How I Made $5000 in The First Month With a Brand New Blog

Making Money Online – With Your Blog

Another video post today along with an enhanced video transcript (make sure to read). Today I cover the exact strategy I used in March 2009 to generate $5000 in my first month with this blog in.

I am enjoying creating these videos. I was just looking at some videos I made a year or so ago. Wow, I have come a long way in the last 12 / 18 months – from my original stumbling and nervousness.

Using the whiteboard as an aid has been a huge help to me – I strongly recommend it to anyone who is just starting making videos or even if you are an established YouTuber.

Some People Don’t Want To Get It

But before I go on I wanted to go back to a post I did a little while ago called Are You Too Clever For Success?. Readers may remember how some ‘sad people’ seem to only be able to feel good about themselves by putting other people down and I like most bloggers get the occasional negative and even offensive email.

These sort of comments ‘amuse’ me for want of a better word and usually I just delete them but I know from the feedback that some of you have sent me that it is an issue – so I just thought I would highlight that even pro-bloggers like me get negative comments such as this one about my last video.

Amusing Blog Comments

This person really doesn’t like me. I did think to myself could I be missing something and is this sincere feedback but considering they provided a false email and web address I must assume it is not.

The first part of their comment is somewhat valid – because British people pronounce NICHE differently to American people and in my videos I used the American pronunciation – mainly because most of my readers are outside the UK. So this commenter was really just showing their ignorance on this point.

However the remainder of their comment was a lot more personal. I have no issue with people taking a personal dislike to my mannerisms, I think that is a common enough thing – not everyone relates to everyone but I subscribe to my Irish Grandmothers view that if you cannot say something good about someone then say nothing at all.

I have a friend of mine who says:

If you are not getting up someones nose, you are not trying hard enough

Not sure I 100% agree, but you get the point. Some people (often so called well meaning people) will always try to steal your dreams – accept that, get over it and move on. I also think the more successful you become the more comments like this you receive.

By the way – note I said ‘negative email’ — this is quite different from a critical email that is genuinely sent from the heart in an effort to help / assist.

There is a lot of information in this video and the transcript includes even more. I have several more videos planned but you can help me by Contacting Me with suggestions for future video topics or commenting below.

Also because of the Title of this video “How I Made $5000 in The First Month With a Brand New Blog” I would just draw you attention to my Earnings Disclaimer. It is a bit sad that we have to do this but my Lawyer says it is best to always point out that just because a dyslexic college drop out like me did it – it doesn’t mean other people can do it! Duh!

Finally I encourage you to check out the IncomeDiary YouTube Channel. You can also Friend me and Subscribe to my channel there.

To All Our Successes

Michael Dunlop

PS: If you enjoyed the video you will also enjoy:

The True Story Of My Overnight Success
AND
My Personal Story, How I Created

Video Transcript – with additional links and resources

Today I want to talk to you about something really cool – how I made $5,000 in my first month (March 2009) with

Now the concept behind it is really simple, and something you can all do. I started with an idea. People wanted to know how I was doing what I was doing with RetireAt21.com. They wanted to know how I got it up, how I was making money, how I was getting traffic and everything.

I listened to them, I provided the solution, and pretty much monetized it, which is what I’m going to teach you here.

The first step is taking action.

You need to do something about it, you’ve got to get the site up. Everyone has these ideas, but many just don’t act. So the first thing I did was, once I got the blog up, I bought a theme from ThemeForest.net, and I uploaded it.

After that, I built momentum, which is hugely important. Because a lot of people don’t build momentum. By the way, I should stop for a second and tell you that I did everything I needed in pretty much three or four days, so don’t think I had this huge planned launch.

I was very busy with my Twitter accounts.

At that time I was adding up to a thousand people to each account per day. I had one for my Michael Dunlop, I had for Retire at 21, I had one for Income Diary.

I was just blitzing it. I was adding as many people from the accounts that I knew I wanted to follow. For example following people in my niche such as pro-blogger John Chow – anyone like that. I got their followers and followed them. If they followed me back – Wicked! If they didn’t, I un-followed them.

And then I start following more people again, regular Tweeting. People came to my profile to see my site, see that I had something coming, and they got excited. I’d Tweet that “I just interviewed this person” or “I just put up this top list” or “Watch out for this….” etc.

Once I did that, obviously I had to get the content. I was doing interviews and I was doing top lists.

TOP TIP: Interview people who have a significant following.

So for example, I interviewed John Chow. John has a great following. If you do a good interview, he’s likely to Tweet about it – bringing you more followers in return.

I also interviewed Joel Comm. He’s got a huge following and he Tweeted it out. That got me even more followers. That’s the huge benefit of social media such as Twitter and Facebook – you can get to a huge audience really quickly. It never has been easier to become an Online Celebrity or Authority in your Niche than it is right now.

So after that I did some top lists with TaskUs.com. I asked them to do a top list on the top 30 bloggers, the top 30 webmasters, the top 30 anything. Whatever came to my mind, they did for me. We got those up. And pretty much after that I started building my eCourse.

Here’s what I did different than everyone else.

A lot of people say: “Hey, check out my free report or Check out my free ebook.”

Great ideas, but I wanted to offer something different and better to get them to join my list. I also needed to make sure people really took action. I didn’t want to just get them on my list, I wanted them to take action.

So what I did is offer a seven day free eCourse . An eCourse that frankly was better than some products people were paying good money for.

I got myself an AWeber Email Marketing account and set up my eCourse to be delivered via an autoresponder.

Once people opted in / joined my eCourse the auto-responder would start sending them an email every day for a week. The course was very much step by step – “Day One, installing your blog” – “Day Two, adding a theme, doing some changes,” – Day Three: monetizing” etc

Every day subscribers would look forward to the next addition. I did this over a year ago, and even today I get emails from people saying, “Hey, Michael, is there any chance I can get Day Two now, rather than wait to tomorrow?” Subscribers took action straightaway. Because I was like, “Look, take action on this today, and then you’ll be ready to do tomorrow’s assignment tomorrow.”

An Important Point

When I started my eCourse I did not have all 7 days ready – indeed any of you who were taking my Blogging eCourse a year or so ago will know that the ‘daily additions’ did not come Daily to start with. The point here and one I think that trips up a lot of well meaning people is that I did not wait for PERFECTION before getting started. So what, the course was not finished – but the most important thing was to get started. Someone told me recently that this is called the “Good enough is good enough principle‘ or the ‘Ready, Fire, Aim‘ principle. I somewhat embarrassingly have to admit this is usually the way I do things.

Of course if it is a physical product and people are paying money for it you have to deliver but in my case and in most start up bloggers cases the most important thing is to get started – TAKE ACTION (My first point in the video)

By the way – working with AWeber is probably one of my best business investments ever. AWeber makes life easy for anyone who wants to manage an email list.

When people opted in for the eCourse on of the first things they saw was this page:

http://www.incomediary.com/thankyou.html – which included links to Website Hosting Comparisons.

People immediately got a chance to take action on their Dream of being a Blogger.

If you visit my Thank You Page you will see I am promoting domain registration, website hosting and blog themes. But you can’t just assume people are going to take your word on these suggestions – which is why I include comparisons – to allow my subscribers a chance to ‘shop around’. Of course I make a clear recommendation but there are other options also.

Fortunately just about every supplier of domains, hosting and blog themes have an affiliate program – so even if the subscriber does not go with my recommendation there is a good chance I will earn a commission.

Now getting people on the list is one of the most important things. So what I did was I actually got a separate page. I made a page in WordPress and I called it “Creating a Profitable Blog” (A rather long Squeeze Page is what I would call it)

This was an Alternative Optin Page for the eCourse – but the difference here was that visitors got a chance to take action – buy domains, hosting themes etc – before they even signed up for the eCourse.

I also emailed all my other lists (eg RetireAt21 list) about this page. I would explain that “You may have to spend some money if you want to make some money” – not a lot of money just a little if you really wanted to be serious about blogging. (Less than $100). I included special offers on domain names and offers on hosting such as get your first months hosting for 1 cent and coupon codes. (People love coupon codes)

This worked amazingly well.

Pretty much one of the reasons it worked so well was because I showed my readers exactly what I’m doing. I was not asking them to do anything that I had not done myself.

Another huge benefit of having a squeeze page, or a separate page on WordPress, is people have a link they can share with friends if they wish to recommend your eCourse. It is great when people Tweet things like “Check Out Michael Dunlop’s Free Blooging eCourse” and link to this page.

I also mentioned this page in my blog posts – for example if I did a Top 30 Bloggers list I would finish it with a link says:

“Follow in their footsteps, check out my free course”

Then of course, once they’ve opted in, there’s a thank you page saying, “Thank you for joining. Make sure you check your email. Oh, by the way, check these products out.”

Then there is the all important NO LEAKAGE RULE.

A lot of bloggers have a blog roll – that links out to other blogs. We don’t have that on

Or they have links to the Top Commenters in the sidebar – again not available on

Links like this represent Leakage. If I compare my two biggest sites – Retireat21.com and – Retireat21.com has much more leakage with advertisers etc but actually produces much less income for me despite having 3 times the traffic.

People get distracted – click on ‘competitors’ links and you lose an opportunity to earn commission. Yes, of course it is nice to have regular advertisers and it is a lazy way to make money but it is not really the best way to make money and as I have proved with the less LEAKAGE the more you earn.

Income Diary outperforms hugely, and Retire at 21 has like three times the traffic.

The reason there is LEAKAGE with most blogs is because people get distracted. If you have advertisers – they will naturally check them out. That is Your ‘competition’ that they’re going to. They will also check out your blog roll. Yet again, mostly ‘competition’, you are directing them to. And then again top commenters are often your competition.

So you don’t really want to have all that stuff because they’re going to get distracted and start going in different directions. For the money that you get, it’s not worth it. So I got rid of that and I made sure that they either went to my opt-in page, or if they didn’t, then they left the site. That was all I wanted.

I have to admit, I wasn’t the best blogger when I started this, and for me to create all this with just a few days of work to start with is quite amazing.

I really think anyone could follow in my footsteps and do the exact same thing or better if they would just be prepared to take ACTION

Good luck to everyone – let me have you comments and in particular your suggestions for future videos.

Remember – The Gurus charge for this kind of info. You get if for free as a Subscriber to