Today marks 7 years since the inception of Life Math Money. Boy, what a journey it has been.
7 years ago there was no blog, no X, no email list, no products, no customers – nothing. And in less than a decade, I’m sitting pretty at millions of readers, tens of thousands of people on my email list, and tens of thousands of paying customers.
At the same time, I’m going to be a father shortly so things are great in all arenas of life – family, money, and health.
In my previous birthday pieces, I went through my origin story and achievements over the years, and in this one, I want to talk about the business of writing as a whole and how it has changed since when I started.
So this will be more of a “meta” post for those who are interested in building their own blog while being a fun read for everyone else.
How the Blog Business Works
The blog business works like this:
- You write blog posts to prove credibility and knowledge about whatever you talk about.
- You build an audience over time by focusing on SEO or social media or both.
- You create a lot of content and provide a lot of value upfront for free.
- You build high quality products that your audience is interested in.
- If people like your products or wish to support you, they make a purchase and you get a sale.
Simple enough.
Writing a blog is in many ways a reverse business. In most businesses, you get paid first and then you deliver the product/value.
In the blog business, you create and deliver a lot of value upfront, and then if people like it they can choose to make a purchase.
Most bloggers do not make a lot of money simply for two reasons 1) They don’t know much about what they are talking about and 2) They fail to build an audience.
The former doesn’t need examples, and a good example of the latter is Lyle Macdonald, who is a subject matter expert who failed to build an audience and has quit writing altogether.
Is blogging a good business?
The answer is that it depends.
Do you like writing?
If the answer is no, then this is going to be a terrible business for you. I can pretty much guarantee that you will be sick of it in 3 months or less.
Blogging requires a lot of writing. If you do not like writing or have no interest in making content like this, you will absolutely hate this business.
Blogging in the long term requires you to not just be a writer, but to actually enjoy writing. You should be willing to write for its own sake.
If you consider writing a slog you do for sales, you will not succeed in this business because the “IT FACTOR” will be missing. Your writing will lack the passion and consistency that attracts readers and makes them keep reading.
Most people have no idea whether they like writing or not for the simple reason that they’ve never tried it (classroom style boring academic writing does not count). You gotta create some content to know if you’re built for it.
Some people are and some people aren’t. You have to try it to know for sure. Personally, I never once thought in my life that I would be a writer and failed English across all my years in schooling, but here we are.
Do you need money RIGHT NOW?
I made $0 from my blog in my first year. If you want to make money right away, blogging is NOT a good business for you.
You will be better served by a service based business model like copywriting or web design. Either that or something faster like building a social media based business with The Art of X.
It takes years of work to make $1k a month from a blog, while only weeks and months to do it from a service based business (assuming you’re selling a high value service like copywriting/web design/SaaS).
The advantage of blog money is that it’s AUTOMATED. Once you’ve done the work, you make money in your sleep. But it does require you to write 100+ articles and spend time building an audience for you to get there.
For MOST people who have made no money online and are broke, I’d recommend starting a service based business or doing social media over starting a blog simply because the money comes easier and faster.
We’ve actually come to the point that it’s almost impossible to make money with blogging without social media as I will show you later in the piece. For now, you need some context into how much money can you even make with a blog.
How much money can you make with a blog?
There are blogs out there that make $0 a month. These types are either non-commercial (e.g. someone talking about their day) to someone with no traffic.
There are blogs out there that make $100 a month. This is the vast majority of your ad-monetized blogs.
There are blogs that do $1000 a month. These are blogs that rely on affiliate marketing and have moderate traffic.
Then there are blogs that made $10k and beyond a month. These blogs sell their own products, are written by people who are experts in their field, and seriously focus on building their audience.
For example, this blog pulls between $15-50k a month.
The average is close to $25k a month. Something would have to be very wrong for me to make less than $15k a month.
How do I do this:
- I focus on building my audience with The Art of X
- I built several ULTRA high quality products
- I keep all my products up to date (I’m the only person who does this. Most sellers disappear once they’ve made the sale. My products are updated many times a year so they are never stale unlike everyone else.)
- I partner with the most skilled people to produce products that are outside my area of expertise. I know jack shit about web design, but Sean, the author of The Complete Web Design Course™ does and makes $200k a year from his design business. You can read all the reviews on his product for proof.
- I keep things readable. People no longer read long paragraphs. Everything is written in short 1-3 line paragraphs to make it easy to read on the phone. I recently added AI text to speech to the site provided by ListenThis for people who prefer hearing over reading.
- Good design. Nothing turns off people like a website that looks straight out of 2010.
- And most importantly – GOOD INFORMATION COMING FROM EXPERIENCE. You can do everything else right, but if you don’t have this, your blog will not make it. Guys will read one article on LMM and then proceed to read the entire archive. The information has to be top notch.
This year I crossed one million dollars on Gumroad and was featured on their website for the milestone. This is Gumroad sales alone and doesn’t include affiliate sales I made. The numbers are a lot higher if you count in affiliate revenue.
As I write this, we are already at $1.12M so things are going well:
And I run this as a hobby, not as a serious full time business (I own multiple other very profitable businesses, see my 5 year anniversary post for more details).
Writing for fun
While I do like making money, this website is written primarily as a hobby. The goal is to help ambitious men get better health, make money from the internet, get good with women, and other “man things” that modern society doesn’t teach you.
If the goal was pure profit, then half of the pieces on this website wouldn’t even have seen the light of day. For example, the previous piece The Problem with Hindus doesn’t help make any money and only alienates a section of my audience (because the truth hurts).
On the other hand, writing for fun and not money also allows me to talk about anything and say what I truly think without having to worry about upsetting people or losing customers.
For example, for the last few weeks, India was at war and I being a good citizen, supported my country with my social media accounts by pushing pro-India news and countering enemy propaganda.
In the meantime, most other Hindu “influencers” kept tweeting as if the war didn’t exist. They were too afraid to lose followers and money.
They all have big words for everything else but when it comes to supporting their own country they act like there’s a big cock in their mouth choking them and preventing them from saying anything.
Note: As I re-read this piece for typo correction, it seems fairly obvious that this website is written for fun not money, but I’ve left the last few paragraphs as is to drive the point home.
How the business has changed over the years
The blogging business has changed significantly from when I started in 2018.
The good: Monetization
Back in the 2010s, people used to be fairly anti-monetization. If you had affiliate links to Amazon books in your articles, people would complain about them, even though you made like $0.08 per affiliate sale of those books.
Today, you can sell products from day 1 and no one bats an eye. People expect you to be selling something and most people are very comfortable making purchases from the internet so the monetization opportunities are far higher.
If you can build an audience, you WILL make money. It is almost impossible to not make money if you have an audience. You have to almost be trying to fail.
The bad: Traffic
It is much MUCH harder to get traffic now than it used to be.
Back in the old days, you could write regularly for 2 years and end up with a million pageviews to your site from Google alone.
Today getting traffic is a challenge. You have to work for traffic. It doesn’t come for free like it used to.
Today if you just write random pieces for 2 years, you will barely even get a thousand readers. It simply doesn’t work like that anymore.
Sometime in 2018-19, Google changed its algorithm to heavily favor the big media websites. Smaller sites barely get any clicks and traffic, at least when compared to before.
In the beginning, Google was the God of the internet and you had to do everything in your power to get a good “ranking” on Google.
Today, Google is garbage.
I no longer even bother looking at the Google Analytics for Bold & Determined. Searching on Google for real information is in vain.
Google has now hidden everything that matters and the corporate entities dominate the search engine results.
Using Google to find real information is fruitless. Soft censorship is readily apparent.
– Victor Pride
In essence, if you want to build a successful blog, you must also build some kind of social media. On this side of the internet, we heavily favor X for its free speech stance, but you could also use YouTube or Instagram to get the word out.
Back in the day you could spend 100% of your time writing long articles and be successful. Now you must spend at least 50% of your time on social media otherwise you will just have no traffic.
Social media -> Website/email list -> Money
This equation is going to get truer and truer because Google is slowly dying to AI search. At least you can get some clicks from Google.
With AI search, people get an answer straight away and don’t have to visit any website. Even the most hardcore SEO specialist will eventually bite the dust.
Advice to Blog Artists and Content Creators
If you are a creator, here are three big pieces of advice for you:
Social media is where all the people are. This will be your main source of traffic, leads, and growth.
You MUST pick one platform of your choice and grow it. If video is your strong suit, go with YouTube. If you speak well, go with podcasting. If you can write, I strongly recommend X, and The Art of X will take you to the promised land.
SEO is not very important anymore. It does not bring you many readers no matter what anyone tells you. I have been doing this for 7 years so I know what I’m talking about.
I’m friends with dozens of writers and NO ONE gets a lot of traffic from SEO. Google simply isn’t that relevant anymore for the small publisher.
2) Build an email list
Your email list is the most important asset of your business. Any product you build, anything you create, any ebook you write – the best way to get it out to all of your readers is email. Your email list is your source of leads.
There is no other platform with a near 100% delivery rate. Even on X, you can have 100k followers but your average tweet will be shown to maybe 6000 people. On YouTube it’s even worse.
Email is the undisputed KING of marketing.
Not to mention that it is the only good way to retain readers. Most people are not going to refresh your website every 3 days to check for a new article being posted.
With email everyone gets a notifier and can check it out. No need for constant refreshing.
Remember, your blog should have one main purpose – to get people to sign up to your email list. If your content is good, your email list will constantly keep growing.
How much money you make will correlate very strongly with the size of your list and how good your content is.
3) Focus on customers
Focus on getting customers. Focus on helping customers. Focus on keeping customers.
This is very important.
Getting customers: If you’re not getting customers, it’s not a business. A blog with lots of writing and no customers is like a guy who goes on lots of dates and sleeps with no girls.
Remember, it’s not a business unless you’re getting customers. So focus on building good products and marketing them well.
Helping customers: I’m not just talking about customer service, but also on taking feedback. If you are popular, then you will get lots of feedback from readers.
If you’re actually taking feedback from someone who hasn’t taken out their card and supported you with their money, you’re wasting your time.
There will be countless people who will email you saying they’ve been reading you for 5+ years and will have “advice” for you.
Advice from someone who has never considered you helpful enough to spend money on your products (despite having read you for a while) is worth exactly as much as the revenue from that person… zero.
Anyone who’s built an online business is nodding in agreement. It’s good to have readers but you cannot make any business decision based on the word of a non-customer.
Wage slaves and non-business people find this “arrogant” simply because they’re used to having to listen to everyone who speaks (because they are slaves). They do not understand the realities of business.
Keeping customers: What is the sign of a good business? REPEAT CUSTOMERS. Make sure any product you release is very high quality. Offer generous refund policies. Keep your products up to date.
I know it takes time to update products and there’s no additional revenue you get from it, but you should strive to make your customers delighted with their purchase. They must be so happy that they’re thanking their stars that they purchased something from you.
This is VERY important. So many people have good free content but mediocre paid content. This is not the way to go. You will not have repeat customers if you do this.
Invest time and energy in your products to make them as good as possible (or affiliate with people doing that). Don’t sell mediocre stuff you’re not proud of.
Announcement: The Art of The Blog
With all of this said, I’m going to make a full ebook on building and monetizing a blog.
It will be called The Art of The Blog and will contain everything I know about making money from a blog.
It will be available for free for all existing LMM customers before launch day (there will be a very small charge to prevent fraud).
Stay tuned and God willing, I’ll be sending you the copy in a few weeks once it’s ready.
Thank you for being a customer and supporting this website over the years.
– Harsh Strongman
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