It’s likely that if you’re here, you have a passion for making more money, saving more money, or cutting expenses, and you’re considering whether to start a blog to share that passion with others.
If you’re on the fence about whether to start a personal finance blog because you don’t know what you need to do, you don’t know where to start, or you don’t have the support you need, then you’re in the right place because in this article, I’ll be sharing all of those things with you.
I’ll show you some successful personal finance site examples, how much money personal finance bloggers make, and how to start a personal finance blog step-by-step.
Personal Finance Blog Examples (with Blog Income Reports)
When you get into any career or start a business, you want to know whether it’s a proven gameplan or not– starting a personal finance blog is no different. You’ve probably asked:
- Are there other personal finance bloggers out there?
- What do successful personal finance blogs look like?
- and, How much money can a personal finance blog make?
These successful personal finance blog examples should demonstrate the answers to some of your questions. You can see other successful affiliate marketing site examples here.
The Busy Budgeter
Rosemarie Groner is a leading personal finance blogger. She blogs about ways to save money, budgeting methods, and ways to make money. She reported making $86,483.83 in January 2017 a little less than two years after starting her website busybudgeter.com. You can see her full income report here.
Living More Spending Less
Ruth Soukup is the trainer of some of the top personal finance bloggers including Rosemarie Groner, Michelle Shroeder Gardner, and many others. In 2010, she started her blog Living More Spending Less as a stay-at-home mom looking for a creative outlet that didn’t involve over spending. Now, 10 years after starting, she’s reported that Living Well Spending Less is a multi-million dollar company.
Making Sense of Cents
Michelle Schroeder Gardner started Making Sense of Cents to document her journey to improving her financial situation. She had graduated from college and gotten a job as a financial analyst. Like many young college graduates, she had lots of student loan debt, and desperately wanted to pay it off.
She started doing side hustles as a way to make extra money, she was very disciplined with her spending, and she kept her job until her blogging side hustle paid her more than her job could. She started doing income reports shortly after starting her blog, but they were originally documenting her side hustles. Over time, her business blew up, and began earning more than $100,000/mo!
Smart Passive Income
Pat Flynn started Smart Passive income because he was passionate about building passive income into his financial portfolio. He documented websites he built, interviews with entrepreneurs, and tutorials to show others how to create “smart passive income”. Monthly, he would document his income reports for nearly 10 years: from October 2018 at $7,906.55 and he stopped them in December 2017 at $166,559.31.
How Much Money do Personal Finance Bloggers Make?
Personal finance bloggers don’t typically make the types of income you see from the successful personal finance blog examples I’ve shared. In fact, most bloggers start out investing money from their own pockets for hosting, themes, and any software tools that help them.
They typically spend $1000 or less and the blog is built in a self-paced manner. Most bloggers make less than a full-time income ($3000/mo) for the first two years of blogging.
Some people will have jobs, kids, and other personal situations that take time away from growing the business. For others, they may have work ethic issues, and don’t have the wear-with-all to grow a successful blog.
The successful blog examples demonstrate what’s possible if you grow a blog like it’s a small business. You have to treat it like it’s a real job and like you have people relying on your for certain information.
When you work on your blog like it’s a real business, continue to produce high-quality content, and sell products and services, then it’s normal to reach a full-time income between 2-4 years from starting, and you can grow your blog well into the $100,000+ per month range with persistence.
How to Start a Personal Finance Blog – Step-by-Step
If you’re ready to start a personal finance blog, these are the steps I’d recommend…
1. Choose a Niche
Although you might think personal finance is a niche, it’s actually an industry. As a new blogger, it’s important to decide who your target customer is, and to choose a niche that would attract them in the most relevant way.
Personal Finance Sub-Niches
- Some sub-niches within personal finance include:
- Money saving hacks
- Credit card reviews
- Investment software reviews
- Investment tutorials
- Side hustles
- Debt free journeys
- Paying off debt
- Starting a business
- Real estate investing
- Real estate flipping
- Stock investing
- Day trading
- Make money online (which includes affiliate marketing, social media marketing, business opportunity reviews, etc.)
2. Build a Website
Once you’ve chosen what audience you want to serve, then it’s time for you to build a website that serves as your digital storefront. On your website, people will be able to find your best tutorials and advice to achieve the goals relevant to your niche.
Starting a new WordPress blog can be very easy using the SiteRubix website builder. You can enter a domain name you’d like and create a WordPress website free here…
Disclaimer: Your free website can be hosted for 6 months without payment. If you decide you want to transfer it to your own custom domain name, you’d have to buy the domain and Site Support can transfer the site for you to your new domain.
3. Set up Your Social Media Channels
You’ll notice that the most successful personal finance blogs have established email lists and social followings. They have multiple touchpoints to reach their audience, and multiple ways to meet new potential customers. It’s important for you to start and establish a social footprint that will help drive traffic to your website and the products and services you offer.
4. Monetize your Site
Once you’ve built your website, it’s important to plan like a business owner, and decide what products and services you’ll sell to make money.
Personal Finance Affiliate Programs (My Top Recommendation for Startup Bloggers)
If you’re just starting out, I recommend you get started with affiliate marketing, so you can get your revenue coming in as soon as possible. With affiliate marketing, you’re promoting products and services that are already getting sales in the marketplace–this means you don’t have to worry about patents, product development, and product testing right away. Instead, you can piggyback on what’s already working, and make a commission from sales.
Recommended Resources:
- How I Made My First Affiliate Sale
- How to Become an Affiliate Marketer
- The Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing
- Recurring Commission Affiliate Programs
Digital Products Ideas for Personal Finance Blogs
In addition to affiliate marketing, you can also make money from creating products that you sell on your blog. You can create:
- Online courses
- eBooks
- PDF Downloads
- Checklists
- Personal Finance Binders or Planners
- and so much more!
Your digital products can help people to make money money, start businesses, save more money, or invest.
Personal Finance Blogs and Display Ads
Personal Finance blogs with high-quality content can also grow into highly visited websites. When you have a lot of website visitors, then it’s possible to make a lucrative income with display ads. Once your site is built and established with content and a regular flow of content, then you can simply add code to your website to have ads placed on your website, but the premium ad networks pay you the best.
Personal Finance Blogs and Sponsorships
Many advertisers who target personal finance enthusiasts are interested in paying personal finance bloggers to post content on their blogs or on their social channels. Once you’ve built an audience, you can work with sponsors to help them promote their products and services to a new audience and get paid for it.
Selling Services on Personal Finance Blogs
Some personal finance bloggers start out as accountants or financial analysts. Some develop skills over time that can be helpful to people who are trying to improve their financial situations, so services like:
- Consulting
- Memberships
- Networking groups
- Help with budgeting
- Coaching
- Webinars or events
- Analyzing portfolios
- Or other services can be sold on a blog
Personal Finance Blogs and Selling Products
It’s also possible to develop software or physical products in the personal finance niche: from T-shirts, Planners, and Wallets to Budgeting software, apps, and accounting solutions.
5. Publish Content
Once you’ve decided how you’d like to make money from your blog, it’s important to start publishing content. Posting content on your website, social media, or via ads are like handing out business cards in traditional marketing. You’ll need to create a good publishing schedule to drive traffic online.
6. Get Traffic
As you’re publishing high quality content that’s optimized for search engines and social media, then you’ll start to get more and more traffic to your website.
7. Make Money
When you’re getting traffic to your website and more people are seeing your products and services, that’s when you can make money from your website.
Conclusion
If you have a passion to help people build a great financial future, starting a personal finance blog could help you fulfill your goal. You can impact a lot of people by blogging about how to make more money, save more money, or invest. If you’d like to get started with your personal finance blog, get started with the Blog Starter Bundle.
