3 Important Steps To Take Before You Make Money Blogging

Starting a new blog is exciting, especially when you begin to monetize your blog.  If you want to make set yourself up for success, just be sure to take these 3 important steps before you make money blogging.

1. Treat Blogging Income as Business Income

The most important lesson you will learn when you are making money blogging is that you need to treat your blogging income as business income.

If you plan to build your own blogging empire, you are building an online business.  By recognizing that from the get-go, you’ll avoid future headaches and problems with the IRS and other tax agencies.

Get a Lili Freelancer Card

An easy way to separate your blogging income is to set up a separate checking account for your blogging income.  You can do this easily with the perfect online banking for freelancers – Lili.

The Lili account has no bank fees or overdraft fees and is easy to open since it has no credit check.

Manage Blogging Expenses

Not only can you have all of your blogging income deposited into this account, but you can also pay for your blogging expenses easily with the Lili Visa debit card.  The Lili app is super-intuitive too, so you can categorize your expenses and income.  That means when tax-time rolls around, everything is already categorized for you – making your taxes much easier!

Get $100 Free Money When You Sign Up

As a special partnership with Lili (I use this account myself), when you sign up for an account and spend just $250 on your debit card within 45 days, you’ll get $100 and so will I!  You have to use my link to sign up for the free money, then just add $250 in cash, deposits from blogging income, or direct deposits, and spend $250, and you’ll get $100.

Plus, once you’re a member, you can offer your blogger tribe, freelancer friends, and clients the same awesome offer to earn even more free money.  It literally pays to sign up for a Lili account for your blogging income and to use for blogging expenses.

Get the free Lili account and Visa debit card now for your free $100.

Whether you use the Lili account or another business checking account, it’s imperative that you treat your blogging income like business income from the beginning.

2. Add An Affiliate Disclosure To Your Blog Posts

It’s great to see those blogging dollars rolling into your new business bank account, but have you added all of the proper disclosures to your blog posts and website?

So many blog posts on the web want to talk about how great it is to make money blogging but very few mention the importance of following the law when doing so.  There are certain terms and disclosures that must be on your website to conform with the law, especially when it comes to monetizing your blog content.

Affiliate Disclosure For Bloggers Is A Must

If you have signed up for any affiliate programs and are including any affiliate links at all on your website, you must disclose this information to your readers.  Not only that, it must be disclosed in a very specific manner.

To conform with the rules of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), your affiliate disclosure must be:

• Clear and conspicuous
• Have no loopholes
• On the same screen before the affiliate link

Example of Affiliate Disclosure For Your Blog Posts

If you look at the top of my blog posts, you’ll see my affiliate disclosure, which shows you how simple an affiliate disclosure can be.

Don’t be intimidated by disclosing your affiliate ads, or think that it will turn off your readers.  Transparency actually builds trust with your audience, so just do it.

Here’s a simple affiliate disclosure that you can copy and paste to use for all of your blog posts if you’d like:

This post may contain affiliate links.  You won’t pay anything more, but if you make a purchase using our links I may receive a commission. 

Don’t Forget The Amazon Affiliate Disclosure

Not everyone decides to go with the Amazon affiliate program, but if you do sign up, be sure to include the proper affiliate disclosure as outlined by Amazon.  The disclosure in the section above is great for most affiliate links, but Amazon requires even more transparency.

The Amazon affiliate program disclosure is a site-level disclosure, which means it just needs to be placed on a prominent area of your website.  That is a highly visible page or area of the website seen often, which could be:

• Home page
• About page
• Header area
• Footer area
• Sidebar area

For your Amazon disclosure, it only needs to appear once on your website and can be as simple as:

Next Level Blogging is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associate Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Please be aware that I’ve gone over the basics for the U.S. and I highly recommend you read FTC Disclosure for Affiliates: The Definitive Guide here.  If outside of the United States, please check the rules for your country.

3. Set Up Email Marketing For Your Blog

So this step doesn’t have legal implications, but it is very important for growing a blog, especially before you make money blogging.

Why Is Email Marketing Important For Bloggers?

With everything else, there is to do with blogging, as a beginner blogger, the importance of email marketing may not be obvious.  So many bloggers skip this important step and regret it later, so let’s save yourself the headache.

Your readers are potentially going to your customers, so email marketing gives you the ability to stay on their radar and keep them engaged with your brand.

Think about it – just because someone visits your website once, doesn’t mean they will remember to come back to it again – even if they love your content.  But, if you offer them a valuable freebie in exchange for their email address, your content will pop up in their inbox – reminding them of how much they loved your content.

The Best Email Marketing Tool For Beginner Bloggers

Email marketing is one of the musts for bloggers and business owners.  Personally, I use MailerLite for all of my blogs and business email marketing, and I highly recommend MailerLite for all beginner bloggers.

5 Reasons Beginner Bloggers Choose MailerLite For Email Marketing

There are hundreds of email marketing tools out there to choose from and I’ve tried several, but finally, I settled on MailerLite.  If you’re a beginner blogger that plans to make money blogging, check out these five reasons to use MailerLite for email marketing:

1. 1. MailerLite is free for up to 1,000 subscribers – Your first 1,000 subscribers are the biggest challenge to obtain, so why pay for a fancy email marketing tool when MailerLite gives you premium features for free?  Everything you get with the paid tools comes free with MailerLite, including up to 12,000 emails per month
   2. Easy Drag-and-Drop Functionality – MailerLite’s platform is user-friendly, with a drag-and-drop form builder that allows you to customize every single form and email to look exactly how you want it.
   3. Email Automation – MailerLite’s automation is my favorite free feature.  This allows you to automatically send a series of emails, triggered by different events, like signing up for a form, clicking a link, etc.  This feature is usually what other tools charge you for – MailerLite lets you set up unlimited Automations!
   4. Subscriber Classification – You can create unlimited subscriber groups to classify your subscribers based on criteria that you’d like.  This allows you to send the right content to the right readers, based on their specific interests.
   5. Make Money Blogging on Autopilot – MailerLite allows you to sell your products and services on autopilot, even while you sleep, and all for free.  You can create a sales funnel that takes your subscriber on a journey from a brand new subscriber to the paid customer, all on autopilot with the help of MailerLite.

Don’t waste another minute without an email list for your blog.  If you aren’t collecting email subscribers you are throwing away potential sales dollars for your blogging business.  Sign up for MailerLite here.

Conclusion: 3 Important Steps To Take Before You Make Money Blogging

As a new blogger, you may not realize just how much work goes into running a blogging business.  Next Level Blogging is here to help you wade through the muck and make sense of it all, including those steps you should take before you ever start making any money with your blog.

Make sure you treat your blogging income as business income and track your expenses, set up your affiliate disclosures, and start collecting email subscribers from Day 1 of blogging.  

I know you’re eager to get started with monetizing your blog, but taking these three important steps first will make sure you don’t lose any of those precious blogging dollars that you work so hard for.

If you found this blog post helpful, please share it with other beginner bloggers by pinning it on Pinterest or sharing it on your favorite social media platform.  I appreciate you and Happy Blogging!!