Book Review – The She Approach To Starting A Money-Making Blog By Ana Skyes

The She Approach To Starting A Money-Making Blog by Ana Skyes presents a sincere approach to creating a blog that can generate income. Ana wrote the book based on her own personal experience and this is not one of those books that promises you immense blog wealth by the end of the month. It goes into detail about the hard work and effort that goes into creating a successful money-making blog.

Ana went from making $0 in 2016 to $62,048 in 2020, quite a journey and she shares with us how she did it in this book. The book is divided into three parts and each part consists of a number of sections. Following is a brief review of each part of the book.

PART 1 – CHAPTER 1: SETTING UP YOUR FOUNDATION

Introduction: introduces what you will have learnt after reading this part of the book.

Knowing your why: Ana starts this section with a very important question, why do you want to start a blog. She believes having a clear reason for your blog will make you more likely to follow through with things, believe in the work you do, be determined, consistent and create an awesome blog.

Finding your blogging niche: Once you know the ‘why’ for your blog then it’s time to think about what your blog will do for others. What Ana means by this is that, you will need to identify a niche for your blog. According to Ana:

A blogging niche is simply a way to describe the topics you blog about and a way to categorize your blog according to the relevant industry.

This section goes into detail on how to discover your blog’s niche and it answers some important questions along the way which include:

• Do you really need a well defined blog niche?
• How much do you need to niche down?
• What blog niches earn the most money?
• What blogs can’t be monetized?

Identifying your target audience: If you have identified your blog’s niche then you should have an audience in mind that your blog is aimed at. Ana writes that:

We have already established that if you want to start a money-making blog, you have to solve a problem for a specific group of people. It doesnt have to be anything life-changing but, ideally it needs to be something that people are willing to pay money to make go away, fix or improve.

So, this chapter is all about identifying your blog’s audience.

Naming your blog: In this section you will read about actions you can take to give your blog a befitting name. Here’s some advice from Ana about naming your blog:

Ideally, you want the name to reflect your blog’s purpose, speak to your target audience and allow you to cover all the topics you’re planning to write about in the future.

Coming up with a tagline: Ana starts this section by reminding us what we should already know about creating a blog if we have read the book up to this point which are:

• Why you want to start your blog
• Whom you want to help with your blog
• Your blog niche and main topics of discussion
• What type of content you want to publish
• What you’re going to name it

Here she writes about how to come up with a short mission statement which she calls a tagline. According to her:

To help tie everything together and give you a sense of direction, you need to come up with a short mission statement, also known as a tagline. These are used to explain what your blog is all about and help your target audience connect with you straight away.

She shares her tagline with us which she recently changed from ‘Empowering women to build digital empires‘ to ‘Helping bloggers increase their traffic and income‘. She did this to make it clearer and to better describe what she provides for her audience.

PART 2 – CHAPTER 2: SETTING UP YOUR WEBSITE

This part of the book concentrates on the more technical aspects of setting up a website for the blog. At the start Ana advises us not to build our blog on a free platform. With that out of the way she concentrates on showing us how to:

• buy blog hosting
• set up a wordpress blog
• get advanced wordpress help
• create blog pages, posts and content

She also shares other blogging tips for beginners which cover areas such as:

• using social media
• branding
• using google analytics
• starting an email list

PART 3: CHAPTER 3: HOW TO MAKE MONEY BLOGGING

The first two parts focused on defining a blog vision, identifying an audience and building the blog website. In this part Ana focuses on how to make money blogging and she covers a number of ways to earn income from a blog which include:

• adverts
• affiliate marketing
• selling digital products
• sponsored posts
• selling services
• selling physical products
• offer print-on demand products
• sell your blog for profit
• host a virtual summit or create a membership
• sell ad space
• become a ghorst writer for other bloggers or publications
• sell on Amazon FBA

The last part of the book before the conclusion focuses on how to form a blog monetization strategy. I have written more on this below as my key lesson from the book.

This is a book that gives you a good overview of how to start a blog as an income source. It is particularly good for those who want to start a blog and at the same time it has some lessons for existing bloggers too.

Following are my key lesson from the book on how to create a blog monetization strategy. I have summarized the lesson as a series of steps.

1. Have a good knowledge of all the possible ways you can make money through blogging.
2. Choose one monetization method to start with. Ana suggests that if you are just starting out begin with affiliate marketing and creating a digital product.
3. Look at how other successful bloggers in your niche are doing things and learn from them.
4. Don’t be quick to give up, continue working on it. Ana had to work for four months before making her first affiliate sale and it was for $7.
5. Make a clear plan of how much you want to earn and how to earn it.
6. Keep track of everything you earn from your blog.