Video Transcript:

Hi! My name is Jennifer Maker! Maybe you know me, maybe you don't. That's cool! But what you are probably wondering is how I can teach YOU to blog boundlessly. Like, what do I even know and who do I think I am anyway!

So I'd like to share my blogging story with you. It actually starts many years ago.

I've been a travel guide book author and publisher for most of my adult life. But the world of books, especially print books, changed dramatically in the 20+ years I'd been doing it. People get their information in different ways now—we don't rely on books the way we used to. The past decade was a slow decline for my business.

Eventually, I got to the point where my business was no longer able to properly support me and my family, despite my best efforts to turn things around. The bills piled up, payments were missed, and I began to fear I would have to leave my home and move into an apartment. It was bad. I was terrified.

Around the same time, my daughter became a teen and all heck broke loose. Unrelated to my financial situation, she began to experience depression, developed a borderline eating disorder, started having dark thoughts, and well -- let's just say things were really bad for my baby, too. Hormones suck. I realized that retreat and moving out were NOT an option for us. I had to stay in this home to continue to provide a stable environment for my daughter—a lot was changing in her life, but I resolved that her home would not be one of them.

So that left me with two choices—get a good-paying job outside my home or find other, better work to do at home.

I went camping up near Mackinac that month and did a lot of soul searching. This was a crossroads for me, and I also realized an opportunity as well. I thought about what I REALLY enjoyed doing. I still loved writing and sharing information. My love for this had not died over the years, despite the hardships with my business. I realized I wanted to keep doing what I did -- teaching people what I know -- but I wanted to broaden the scope and reach. So I didn't just want to tell people how to plan their travels, I wanted to share EVERYTHING I knew. And I wanted to share it with as many people as possible.

So what's the best way to reach people these days? The Internet. More specifically, blogs. I'd dabbled in making blogs up to this point. I had several hobby blogs that had reached a surprisingly large number of people considering how infrequently I posted on them.

And I had just discovered it was possible to make at least some money blogging. A few days before the camping trip, Google had sent me an auto-payment of $100. I wasn't sure why the heck they were paying me, then I remembered -- a year previous I had put up a Google Adsense ad on one of my hobby blogs (a historical costuming blog), just to see what would happen, and apparently it had generated $100 worth of ads. This really surprised me. And while $100 may not seem like a lot, at the time we were scraping the bottom of the barrel and $100 meant groceries.

So I thought, if I can make $100 on an extremely narrow-topic blog I've posted to maybe once or twice in the past year, what could I make with a blog on a more popular topic that I really put some effort into?

One of those hobby blogs I started was my "mommy blog" at JenuineMom.com. It wasn't anything special—just recipes and crafts. It was filled with my projects that didn't fit anywhere else. Maybe a dozen posts over the years. But when I looked closer at it, I noticed that one of its posts—a list of games and printables for my daughter's Minecraft party—had become popular. I had put some of its images onto Pinterest a year or so prior to this, just for fun. I realized that this blog had potential.

I got home from my camping trip, dusted off my mommy blog, and began blogging in earnest.

I blogged my heart out from October to December of 2016. I gradually narrowed my focus from "all things mom related" to specifically DIY projects and crafts. I began to research ways to monetize blogs, how to improve my blog, and how to expand my reach. My first post went online in late September and I made $7.80 that month. In October I made $34, in November I made $76, and in December I made $108.

Not much, huh? While it was growing each month, it wasn't going to pay my mortgage and I was getting deeper in debt.

So I dug deeper. Were other blogs making more money than this? How long did it take them to get there? What was the potential here?

So I began to learn everything I could, because I know the value of information, education, and training. I enrolled in a blogging course, made blogging my #1 priority (outside of my family, of course), and really and truly learned how to do this thing.

And one year later, I earned $15,317.01 in a single month.

That was September 2017. In February 2018, I made over $20,000 in income. In April 2018, I made over $45,000. And in October 2018, I made over $65,000. By 2019, I was a seven figure blogger. I can now support my family, and even an entire team of amazing people who now help me run a blog and business! 

It continues to grow, because I continue to share my passions with people who get me!

I don't share these numbers to brag. I share this because it's real and it happened.... and I honestly had no idea it was possible to earn this much in one month from a blog back when I started.

I share this solely because I am hoping to inspire you.

Yes, I think I am ahead of the curve. But I think it's because I looked to others who were doing it successfully and followed their advice, even when I thought it was a bit weird or was outside of my comfort zone. I read every article they gave me twice, watched every video carefully, and did EVERY assignment in my blogging course. I listened to those who had come before me, who were so willing to share.

And now... it's my turn to pass on my knowledge. I've learned things along the way outside the scope of my course that I want others to know. I STRONGLY believe in passing on information. I want to help others up, too.

I hope my story inspires you to start your blog and TRULY believe that it's possible to make a living from it. You may not make what I make, and you may not even want or need to ... but you may be really surprised at what you can do ... IF YOU BELIEVE IT IS POSSIBLE.