Starting A Blog for Some Extra Side Income

Fellow hustlers, I have been a long admirer of the concept of passive income from side hustles like blogging. But like many, I kept procrastinating due to a lot of factors like self-doubt, not knowing where to start, laziness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I realized nothing’s gonna happen until I take some action.

Below, I outline my own personal journey, or more like a hands-on approach, towards building my first website and taking that leap towards financial freedom. Beware, this is a work in progress so I will keep you posted with my experiments, pitfalls to look out for, the moments of "aha", and the last but not the least - some tangible results for my efforts.

The Goal

Create a passive income of 500$ per month in a span of 6 months

It is very important to set some goal and I prefer to keep mine realistic. For me, the goal is to create a passive income of 500$ per month in a span of 6 months. That may not look like much, but I am damn sure the lessons I learn along the way will be worth a whole lot more. It's not about the money for me, I am more interested in trying out different strategies and document my steps along the way.

The Project — Letter Designer

Let’s get down to business. The project I am going to undertake is a blog. The plan is to make available the best templates for various business and professional letters. These letter templates can be edited right inside the browser and then exported to PDF.

You may be wondering how I decided on this particular project? If not, you should because choosing a niche is the first and important step. Let’s dive into details some other time.

The blogging platform that I am going to use for the blog is WordPress. The reason is that it is one of the best out of the box solutions for a beginner to start blogging. They have a lot of ready-made themes to choose from. After all, a custom solution requires huge upfront time and money investment. A comparison of existing platform vs custom solutions is in itself a huge topic of discussion. Let’s keep it for another day.

I am hosting the WordPress site on DigitalOcean. To keep the initial expenses low, I have started with the smallest possible droplet. They have very reasonable hosting prices starting at just 5$/month and you can get a domain for just 10$/year.

In my opinion, the approach to any new website can be broken down to the following:

1. Niche Selection Strategy — How to decide what to blog about?
2. Content Strategy — How to generate content?
3. Traffic Strategy — How to drive traffic?
4. Monetization Strategy — How to make some bucks?

Stay tuned to go on this amazing journey with me and let’s learn together.