Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:30 — 17.0MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | RSS | More
Do you like passive income? And food? And free Disneyland tickets?
Today, Randa from The Bewitchin’ Kitchen drop by to chat about how her food blog provides her all three of those!
Randa is a work-at-home mom who started a food blog on a whim in 2009 (to almost no audience by the way), and has since grown her blog income to between $6k and $12k a month. In addition to cash, she also lands free or discounted food, kitchen/home products, and even Disneyland tickets. Yes actually.
Also, she makes mouth-watering food photos.
In this chat, we dig into…
- finding the time to make blogging work
- how blogs (specifically food blogs) actually make revenues
- Randa’s dream life with passive income and frequent travel
- partnering with companies for free products (as opposed to cash sponsorships)
It’s incredible how much Randa actually produces every single week given her lifestyle. Enjoy this episode!
Show notes and links from today’s episode
- Randa’s blog: Bewitchin’ Kitchen
- Adthrive – ads for blog monetization
- CJ – One of many “umbrella” affiliate marketing networks. Used to find affiliate companies 🙂
- Okanagan – Beautiful country! Randa wants to chill and sip wine there on the lake 🙂
- Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutiqu – We kinda want one of these too…
- How to Get Started Blogging
Key takeaways from our chat with Randa at The Bewitchin’ Kitchen
1 – 1st year of blogging
“What was I thinking? That looked terrible.”
If you’re at all new to blogging (or thinking about starting one), you can probably expect this after your first year.
Regardless of WHAT the “pro bloggers” will sell you on, starting a blog is hard work, and requires patience, consistency, passion, and drive.
Your first year will be, well, a learning curve. (Good news is, it does get easier the more you do it. Sounds like life, yes?)
If you’re just starting out, please keep that in mind! If you’re in your first year (or even first three years), don’t give up hope of wild impact and passive income 🙂
May we recommend our friend Pete at Do You Even Blog if you care to learn more about blogging? He’s one of our faves, and his blogging podcast is A+. (J was on it here!)
2 – How does a food blog make money?
For anyone looking to make income a blog, this chat with Randa was really, really helpful for a number of reasons.
Before we share exact numbers or strategies, here’s one huge point: Randa doesn’t make millions from her blogs.
There are loads of bloggers out there making $200k+ a month from their blogs (and even $2M…), but those ginormous bloggers can often discourage newer folks from even starting…or from persisting on when they fail to bring in sweet gobs of cash.
Don’t be discouraged. It takes patience, consistency…….wait we just said this. But it’s true.
Anyhow…
Randa makes between $6k – $12k, depending on the seasons, etc, from her food blog.
She’s also a nice case study for blog monetization, as she hits pretty much all of the common methods:
- Ads – Native ads, display ads, Adthrive, Google Adsense, Media.net, Mediavine, these are all great ways to monetize in a very passive way.
- Sponsored Posts – Gaining sponsors (be it in return for cash or Disney tickets) requires a bit more work, but can be extremely lucrative if you can deliver value for the sponsored products/companies
- Affiliate Marketing – Without writing 17 blog posts to explain affiliate marketing, let’s just say you can put links to *other people’s* products or services on your blog, and when reader’s click the links, their browser stores a “cookie.” If the reader purchases the product/service afterward, you could get a nice commission for referring them!
- Info Products – Randa has a number of ebooks she sells on her site. These types of products take time to produce and sell, but can end up being quite passive in the long run.
If you’re just starting out, it’s important to note that you’re going to need some pre-requisites before making anything worthwhile money from your blog:
- Traffic
- Loyal Fans (the more loyal, the more lucrative probably)
- Extremely good pitching skills.
Again, it takes time.
3 – Cooking is a personal finance hack.
Seriously.
Millennials, more than any other generation, don’t cook. We work a lot. We eat out a lot, but we don’t cook (#broad #generalities).
It’s no secret that eating out is generally far more expensive than preparing meals at home (especially if you can prep lunches to take to work). However, there is a little-known secret people don’t talk about enough:
The more you cook, the better (or at least more efficient) you get at it.
“I’m not a good cook” or “I don’t enjoy cooking though!” tend to be the biggest excuses for excessive eating out, right? Cooking is not in your DNA, it is a practiced skill you can actually get better at.
If you’re aggressively seeking FI, improving your cooking skills can easily add a few hundred bucks to your savings rate every single month.
No joke. Grab the Joy of Cooking and let’s save some cash.
Have you ever dreamed of taking a passion like cooking….and turning it into a $6k/month side-hustle?
Want to support the podcast? Here are three things you can do.
Join the FIRE crew and change your life
Subscribe and get emails about new episodes of FIRE Drill Podcast.
Leave a Reply