Last year, I published my first Ask Me Anything here on Making Sense of Cents. That went super well, so I decided to make it more of a regular thing!
Ask Me Anything is literally that – you can ask me anything. If you’re struggling to figure out what to ask, here are a few of the topics you may want to know more about:
- Personal finance
- Blogging
- My life
- Travel
- RVing
- Sailing
- Being location independent
- Business
- Making extra money
- Questions about my dogs
And so on, and so on.
Seriously, ask me anything in the comments below, and I will take the time to answer every single one. Of course, please nothing inappropriate or creepy. I’ll let you be the judge of what is creepy, I guess, haha!
All right, go for it, ask away!
P.S. If you’re looking to see all of the comments and questions, make sure to hit “Older Comments” or “Newer Comments” below. The comments break apart in pages once there are over 50 comments.
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Hi Michelle! Thanks so much for opening this up! I was wondering when you were starting out did you approach other media sources about your blog eg newspapers, tv. Or was it just word of mouth once you grew and they contacted you?
Many thanks,
Madonna
Usually, they approach me. HARO is a great website to check out 🙂
Thank you ☺️
Hi Michelle, thanks for doing this and thanks for taking my question. If you were just starting today would you still do a personal finance blog or would you choose something different? Do you think the personal finance blog arena is overcrowded?
My blog would still be the same 🙂
I don’t think it’s overcrowded.
I am looking to create a blog, however, I have somewhat of a dilemna. I have a book that I’ve written that I had planned to sell through my blog as an ebook. However, I was wondering if instead of selling the book, that maybe I should use the information from the book in order to build content for my blog. I figure I could use the articles to build up the blog and then use the blog to offer affiliate programs to my audience. I’m kind of concerned about having enough content to continuously feed to my blog,so I think using the book would be a good ideal, but at the same time I hate to just give the book away for free. Any ideas,insight, or suggestions you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
You can go either way – it’s just a personal decision.
I wouldn’t worry about having enough content, though. A book wouldn’t be enough for a whole blog anyways – so hopefully you have lots of other stuff planned 🙂
Hi Michelle –
I enjoy your writing and your blog course! It seems sensible to initially build a product page where I collect an email address with a free giveaway then create an email cycle for my credit products as opposed to writing content multiple times per week and just “hoping” to generate money.
I am curious if you feel its a better strategy to just start writing content vs building a product where we collect email, provide a free giveaway then establish an email cycle. It takes more time, thought, effort and money than I realized to create all of this, but, once its done I believe I could easily create content multiple times per week and then have the email cycle already in place.
Can you offer your opinion on the best way to start getting traction on users and financial momentum ?
Are you starting a blog or a store?
I have a blog area on quickapply.com, I have never had a blog before. So yes I need to add to this blog as much as I can.
Giveaways aren’t always the best way to collect emails – as most giveaway entries are people who are only interested in giveaways (so you may get a lot of people marking your emails as spam). It sounds like you need to decide what your business will be. For me, I’m a blogger so I like content.
Hi Michelle,
Thanks for letting us have a quick chat with you. You are one of the fewer bloggers that has inspired me to jump in this crazy blogging thing.
I am new in blogging, I love writting and learning. (I have purchased your affiliate marketing course). This is my ‘draft’ blog, still have a lot of work to do 🙂
My first income goal is to reach 1 or 2% of what you earn per month within 6 months. I would have so many questions but here are three of them :
1. When you started to earn money with your blog, did you plan to grow your income that big in a certain amount of time, was that your goal ?
2. What increased your income and what have you done to keep it growing ?
3. Do you use stock photos or do you actually take your own pictures ?
Thanks again,
Emeline
Hello!
1) I don’t think I really had any goals with my blog in the beginning. I was just happy with what was going on 🙂
2) Diversifying my income really helped, as well as firing all of my freelance clients and focusing 100% on Making Sense of Cents.
3) I do both.
Hello Michelle,
Great that you let us pick your brain 😀
I have so many questions regarding blogging but I’m currently under medical leave, which has made my personal finance a little worse for wear.
So now, I wonder:
1. I have a credit card debt and a car loan. Which method would you recommend to tackle the debts to get rid of them as soon as humanly possible?
2. Aside from Affiliate Marketing, which I’m fairly new in your course, which other methods would you recommend?
3. Being location independent and traveling with your dogs, is it difficult to find pet-friendly places? Have you thought about taking a trip to Europe with your dogs?
4. Did you train your dogs or someone trained them with/for you?
Thank you for the information 🙂
Hello!
1) I’d probably go with the one with the highest interest rate.
2) Sponsored partnerships 🙂
3) It’s not hard to find pet-friendly places. Our dogs are old so I would not fly with them. Personally, I think it’s quite evil to put your dogs in the baggage area of a plane.
4) It depends on what you considered “trained” haha
Hi Michelle!
Is there anything that you would have done differently throughout your business journey? If so, please share examples.
Thank you for all that you do! You rock!!!
My main thing is that I would have bought my domain right away and started on self-hosted WP 🙂
Have you found that certain titles work best on Pinterest? I am a food blogger and I wonder if my titles should be shorter rather than longer?
I have never really tested it, to be honest.
Hi Michelle.
My question is, what safeguards did you have in place financially (if any) before you, and then your husband, had your blog business as your sole source of income?
Thanks!
Hmm can you share what you mean? Do you mean like having an emergency fund?
Kind of- did you want to have a certain number of months where you hit a certain income threshhold and / or savings?
Honestly, it was just to fully fund my EF and to pay off my student loans. I was already making good money from my blogging business, so it was mainly just myself holding myself back.
Thank you 🙂
Hi Michelle
I’m so excited you have given us this opportunity to ask you questions.
I probably have a few but the one I am most interested in is what software did you use to set up your Affiliate Marketing platform?
Thank you.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Kind Regards
Ivone
Teachable 🙂
Hi, Michelle:
Thanks for taking our questions!
I started a blog in July: https://katiegoesplatinum.com
People seem to love it, which is great! And I am now on page 1 of Google for my main keyword (gray hair transition blog). So I guess that means I’m kind of doing SEO correctly? 🙂 I am so new to all of this!
Question:
I get a lot of clicks on my Amazon affiliate links and some purchases but my income since July is only $69. I reached out to Amazon for advice, and they basically told me that my income would increase once my traffic increased.
Any tips or advice on how to get more purchases through my links? Or should I just work more on getting traffic to the blog? Last month I had 5000 visitors and 11,800 page views.
Thanks!
Hey Katie!
There’s so much that goes into this question. My top tip would be to take my affiliate marketing course – http://makingsenseofaffiliatemarketing.com
Getting more traffic would definitely help.
Hi Michelle,
Any advice on how a newbie blogger can land guest post opportunities?
Is there a format for requesting to guest post or any particular sites you could recommend that give newbies a chance?
I don’t have a following yet and I’m trying to increase my exposure.
Hello!
I did some research and you may find these helpful:
1) https://neilpatel.com/blog/guide-to-guest-blogging/
2) https://www.jeffbullas.com/how-to-start-guest-blogging/
Thanks so much, Michelle. This is very useful information!
I really appreciate this Ask Me Anything segment, it’s always good to learn from experienced bloggers like yourself.
Still trying to be like you when I grow up! 🙂
What is your major source of traffic Google or Pinterest?
Pinterest used to always be bigger up until just a few months ago.
Hello Michelle,
I have been doing far TOO MUCH thinking and way little action on starting a blog. I have a ton of excuses and I obviously recognize that. Ha! I wanted to do something special for my birthday this month and I feel that starting my blog on that special day is PRETTY SPECIAL! What do you think about that? Is it a good idea? Or could it be a disaster waiting to happen?
Ha, why would that be bad?
I know that I can do this, but I have heard both success stories, as well as some failures and I, DO NOT want my birthday to be a constant reminder of a failure. That may sound ridiculous, but it is a thought on replay in my head. And failure is failure no matter what day it is. All that matters is how you recover after not having the success that you want, but I feel that I will remember it more if it’s on my birthday rather than some random day of the year! I hope you don’t think that I’m nuts after this. LOL. What do you think? Should I go for it?
Did you do SEO of your blog on your own like outreaching to other webmasters for links or did you just focused on creating good content and links followed up?
I do hardly no SEO.