Darlene Milligan: How to Generate $1,000,000 from Your Blog

money results

Have you been wondering how I will monetize the nutrition blog? Getting to $100,000 a month is a difficult task. Surely, I have something up my sleeve, right?

Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I have no clue how I am going to make money from the blog.

That doesn’t mean I won’t hit my target as I am pretty confident that I will. But monetizing a blog, or any business for that matter, doesn’t work the way most people think.

Here’s what I’ve learned about monetizing blogs over the last ten years…

You can’t make money without the traffic

When I first started blogging about nine years ago, I tried to make money right away. There’s nothing wrong with that… but I quickly learned that it just doesn’t work.

Why?

Because if no one is coming to your blog, you won’t have any traffic to monetize.

So the first step in trying to achieve a large revenue stream is to build up your traffic. In the B2B niche, where blogs appeal to other businesses, kind of like Quick Sprout and Backlinko, you can make $80,000 to $100,000 a month for every 100,000 unique visitors you have every month.

You won’t see those revenue numbers right away as it typically takes a year of hitting those traffic numbers to see your revenue climb that high. Why? Because you don’t make money from people visiting your blog.

You make money only when someone visits your blog, provides you with their email, and then buys something from you through email.

The bigger your email list gets, the easier it is to make money. If you are generating 100,000 visitors a month, you can usually collect 5,000 plus emails. As long as you offer bonus content through plugins such as Thrive and add email collection methods through bars, popups, sliders, and takeovers, you should be able to hit a 5% visitor to email subscriber conversion rate.

In the B2C niche, with blogs similar to the nutrition blog, you’ll have to generate more traffic to generate that kind of revenue. Consumers typically don’t have the same buying power as businesses. They are much more price sensitive.

In most consumer niches, you need to generate roughly 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 visitors a month to start seeing numbers like $100,000 a month in income. This is at least what I’ve seen by working with dozens of blogs in the consumer niche over the years.

Unlike from B2B blogs, you can make money from consumer blogs by just pushing people directly to a product or a service that they can purchase. Sure, collecting emails is still very effective, and you can sell to people on your email list, but assuming your price points are low enough, you can also do a straight sell by pointing people directly to a product landing page.

Why do you need all those visitors?

What most people don’t realize about monetizing blogs is that if you have 100,000 visitors coming to your site each month, you can’t expect 1% or even 0.5% of those people to buy.

What you need to look at is the number of people who are visiting the landing page that contains your offer. If you are lucky, 1% to 4% of those visitors will purchase.

In some cases, you can get that percentage up to 6% or even 8%, but that usually means your offer on the front is irresistibly attractive and very affordable. In that case, you won’t be generating much profit from that specific offer, but you can add in upsells and downsells, which is where you will make the majority of your income.

Do upsells and downsells really work?

You will never maximize your income unless you have good upsells and downsells. I’ve mentioned this in the past… Unleash Your Thin was able to double its average order size by adding 3 upsells after its main product offer.

Let’s assume that the main product you are selling is $97. Here is a formula you can use to grow your revenue:

Upsell 1: Offer a speedy upsell for roughly 3 times the price of the original product. The speedy upsell has to help the customer achieve the results and benefits of the original product they bought. If the original product was sold for $97, the first upsell would be sold for around $297.
Upsell 2: Whether the customer purchases the first upsell or not, the second one should also be related to the product. The cost for the product should be about 2/3 of the value of the original purchase. In this case, the second upsell would be priced around $67.
Upsell 3: The last upsell should also be one that complements the original product. I would make it roughly 150% of the price of the original product. In this example, it would be priced at about $147. Again, this upsell would be offered whether the customer purchased or declined the previous upells.

Beach Body, the creator of P90X and Insanity, has also done well by adding in upsells. It currently does a billion dollars a year in revenue. If it didn’t add 7 upsells at the end of each product purchase, its front end revenue would be cut in half.

If you don’t have products to upsell or downsell, that’s fine. You can upsell other people’s products just like GoDaddy does. Whenever you check out on GoDaddy, you see offers such as website creation services or SEO, which are not always provided by GoDaddy but rather by a third party.

What about ads?

Ads are typically the worst way you can monetize your traffic. If someone is willing to advertise on your website over the long haul, it means they are making money from you.

Just think about it. If you bought an ad on someone’s blog for $1,000 a month, you’d better be making way more than $1,000, right?

Don’t get me wrong—you can still make money by placing ads on your blog, but it isn’t the best way to generate income. From what I have seen in the B2B niche, if you have 100,000 visitors a month, you’ll be lucky to generate $5,000 a month in ad revenue.

In the B2C niche, if you have over 1,000,000 visitors a month, you will be lucky to generate $20,000 a month in income.

If you really want to hit 6 figures a month in income, you have to sell your own product or service. Or you have to white-label someone else’s products or services and sell those.

So what’s the plan with the nutrition blog?

To be frank, I don’t know the exact method I am going to use to achieve $100,000 a month in income. But I do have a rough idea about what I’m not going to do and what I am going to test out.

Let’s start off with the methods I don’t think will work well:

Affiliate products – a portion of the site’s revenue may come from affiliate offers every once in a while, but I don’t see it as the main source of income. The main reason for that is that if you white-labeled a product or created your own, you would make more money than if you took in an affiliate rake.
Ads – at the beginning, you may see some income coming from ads to help pay for other content types such as infographics, but it won’t be the main source of income. Why? Because you need way too much traffic to generate $100,000 a month in ad revenue, and I don’t think I can get the blog to that traffic level in 12 months.

Now, let’s go over some of the methods I think will help me hit $100,000 in income:

Digital products – ebooks are a great source of revenue. I’ve sold ebooks on Quick Sprout before, and it isn’t hard to generate $100,000 a month in income if you have enough traffic. Quick Sprout is in the B2B vertical, so it is easier to charge more money for an ebook compared to the nutrition space. Nonetheless, Mike will eventually create ebooks for the nutrition blog.
Subscription services – in any business, it’s easier to keep your customers than it is to acquire new ones. For that reason, we will be coming up with subscription services where people can pay a monthly fee for something. I don’t know if that “something” will be a tangible product or a digital product, but there will be a subscription revenue model if I can help it.
Physical products – from what I have seen in the health space, your conversion rates go up by 300% to 700% when you sell products that get mailed to people. Due to cost, we won’t be able to produce our own products at first. But what we can do is work out a deal with someone else and white-label their products. Eventually, we can create our own once we have cash in the bank.

In addition to those 3 ways of monetizing, there will be upsells and downsells added to each product line. Without that, I don’t see the blog hitting $100,000 in income within 12 months.

Conclusion

When you start your business, your original idea about how you will make money usually isn’t the one that generates you the cash. Over time, things change, and you learn more… that’s when you have to pivot and keep adapting.

As for the nutrition blog, I have a few ideas, as discussed above, about how income will be generated. But I am not 100% sure about my path as things can change. I may learn something new as I have never created a B2C company.

One thing I know for certain is that you can’t generate income without traffic. For that reason, I will be focusing purely on traffic generation over the next three months. Sure, I may throw ads on the nutrition blog during that time to help generate some income, but I don’t see the ad revenue taking the blog to $100,000 a month in revenue.

So, how do you monetize your blog and website?

P.S. Some of you want me to blog about the nutrition blog challenge so you can continually learn from it, while others want me to blog about it only after the 12 months are up so that I wouldn’t be able to leverage Quick Sprout to grow it.

As middle ground, I’ve decided to blog about this topic throughout the challenge so you can learn as I learn, but I won’t be linking to it from Quick Sprout to avoid skewing the traffic, at least to some degree.