In this blog post, I will share how you can grow your blog so you can learn how to make money from blogging and make an income of at least $10k every month.  

In earlier blog posts, I went through the foundations of how to build a blog. We’ve covered the following:

• How to pick the right niche and a lucrative audience for your blog
• How to start a blog (with either WordPress or other blog platforms)
• How to prep your blog for launch and what content you need to succeed
• How to drive traffic to your blog and keep scaling it
• How to monetize your blog and build a monetization plan and sales funnel
• How to generate more email subscribers and monetize them

By now, you should have all the information you need to pick your niche, build your blog and start making money blogging.

Now, you need to make a business plan to ensure that you can keep growing and scaling your blog business so that you can go from a few thousand dollars earned in the first couple of months to over $10,000 a month (and keep growing and growing from there):

• Selling one-off products
• Upselling and cross-selling
• Ensuring at least one monthly recurring income stream
• Building up enough income streams
• Building up passive income streams
• And constantly planning for growth – i.e. thinking like a true business owner, not just a blogger!

If you want your blog to keep growing, this is extremely important. Only those who think and plan like business owners truly make it in the end – they’re the ones who make $20k and even as much as $40k a month (although there are plenty of examples of bloggers who make it even further!)

So how do you ensure your blog keeps growing?

How to scale your blog like a start-up business

For the first three months of your blog, use the plan outlined in earlier blog posts; that means:

• Use a web hosting tool to build your blog (like GoDaddy, or Bluehost)
• Create four staple blog posts optimized for high-volume keywords so that you can get targeted organic traffic every month
• Optimize your blog for SEO using SEMrush and SEOPressor
• Start a backlinking and a guest blogging campaign to generate quality backlinks for your blog and boost your SEO and traffic – use sites like Fiverr, People Per Hour, and Upwork to find freelance writers to help you save time create enough content every month. Or, if you prefer to work with a content marketing expert, feel free to contact me to learn more about my content writing packages.
• Create a high-value, targeted lead magnet and use Optinmonster to create and add opt-ins throughout your website
• Create an email sequence using an email marketing platform to help nurture your leads and subscribers
• Create a variety of products and services, both low-ticket and high-ticket, to help you monetize your traffic and your subscribers

Once you do all that – and ensure that you create quality products and services – you’re well on making good money on your blog. But you need to do the work, not just create a few pieces of content, sign up for a couple of affiliate programs and hope for the best.

But if you follow these tips and advice to the letter, you’ve mastered the secret to building a successful blogging business.

But what next?

Where do you go from here and ensure that you’re constantly growing?

Update your blog regularly

You don’t need to create new content constantly, and you don’t need to blog every day to be successful.

You need to create a few staple pieces of content and regularly update them to ensure they’re up-to-date and still offering value – and that they’re still better than your competitors (i.e. all those other search results people get on the first google page!)

From then on, you can blog a few times a month – and that’s it.

But whenever you write a new blog, keep this in mind:

• It needs to target a relevant keyword that has a high search volume
• It needs to provide real value to your target audience
• It needs to help you get results: more subscribers, more leads, and more conversions.

Every time you create a blog post, ask yourself this:

• What does this piece of content help me achieve? More traffic? More leads? Is it a trending subject right now that can help me make more sales?
• What do my readers get out of it?
• Can I use this to sell?

Remember, you’re a business; a business that knows its stuff will never produce content just for the sake of it.

After all, you’re losing resources (time, money), so if you’re not getting enough in return, there’s no point in creating content.

Focus on your subscribers

If you want your blog business to keep growing, then your email list needs to grow.

Think of it this way: the more subscribers you get, the more people you have to sell to. The more people you can nurture into becoming your paying customers.

Plus, you get the added benefit of growing your audience and your traffic, which helps grow your influence, your domain authority and your search engine rankings.

So, don’t set it and forget it.

You need to constantly update your primary lead magnet, create new lead magnets, and use the strategies outlined in previou bl to keep getting more email subscribers.

Your blog growth plan: create multiple income streams

The biggest “secret” to blogging success is to set up multiple income streams.

However, you can’t do it all from the first month. Instead, you need to plan your growth ahead of time and create new products and services as your blog and audience grow.

Now it’s time to plan out your marketing campaign. Below is a suggested 3-month blogging campaign:

Month 1:

While it is possible to start making money from the first month of being in business, the truth is that at this stage, you should focus most of your attention on growing your blog.

Now, it’s all about:

• Building up your blog traffic
• Improving your SEO (search engine rankings)
• Signing up for relevant affiliate programs (it can take some time to get approved, so it’s a good idea to start as soon as possible – but first, you need to have your blog up and running)
• And perhaps most importantly, growing your email list 

That being said, as soon as you start getting email subscribers signing up, you can also start selling to them.

If you’re just starting, it could be challenging to sell high-ticket items at this stage; you need to build up their trust and show your value first.

That’s why, in this first month, you should create and sell low-ticket items; for example:

• Paid webinars
• Online courses (save the online course series for upselling later on)
• E-books
• Templates and checklist packages

Another thing you can do at this stage, especially if you want to start making money quickly, is to look for freelance clients.   This can be for blog writing services (and other writings tasks, such as website copywriting, sales copy, email copy and so on), SEO services, web design and web development – depending, of course, on your skills and knowledge.

To find clients for your freelancing services, sign up to sites like Fiverr, Upwork, People Per Hour or leverage social media sites to promote your services.

It will take some time to find better-paying freelancing gigs, but this is a great way to start making some extra money and further develop your skills.

Month 2:

Now that your blog is starting to grow and you’ve started generating some email subscribers, it’s time to think forward and develop new income streams.

Here are my suggestions on the following steps to take in the second month:

• Start focusing more on affiliate marketing: sign up for more affiliate programs and start creating content to help you promote them and boost your sales (create helpful listicles and how-to guides, create downloadable resources and new opt-ins, send emails to your list with valuable tips and advice, along with your product/service recommendations)
• Develop a service or product that will help you generate a monthly recurring income: coaching and mentoring, high-end consulting services, an online course series, a membership solution (i.e. access to multiple digital resources for a monthly recurring fee)
• Create a podcast (optional, but a great way to grow your audience and make more money): you can make money through podcasting with sponsorships; plus, it’s an excellent way to grow your blog audience.
• Keep growing your list: don’t forget about your list – follow my tips from previous blog posts to keep growing your list and experiment with new lead magnets and opt-ins if you’re not generating enough email subscribers.

Month 3:

By the third month, your blog should be starting to grow: you’ll have a steady stream of traffic and a healthy list of subscribers and begin generating good money from your various products and services.

But you’ve only just started – there’s so much more you can achieve at this stage.

Here’s what to do in the 3rd month to keep scaling your blog business:

• Develop an online course series: this is one of the best monetization options for building a scalable business model. There’s a huge audience out there waiting to learn new skills, and if you have what it takes to teach them, you can make a lot of money by creating a series of online courses. However, joining and committing to this can be difficult if you don’t have their trust. That’s why you’ll be more successful from the third month onwards, once you have an excellent followership/list of subscribers – plus, you can upsell your series to those who bought your low-ticket item
• Sales outreach: as the months go on, so does the importance of getting recurring clients for your various services (consulting, freelancing) – start reaching out directly to brands (using an email marketing tool) that you want to work with, connect with marketing agencies that will pay you for your content writing services, social media marketing, SEO services, and so on, and continue looking for freelancing clients.
• More affiliate marketing: affiliate networks has enormous potential; learn from your wins and losses, see which products sell and which don’t, and identify the best platforms for promoting your affiliate products (email, how-to guides, blog posts, listicles, etc.) and optimize your strategy accordingly
• Offer influencer/blogger services: as your blog grows, you’ll be able to offer sponsored content opportunities, product reviews for relevant brands, and influencer marketing campaigns for brands on your blog and social media.

And don’t forget that EVERY month, you should also keep working on building up your blog; set yourself targets to follow every month:

• find and email 500+ relevant websites per month as part of your backlinking campaigns (you can use an email marketing service to help you)
• Guest post for 5 high-tier websites in your niche with a DA of 85+
• Guest post for 10 mid-tier sites with a DA of 70 to 85
• Find 2 new high-volume keywords to target

Also, EVERY month, you need to set yourself clear objectives to reach – this will help keep you focused so that you can grow your blog with each new month that passes; for example:

• Traffic increase target
• How many new subscribers you want to generate
• Search rankings targets for each of your keywords
• Sales targets for each of your products and services

Blogging presents many exciting possibilities and monetization options – all you need is to get started and work hard to achieve your goals.