This post may contain affiliate links.
As some of you know, I started this blog about two months ago as a way to tell you about my travels and life in this amazing new country. I also decided that I’d love to make money off of it, if possible.
Making Money While Travelling
Living location-independent and being able to travel are hugely important to my husband and I right now, and although I’m a freelance writer and virtual assistant (which pays the bills), who doesn’t want to make money from travelling? So then I found out about Michelle Schroeder-Gardner who makes — I’m not kidding — $100,000 A MONTH from her blog. That money allows her to live completely location-independent and travel the country in her RV. Wow!
I found Michelle’s “Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing” course online, and after reading her major success story, I signed up, took the course and became one of her affiliates!
Michelle’s course is “self-taught” in the sense you go through her very easy-to-navigate website course and read each step of the action plan. Because I was pretty much entirely new to the concept of affiliate marketing, she helped me do everything from choosing the right affiliate programs for this blog to figuring out how to market them properly.
But the best part of the purchase — for me — was the community. Michelle invites you to be part of her special Facebook group of other bloggers taking the same course. That has been huge! I get to share my goals, failures, confusions, struggles and successes with other like-minded bloggers and the whole community supports one another our pursuit of successful, quality blogs. I’ve had a million questions answered, and I even found a couple VA gigs from the group.
Michelle’s course is helping us live in Scotland this year, and that’s invaluable! I spent full-price on the course, but through 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time, she is offering $28 off the course price! That’s a great savings and all you need is this coupon at checkout: 28OFFTODAY.
So now I told you why I loved the course, but why not hear about Michelle’s location-independent life?
Meet Michelle
1. Can you give us a brief history of how you got into blogging? In August of 2011, I started my personal finance blog, Making Sense of Cents, with the hopes of teaching people how to save money after reading a magazine that featured a personal finance website in one of their articles. I became super interested in that website and my interest in blogging just grew significantly from there. Before August of 2011, I didn’t even know that blogs existed. I didn’t know what they were, I didn’t know that they could make money, or anything like that.
I did not create my blog with the intention of making money blogging. It was really all just a hobby. I then realized how much I loved blogging and realized that it was for me, so now I am a full-time blogger! It’s funny how life can change so much.
On Making Sense of Cents, I talk a lot about different ways to make extra money, money saving tips, living your dream life, RVing (me and my husband RV full-time), and more. I love running Making Sense of Cents and I am very happy that this is now my full-time career, my business, and pretty much my life. I also love that is allows us to travel full-time!
2. How long did it take you to earn a full-time income? You can find all of my blogging income reports here. Like I said above, I didn’t start my blog with the intention of making money, so I never thought about it or even tried until almost a year later. I made around $1,000 a month the year after I created my blog and now four years after that, I am making around $100,000 a month from my blog. Over $50,000 a month regularly comes from affiliate marketing too. That means that most of my income is actually quite passive!
3. How much are you earning per month now? In September of 2016, I earned a little over $100,000. That was a mixture from my blog as well as my affiliate marketing course. The course is something that I wish I would have done sooner. If you have a course idea, definitely create a plan to make it a reality. It was a lot of fun to create, and I’ve helped many people improve their blogging income as well.
4. What has that allowed you to do? We earn a great living online. It has allowed us to quit our jobs and absolutely love what we do. It has also allowed us to be financially independent, and we will be able to retire when we want to. However, I don’t see that happening any time soon as we absolutely long what we do!
We also travel full-time. We currently RV around the United States, and soon North America. The U.S. has so many different landscapes to see, and since we have two dogs it makes it much more comfortable on everyone to travel full-time because we can bring our dogs everywhere with us.
5. Tell us about the travels you have been on? RV living has allowed us to go on a ton of travels and trips, since we do it full-time. We’ve been to a majority of the national parks here, we’ve gone on tons of outdoors adventures, but we still have a ton more to see. We plan on RVing for a few more years, then eventually purchasing a sailboat and sailing to places around the world in it.
6. What would you say to other wanna-be travelers/location independent workers who are thinking about delving into blogging? I would say that you just need to take the leap and try it! Blogging is a very affordable business to get into. Due to that, you can see if it’s for you or not and really not waste that much money. You won’t know if you’ll become a successful blogger or not unless you just take that jump and try it!
7. What would you have done differently, knowing what you do today? I started out my blog anonymously. No one knew my name, my friends and family members didn’t even knew I blog, etc. I would definitely have started out publicly as I believe it greatly held me back in the beginning. Now, I am a very public blogger and I don’t hide anything – and I’m much happier this way.
Michelle is certainly as inspiration to us all! So how about you? If you are hoping to travel and make money doing it, why not check out Michelle’s course? Remember, the deal ends today, so why not save yourself $28 with the coupon: 28OFFTODAY 🙂
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