Congratulations Sumit Bansal : $10k a Month in Passive Income from Blogging and Excel Courses

Definitely an outlier gem. What a dude! And $10k was three years ago! Wonder what it's up to now!

What I want to know is: how did he decide that blogspot couldn't cut it and he needed a paid-for hosted site?

This one is worth the five minutes it'll take you to read it : https://www.starterstory.com/stories/how-i-started-a-profitable-business-helping-millions-of-people-learn-excel

One day, my co-worker mentioned a book called The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau, which is about the stories of people who were making money through their expertise. It also included two stories of people who were making money through their Excel blog and freelance practice. I immediately ordered the book and read it.

Another mistake I made was to not learn about SEO in the initial days. I was lucky that my content worked and I started getting traffic, but I could have done better had I known SEO better.

Since I write all my articles myself, I try to publish 1 article per week. The ideas for these blog posts mostly come from my email list (or through comments on my blog posts).

Last year I read the book - Deep Work by Cal Newport. It has really helped me as I now use this technique on a daily basis. Since a lot of my time is spent on writing tutorials/articles, this helps me a lot.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and my favorite ones are Authority Hacker, The Smart Passive Income my Pat Flynn, Human Proof Design, Problogger, The Recipe for SEO Success show, and Business Wars by Wondery. (Side note : Kate Toon of Recipe for SEO Success also has a Copywriting course. She claims she's made $3m from writing copy)

I also got a chance to be on a few Podcasts - Problogger, Human Proof Design, and Side Hustle School.

The Recipe thing seems to have some worthwhile stuff :

Tune in to learn:

• What it means for your site to be crawled and indexed
• How to find out that your site isn’t getting indexed
• What is a sitemap, what is a robots.txt
• What is crawl budget
• Crawlability vs Indexability: Why Google doesn’t automatically index your site after crawling every page
• Common issues that prevent site pages from being indexed
• Gaston’s recommended tactics to get your site indexed
• How to troubleshoot indexing for a small website
• How large sites differ, and how best to approach indexing
• The difference between LATAM sites and English-speaking western countries (USA/UK/AU)
• Gaston’s go-to tools to get your site indexed

One idea I've been toying with is salting the blog - making it a treasure hunt - to entice readers. Meaning? Can you set up a total bounty of $10 in crypto-currency (say) and distribute it over the blog steganographically so that people really have to pay attention to the content?

https://writeers.com/career/earn-cryptocurrency-by-blogging/