenagers” AND “rock climbing” + “gear” + “plus sized women”, “fat men”, etc
Minimum 10 articles with keyword clusters but in some cases she has 50 articles per cluster
Writing with keyword clusters makes it easier to do research
If someone outranks her it means they’re providing better value
Target same keywords on lower domain authority websites and provide better articles then them
Starts with 10 articles, if sees positive ranking on Google Search Console, then goes all in
Need credibility, provides LinkedIn so people can people can search her, plus Google wants to know if you’re not a scammer.
Doesn’t do link building, it happens automatically if you provide good content
She pitched as a freelance writer, guest post has a link and made it better than an article on her site
Had to learn to pitch clients and build guest blog posts as part of her freelance career
Uses data from research to provide the pitch (I have this keyword, this data, I can write you an article in 2 hours, etc)
You don’t need a high DA to get a lot of traffic
If you can link build, then great but always focus on content. Content will generate links organically
Started a second site to give her workshop students the ability to be featured to help them
Was up to 90 articles and Google ignored it, give yourself 12 months and 100 SEO optimized articles before you quit
Runs her team with Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Zoom
Started by hiring writers from her workshops, She doesn’t hire from any sites
Promote people that do great work

Organizing Team

Ask the question, what is the priority for the quarter
Writers are trained to write across all of her niches (35 people)
The team is non-traditional, more passionate and loyal team
Started with a paid workshop as it gets rid of riff-raff
Teaches them to find freelance work, asks them to pitch to Aisha with a template
Teaches how to write a good outline
Uses non-passive to build out website first
Starts on Instagram, has less than 10,000 followers
Shares a quick video on SEO everyday, records all her videos in one go then schedules them out
Tips for sites getting unstuck
Recommend look at site speed and theme, under 4 seconds
Do you have 100 SEO optimized blog posts?
Picking the right topic that people are searching for and the right topic to rank for
Finding good keywords (low competition, good volume), put those keywords in the right location (H1, H2, URL), supercharge with secondary keywords
Put yourself in the seat of reader, does that article answer the question? Get to the point
Find the right strategy and keep taking action, the magic happens around 100 posts
It takes time for Google to find you, need to wait at least 12 months
Don’t compare your start to someone’s middle

End Notes

I learned a lot from this interview. I like her systematic approach to building out her website from research, to writing articles with keyword clusters, and organizing her team. She treats it like a business and if you want to make money online, you should too. Focus on better and more valuable content over your competitors and you’ll see the pageviews grow.

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