How To Blog And Keep Your Job

Most people start out their affiliate journey with a "normal" 9-5 job. With training here at Wealthy Affiliate AND trying to get a consistent publishing schedule on your blog, it can seem like an impossible task to make any progress on your business.

Personally, I think it's possible to earn a full time income from your blog relatively easily within two years, even if you are working a full time job and I wanted to share my game plan with you.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed. Starting a business is risky. Even so, I think with consistent action over a multi-year period practially gurantees some sort of success along the way. At the very least, you'll have a few more doors open to you. You'll just have to keep your foot on the gas to find out exactly how things will turn out.

The ONLY TWO THINGS You Need To Be Successful At Blogging

There's a lot to learn about the world of affiliate marketing and blogging, especially if you start out with zero prior experience. Things like WordPress, SEO, and Google Analytics. However, in my mind, those are little technical details to help you boost your results. Actually, having built many successful blogs over the past decade, I see my success is mostly stemming from masterting two main things.

1. Keyword Research

Finding "good" keywords means finding things that people are searching for. I always try to thing about if an actual person would search for this topic and what would be their mindset when searching.

Related:

• Everything Gets Searched. (Almost Everything)
• Check Your Internet Browsing History For Keyword Insights

2. Consistent Publishing

I get asked all the time "how many" blog posts are required to start making money. Some people throw numbers around like 50, 100, or 200 posts. While those are good goals, there really is no specific number.

I can tell you though that it's more than 1!

More content means more chances to rank. It means more practice writing. It means more related topics to interlink and signal to search engines what your site is about.

In my experience it's much better to have an easy schedule you can keep long term than an unsustainable shedule that causes burnout down the road.

Related:

• Why You Should Feed Google More Data
• Sometimes You Just Have To Grind

The Two-Year Gameplan For A Successful Blog

Considering that you only need these two elements for success, here's what I'd do to create a highly successful blog in the next two years.

• Monday: Topic research, article outline, 500 words introduction & conclusion
• Tuesday: 1000 words, edit, upload images, format text, & publish
• Wednesday: Repeat Monday
• Thursday: Repeat Tuesday
• Friday: Tie up loose ends, catch up on work, Wealthy Affiliate training
• Saturday: Analyze traffic, keyword research, Wealthy Affiliate training
• Sunday: Keyword Research & Wealthy Affiliate Training

This gives you two articles per week for two years. That's 208 articles at the end of those years, plus it allows for time to complete your WA training, analyze your traffic, and take "high level" actions like fixing your site navigation, putting out fires, and doing additional research.

Two articles per week is definitely a sustainable schedule I think, even with a job and a family.

Can you find 2 hours per day to dedicate to your online business? I don't think it's too much to ask. What other business in the world can you run on 2 hours a day, with zero previous experience? I would imagine that affiliate blogging is unique in this aspect.

This is just a hypothetical schedule. Maybe you have just 1 hour per day M-F, then you can do 8 hours per day on Sat/Sun. That's fine. Maybe you want weekends completely free, and can dedicate 6PM to 12PM every day, for a 36-hour total time dedicated M-F which is awesome. You can tweak this schedule as you need.

An even cushier schedule could be 1 article per week. Of course, fewer articles published usually means less progress in your business, but that may be all you can do. That's fine. Maybe your time horizing is 4 years or 10 years. Don't be ashamed of that.

There's a lot of pressure on people in this business to be successful in a short period of time. Sometimes it can feel like if your blog is not succesful in one year that you're doing something wrong.

Everyone's journey is different. I like to imagine myself 10 years in the future. Are the action I'm taking now going to get me closer to that goal? If it took you 10 years to build a six figure business online and then you could enjoy that business for 20 or 30 years more after that, would you be happy? Most people would.

Then again, you could also speed this up. Write like a maniac for a year and you might have a six figure business by the end of 12 months. It happens all the time.

Rethinking "Free Time" & Relaxation

One recommendation I have is to rethink what you consider to be "free time". A long time ago I decided that my hobby would be making money online. It was a consious decision. Rather than Netflix or playing guitar or playing video games, I wanted to research and become an expert at making money.

What things are you doing now that you could replace with a profitable hobby like hanging out inside Wealthy Affiliate? Instead of watching Season 3 of Kobra Kai or watching Bachelor Nation eat itself over controversy every week, what if you watched Jay for an hour with a beer?

These types of habits make a different and you'll often discover that you have a lot more free time than you think.

What habits & hobbies could you cut to dedicate more time to Wealthy Affiliate training, keyword research, and article publishing?