Blogging for a living

So a few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine about this blog. We got talking about making an income from blogging and he was curious on how it works and how much I make from it. That conversation got me an idea for a post.

So first of all, I currently don't make an income from this blog. I have already started to get a fairly large amount of traffic to it but I am not sure on whatever I should monetize the blog or not. After all, this blog is mostly a place for me to write about what I do, it's almost like therapy in a way for me since I have so much to share. I don't see it as a job however so monetizing it might feel wrong, anyhow the future will decide that I guess.


Anyhow, I will today be talking a bit about blogging and how monetizing on it works since I have quite a bit experience on it from the past.

Now if you're considering starting a blog, let's make something clear. A lot of people involved in marketing will tell you to target specific niches. "Make a blog about healthcare" or something like that. This is the completely wrong way to go about it. Blogging about a subject that you're not passionate about will be nearly impossible.

Instead, start a blog about a subject you love. I love my job as a freelancer and I could talk about it for days without a break, which is why I can keep posting long (Sometimes too long) posts on the matter. However if someone asked me to write about dieting or something like that, I wouldn't be able to make more than a post or two.

So write about something you love, one of your hobbies or the subject you're studying about. Anything goes if you're passionate about it since it will inspire your readers and pull them in. They will want to know how you work and what your world looks like when they notice how interested you're in it. You can compare it to how we sometimes can get stuck on weird subjects on Wikipedia. We might not care for the subject but we keep reading about it because it's darn interesting to find out how things and people work. Humans are curious like that.

Now don't start out by coming up with ideas that will let you earn from the blog, wait a month or so until you get traffic to it. Which brings us to the next topic, traffic.

Traffic, or in more layman terms, visitors. It's one of the biggest issues for a lot of people. "How do I get more visitors? My blog is so nice and it has tons of interesting posts but only a handful of people read it..." etc.

Now whatever you get traffic or not is decided by factors since there are different ways for people to find your blog. They might find it linked on other websites or blogs, or they might find it on search engines.

Now for search engines, it's all about SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Now this is a large subject and I wont go further into it since there are much better blogs and websites for that. One is Googles own SEO starters guide, thirty pages of pure gold facts. Find it by clicking here. (PDF)

Another good source of info on SEO is Moz own beginners guide, amazing website in general for anything Internet Marketing related. Find that one by clicking here or by going to moz.com.

Now it's important as a blogger to connect via social media. Use your facebook or twitter account to inform people when you've made a post, and don't forget to use appropiate hashtags! For help on hashtags use hashtagify.me. If you feel uncomfortable using your private twitter/facebook, just make a new one with your blogs name as username!

Now there are other ways to gain visitors. There are sites that will sell you visitors. These have gotten a really bad reputation lately due to the fact that some provide fake, botbased visits. However not all of them are bad. Some provide visitors to their customers via redirects, so from an old expired website in your category/niche. This is completely legal and a good way to make your blog rank better on blog directories! These types of visits can also convert into real fans on your website. One of these trusted sites for example would be maxvisits. They provide real visitors and work even with ad companies such as Google AdSense. I have personal experience with MV in the past when I ran a news website and it really boosted my rankings so even after I stopped hiring them I kept getting new visitors that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. There are also people on sites such as Fiverr that can provide similar services for good prices.

So don't go judging people too hard before you have a clear view of their services. Using Google to check up on these companies is always a good idea before hiring them. But the legit ones also tend to have money-back guarantees if you dislike their service.

So is blogging for a living possible? Yes, yes it is. Is it for you though? No idea, only you can answer that.

Remember that blogging is a long-time project and using cheap shortcuts tends to backfire quickly, such as duplicating content from other blogs or websites. So if you have the time and passion to start a blog, do it! It's a ton of fun and you learn a lot of new things.

How narrowing your freelancing can easily be used to boost your career

So I have recently mentioned freelance marketplaces such as Fiverr, Odesk and Freelancer. Now these are amazing and can garner you a lot of attention. However some people prefer a more targeted advertising for their services as this drastically reduces the competition. Let me teach you how just choosing a different website can boost your earnings tenfold!

Now what does it mean to narrow your field? Well it can mean several things depending on how far you want to go. I will explain this in a simple way by using myself as an example.

Now, I am a writer. I can write in English and Swedish. I could for example try to compete with other freelance writers in the English language, however just on Fiverr there are at the moment over four hundred active writers. So how can I narrow myself?

Well in the example of Fiverr, I narrowed myself by focusing on Swedish. I currently offer translations between Swedish and English primarily. Other than that I also offer to write articles in Swedish for a small sum. Now, I narrowed myself quite a bit there as Swedish is a fairly small language when compared to other large ones like Chinese, French, German and Russian. However, I get new work daily. How does this actually boost my earnings? Well, I pretty much went down from around 500 competitors to four or five. Now that is a much easier amount to manage, which I easily did and now most come straight to me for any Swedish related work they might have.

So if you know a field, try to target it more. Instead of offering "Graphical design", try to niche yourself and promote something more specific. In this example, how about just doing editing? Pick your favorite thing in your field and focus on solely that. If you notice that you only get about half of the amount of work you can handle, specalize yourself again in another offer. Keep doing that and you will be known as an expert in those specific tasks, meaning your old customers will keep coming to you and they will start recommending you to their friends and partners!


However, there is more than one way to target your audience as a freelancer. Most of you have probably heard about the freelance websites like Odesk, Guru, Freelancer, Fiverr and Elance. However, did you know that there are over ten thousand websites where freelancers can market their services? Now lets face it, at least 80-90 % of these are empty and useless. However, there are a lot of sites out there where you can expand your career.

For example, targeting specific countries is an amazing method. Here in Sweden we have a freelance marketplace I recently got active on again. They have taken a lot of inspiration from Fiverr which makes it easy to use. Now Sweden doesn't have a huge market but there are a few thousand people who use the website. By expanding there with my translation skills I managed to expand my potential market with about 20% (Fast head calculation using traffic statistics).

Now I know, some of you are now going "Where do I find these sites?". Well I can't help you completely since there are so many. Googling can get you a long way but I will give you a blog article here that will help you out. They listed freelance websites that focus on specific countries, niches and such. Check it out by clicking here.


So don't just sit there, start experimenting and watch the results! Failure only comes to the one who doesn't try.

A freelancers choice of weapon - The Portfolio

I mentioned earlier that when you're just getting started as a freelancer, it's of the outmost importance to provide a better service and service offer than your competition. But with this in mind, how do you show your future clients your amazing skills when you have had zero customers? The Portfolio. Let's talk about that for today.

Having a portfolio showcasing your work is one of the most important tools you have. With your portfolio future customers can see whatever you're the right freelancer for them in a matter of minutes.

So what does a freelancers portfolio look like? It's quite simple actually, most platforms like Fiverr, Odesk, Freelancer and such even provide a simple feature to help you on your way. Usually it's a simple upload feature for pictures, files and videos.

Now you all [should] understand what one is to find in a portfolio. It's past work or examples of your work, that shows an interested buyer exactly what you provide and the quality of it. If you're a graphic designer, wrap up some good designs! For example, if you want to work with logo and ad design, make some example ads and logos just to show your customers how broad your skillset is. If you're a writer, upload a picture or text showcasing the level of translation you can do.

A portfolio takes just a few minutes to prepare, maybe a few hours if you have to prepare work for it but is worth it since any serious client will be looking at it. It goes without saying that the paying clients that have the real money are all of the serious type that will want to hire the best freelancer for their work. So spending a few minutes or maybe an hour to make a simple portfolio of your work will bring you tons of more work, especially more wellpaid work which is what you're after.

Once you have had a few clients, ask them for testimonials. Trust me, it might sound scary but anyone who hires a freelancer understand that testimonials are important so if they're happy with your work they will gladly leave one. Some sites that allow freelancers to post their offers, like Fiverr, will have a testimonial/review feature that will encourage buyers to review the freelancers they hire.

What you can then do is to take a screenshot of these testimonials and use them in your portfolio. Because not only work is supposed to go there, after you start getting customers you should also leave the past clients opinions there so that interested buyers can see that you're not just all talk.

Markets you can easily profit on as a newbie

So last night I got a tweet about what market a newbie freelancer should focus on. Now, this is a super tricky question and while all of you have talents or hobbies that can be profited on, it tends to be hard to realise what those talents might be. "What can I offer, I don't have any special education."

Now the first thing you should check is if you have any basic talents. Most of us have some type of basic knowledge and those tend to be the most profitable. Mine for example is writing. With writing a lot of various types of work are available. Translation, copywriting, editing and such. And in those are even more specific work. In just basic writing you have things such as writing blogposts, articles, sales letters, website info, product listings, ad listings and such.

But, writing isn't the only profitable market. The next one is graphics, I mean ANYTHING GRAPHICS related. Really, anything related to design.

Just quickly browsing Fiverr and Odesk you can find people designing logos, websites, product covers, e-book covers, ad designing, photoshop, editing, 3d graphics, presentations (Such as infographics) and also anything related to drawing. Yes, people spend thousands and tens of thousands daily on people who can draw. Draw for books, pictures, for music covers, ads and even stuff they want on their website or t-shirt. The general rule is that if someone can write, they are awful at drawing and designing. This means that anyone who runs a successful blog most likely needs people who can take photos or do design to help them out!

In graphics you can also find video related markets. Anything from animating commercials to doing testimonials for products on webcam. I personally hire people to do commercials and cute animations once in a while. I am fairly known among friends for hiring people to do really cute anime-esque animations with personalised messages for when they are sick or are having their birthday for example.

Another huge market that is constantly undermanned is music and sound. Anything from voice-overs, commercial music, jingles and such is a constant demand since it's a small investment to get music for your website or video that you don't have to pay huge royalties for.

Another endless market is programming and IT. Anything from designing websites, IT support, setting up ecommerce and such is always on a huge demand. A lot of people have the ideas to sell things or get a message out but they don't have the means. People will hire anyone who is willing to do some quick programming work for them so they don't have to spend the whole afternoon Googling IT questions to solve their problems themselves.

The biggest market on the freelance platforms however is marketing. It's probably on a shared first place with writing. While you were reading this post, at least 10.000$ was being spent on freelancers for marketing purposes.

In marketing you can find pretty much anything. People will pay anyone who can provide any type of marketing. Social media, videos (Youtube), SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and such. Now these are fields that do require some knowledge but if you have it, or the will to learn, there is an endless income stream there.

But marketing on the web aside, people will pay handsomely for handing out flyers, putting up flyers and such. So if you live in a bigger city (Or in a country that is not the UK or US) you might want to consider offering to put up flyers for someone. Put up a gig on Fiverr and I'll guarantee you'll get some orders since real life marketing is undersaturated, since most freelancers want to work at a computer and are unwilling to go outside and paste flyers for an hour or two. Extremely worthwhile and I did this when I lived in Stockholm, made at least 10-15$ a day by this alone.

Now these are all general markets. There is also the...less orthodox markets. On Fiverr for example, there are top-rated sellers that provide magic. No you didn't read that wrong, people are actually offering spells and rituals and are making a killing on it, some of the best ones have thousands of sales! These are mostly people who actually believe in their magic and spells so they aren't bogus, but whatever their magic actually works is a subject I'll leave for their customers.

There are even freelancers that provide cooking tips, recipes, homework help like tutoring and such on smaller gig based sites like Fiverr. They are all making a killing on it since they are providing a good service that few are offering.

This should give you some ideas on how you can start out. I promise, if you just get started and actually try, you will notice that freelancing isn't some dreamlike ambition you only read about in the magazines and blogs, it's an endless job market where anyone with the will can make a profit. It's all up to you!

Now this week I will be releasing two larger posts. One will be about Fiverr Gig Videos, where I will teach you how to quickly and easily make videos that you can use for anything, not only Fiverr. Secondly, I am currently writing a paper called "What Freelancers and entrepreneurs can learn from Julius Caesar", which will be a paper focusing on the mindset of a freelancer/entrepreneur and how you can improve your results by improving your mind and will. This will be a bit longer than a usual blogpost and I am hoping to have it up before Sunday this week.

As usual, feel free to share this post on social media to show your support. For any questions or opinions, don't hesitate to drop them in the comment section below.

Fiverr - What it is and why your career as a freelancer starts with it

So as promised, here comes a "guide" of sorts on how anyone can become a freelancer today. Deadsimple for some, deadheard for others.

So what is Fiverr? Well basically fiverr was a website launched five years ago with the slogan "Browse. Buy. Done.". It's a marketplace like any other webshop, but instead of selling items such as iphones or t-shirts, it sells services.

Now I was among the first freelancers on the site, back in 2010. Back then, you would put up an ad on the site for some type of service that you offer in exchange for a fiver, 5$. Today the site is a lot different, you can make money up to several hundred USD for any service you offer via special addons to your small little five buck gig.

Fiverr has several million different services being offered right now and it doesn't matter if you need someone to post a flyer for you in another country or if you need some quickly made blog posts, they definately have at least one freelancer offering exactly what you're looking for.

Fiverr has more than us professional freelancers though. Girls (Mostly) willing to sing songs written by you, people willing to do voice-overs and such. Pretty much anything you could ever want that is digital is offered. So why should the rest of us make money there and not you?

So being a huge marketplace with millions of offers up many would assume that the competition is fierce and that it would be impossible for an amateur to get into the Fiverr game. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people are scared of freelancing. But the fact is that the freelance market is so large that people forget that the competition between freelancers is much smaller than one would imagine.

Lets take one of my largest freelance niches for example. I translate from Swedish to English and from English to Swedish. Now, there are only about nine million people worldwide that know Swedish fluently enough to work as translators Among them, about two million are too old to work. Another four-five million are already employeed in basic 8-5 jobs. Another 1 million are students. The remaining one million? 200k of them are sick and go on wellfare, another 100k are employeed in higher positions or are academics. Then we have a few hundred thousand that are unemployeed. Which leaves us with what, maybe 70-100k that could do what I do? Among those we have lazy people and people who want to get a job. Which leaves us with about 1000 people who can do what I can do.

Now here comes the funny part. I said people who know Swedish fluently but how many of those are actually good with language based skills like writing? One of the most popular areas of freelancing happens to be webdesign and graphic related skills.

Actually, I can count my competition on Swedish translation, at this moment there are 18 people including me who work with translation. There are about fifty more or so, but they consist of people who haven't put down any time to get any real customers so they don't count as real competition.

Now, how would I go forward? You see Fiverr is easy, you put up a gig about what you want to do for five dollars. Translate a few hundred words, design a logo, design a template for a blog or something like that. If you have any type of skill, you can most likely profit on it. Just check out the weird things that sell there, I mean really, there is a girl there doing a killing by recording herself for 15 seconds on webcam to say anything the customers want. I mean seriously, if she can make money (Mostly based on her looks is my guess) then so can you with your hobbies or skills.

Now remember to make your profile on Fiverr/Freelancer/Odesk look real. If you're not too shy, use a picture of you and don't worry, the odds of your friends ever finding your freelancer profile is zero, so far no one I know has ever found my profiles, mostly since they are too lazy to work as freelancers.

Now it actually is important to fill out your profile info. Make sure to list whatever skills you may have that the customers might need for their business. I mean really, just list everything you excel at.

Tip:Dumb the info down, don't use overly advanced terms to describe it, makes it much easier for your customer to understand. Say you design logos instead of "Graphical design" for example. On my old account, I literally had "I translate shit to Swedish" as part of my description.

Now for posting a Gig. In my opinion, it's best to check out your competition. Look at the best selling gigs in your field and see what they offer. Especially look at the gig descriptions since the best selling gigs probably have the best, most catchy descriptions.

Now, for pictures just go with anything, no one cares much about them unless you work with anything graphical, if it is then you MUST put up some work that you've done to showcase your skills.

Now on Fiverr, there is always the issue with "Gig video". It's basically a feature that allows you to upload a short video about your offer. Now most sit in their webcam and talk in a message. Some record themselves while doing whatever they offer.

Now, I already know most of you are trembling going "Oh but I am too shy to talk in a message, way too shy to show my face!" Yeah, I know. I have never shown my face on a webcam so trust me, if anyone knows a way around this it's me.

You see, you need a gig video. Or well, need is a strong word but basically it's been proven on Fiverr that having a video increased the sales chance with 200%. Now this might sound bogus but it's true, and I will now tell you why.

1) People will think of you as a more serious seller if you have ANY kind of video. Since a video means you've put time into your gig offer, more than the others who have just a basic text description.

2) Buyers can search specifically for sellers with video, so this means your offer wont even show if you don't have a video. Many buyers use this function to only get the most serious sellers.

I will go more into depth of how you can whip up a sales video with little work put into it but still all that extra sales value. That post will be released in the coming week so stay tuned for it! For now lets move on.

Now the last step is of course how we handle the competition. Basically, the trick is to crush the competitor by being better.

Now for this I will once again go on my own field, Swedish translations. Most sellers working with it on Fiverr will translate 500 words to or from Swedish for 5 dollars. The delivery time is usually between 5-10 days. Now, how can I beat that?

Alright, for starters, I know I can translate way more than 500 words in 30 minutes. In thirty minutes I can translate about 700 words if it's just a simple translation. Alright, so instead of translating 500 words like everyone else, I'll go with 600. This means I am already providing a larger quantitiy than my competition. But hold on, I am new to the field and the competitors have a ton of reviews and sales already. Lets make it 700 words, in other words, an estimate of 30 minutes of work per gig.

Alright so time limit. 5-10 days you say? Well sucks for you, I'll put it on three days and offer to have it completed within 24 hours in exchange for five dollars extra, a so called Gig Extra.

So as you can see, I am better and faster than my competition. Now, with a gig video and some examples of my work and any buyer will see that I am way more high-class than any other translator there. In other words, even though I have 0 sales and 0 reviews, I can guarantee that I will have made a sale within 24 hours.

Now to end the awfully long blog post, lets see how much this offer alone could earn me. Now at a minimum, the minimum amount of orders would be 1 a day. That means between 25-30 a month. 30x5 is 150$. Now about half of the customers tend to go for the Extra Fast gig extras, no matter what gig it's about. The end result would then land between 200-300$. That's for this gig, at a minimum. Now most freelancers offer about 5-10 gigs. They do some varied work since if you can translate, that means you can write for example. I don't only translate in Swedish I also write articles in Swedish for bloggers and such.

Now most people in for example translation, writing and such, they order more than one gig per placed order. My average for 600-800 words, tends to be three orders per customer. Now lets say I have 50 customers (I tend to get between 40-60 a month for translation). Lets say 20 of them place just one single order, and the rest place double orders. The first twenty garner me about 150$ for ten hours a work, that is 15$ an hour.

Now the remaining thirty order 2-3 translations per gig. Now, some will order Extra Fast, some wont. Lets say I get a total of 70 translations from those thirty, that's about 450$ for 30 hours of work. So a total of around 600$ for a total of around 40 hours of work. Now thats for one gig. I barely use Fiverr nowadays but when I did, I would have about four-six gigs running at the same time, work about three or four days a week for six-seven hours. For a total of about 2500-3500$  in monthly wage, if you can call it that. Now sure, we're not talking a high salary, but do keep in mind that I only worked half-time compared to a normal person and on top of that I would work directly from home. In my opinion, it's the best part of being a freelancer.

Now that should give you a good idea on how Fiverr works. If anything is unclear or if you want some more in-depth info on anything, don't hesitate to leave your opinion or question in the comment section below. Until then, enjoy. Please share this blog post if you found it interesting or helpful.