Midlife was the question. Moxie Fruit was my answer. “Moxie Fruit began as a personal quest to make sure that I defined my midlife and beyond.” That’s a quote from my Meet Tracy page. I started Moxie Fruit during a creative lull in my career as an author of young adult books and soon became a total convert to the blogging life! I want to show YOU how to start a blog for fun, freedom, and extra money!
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, read the Disclaimer here.
In many ways, having a blog is similar to my author/fiction life in that I get big doses of creativity & freedom, but blogging has a few BIG advantages.
- Writing a blog post is a heck of a lot faster than writing an entire novel!
The gratification of being able to say, “I’m done” comes much quicker as does interaction with the readers. It’s wonderfully gratifying.
In traditional publishing, you can take a year (or years!) to write a book and then it can be a year or longer from when the book sells to a publisher to when it hits the shelves in bookstores. With blogging, I AM THE PUBLISHER! I love being able to write whatever sparks me, or whatever I think will spark midlife women, find some fun pictures, and BOOM! post it whenever I feel like it.
Because I’m the writer, editor, designer, and publisher, the CMG = Chief Moxie Goddess, I have ULTIMATE CREATIVE FREEDOM! (Said in booming genie voice) Moxie Fruit is MY house. In it, I can do and say what I want. I’m high off that creative freedom!
- Frankly, the money and freedom opportunities are better.
Very few authors live solely off of their writing income. Most have day jobs and fit writing into the margins of their lives. It’s incredibly fulfilling and a dream come true for a writer to become traditionally published but…truth here, it’s not incredibly lucrative for most. If you’re a writer, you’ve got to write. Period. It’s who you are and creativity is immensely important. Your stories deserve to be told. Just don’t attach money to those stories or your creativity is likely to suffer under the weight of that demand.
Pssst… (If you are a writer or you long to be and you want to learn all about the business of writing and publishing, get on the waitlist for MOXIE WRITER. I’m also giving away a free course! Moxie Writer will be a one-stop place for you to learn and hone your craft and also help you navigate the bewildering business of publishing.)
Blogging is different. In fact, the more I research how bloggers make their living, the more I realize…
- it’s a doorway to time freedom, creative freedom, and financial freedom.
While I’m not yet able to say that I make a living solely from being a blogger, I believe I’m on my way and I’m having a total blast while doing it! Many people start blogs as passion projects that end up doing so well they’ve been able to quit their day jobs. Bloggers dictate their own schedules, can work from literally anywhere with an internet connection, and connect with their like-minded tribes all over the world.
If the idea of starting a blog has been percolating, I want to help you.
Have you thought about starting a blog about something that you’re passionate about? Do you have a hobby or a skill you’d like to teach? Or, do you want to blog for just the pure fun of it? If so, I’m here to give you a roadmap to get started.
Setting up a blog can seem pretty daunting at first. I’d previously played around with my author site and built its various incarnations myself. (Not bad for someone who’s had ZERO training on building websites, right?!) But a blog is a different animal, especially if you hope to generate any income from it. When I first started out I knew nothing about blogging, how to set one up, or how people monetized their blogs.
I had a vague notion about what affiliate links were (a way for sites to get paid commissions when people click on their affiliate links.) No, you don’t have to be an affiliate for any products to have a blog. If you want to just blog for fun, go for it! It’s a marvelously creative outlet, especially in midlife, when you might find a bit more time on your hands as I have recently with kids graduating and moving on to college. You deserve to have a creation that’s your own if that makes you happy, dear Moxie Lady!
For me, I wanted to supplement my fiction writing income with additional income. Not just wanted…NEEDED. I also wanted the freedom to work remotely, something I’ve been accustomed to as an author who also does freelance work on the side. I love my freedom! I’m unwilling to give it up. Whatever your motivations, I want to give you the Blogging Bible, so to speak, so, at the very least, you can start your blog and get your metaphorical shingle hung and attract other like-minded readers who care about what you care about.
First things first:
What do you love?
Is there something you feel passionate about that you know you could write about on a regular basis without getting bored or running out of topics?
Do you have a skill or hobby that you’d like to teach others about or that you’d love to create a community around so you can all geek out about that cool thing together?
Is there a niche topic that you’ve longed to find but haven’t been able to find online? Can YOU fill that void?
What’s motivating you? What would you use the extra money for? A life goal? A charity? Kids’ college expenses? A spa weekend with your best girlfriends?
For me, the motivation was to keep doing what I love (writing) for an audience I care deeply about (midlife women) and make enough money to live life on my terms (freedom.) Find out what motivates you and use that to fuel you through the process of starting your blog.
After you’ve decided on the topic or theme you’d like to blog about, it’s time to come up with a fun domain name and claim it as yours! The domain is one of the first steps to creating your blog. It’s your “shingle” your “signage” your “storefront.” It will be the name of your blog.
My first step was to search for the availability of my domain name so I went to “>BLUEHOST.
With their very affordable $3.95 a month for their basic hosting plan you get your domain name included for FREE! WordPress hosting is included as well and connects with one easy click. Their customer service is responsive and available 24/7. As soon as you click the “Get Started” tab and choose your plan, you will be directed to a page to either search for the availability of your domain name or use one you already own.
Once I had my domain name and hosting secured, it was time to start building my site. I knew that choice of theme was important and without fail, some of the best-looking sites I visited used a theme called Divi Builder from Elegant Themes. I wanted drag-and-drop capabilities and strong customizing ability and Divi Builder has lived up to both. There are free themes in WordPress and you can absolutely make a beautiful site with them. I just wanted more customization on my site and Divi has worked beautifully for me.
Of course, Elegant Themes has a variety of themes to choose from. You can explore them here:
WordPress has, in my opinion, a steep learning curve but there are TONS of free video and blog tutorials for everything you’ll want to do on your blog. Whether you want to just write and share posts, or have an online store where you sell your own
What I love about Divi are their video tutorials and very responsive customer service. They are quick to answer questions and very helpful. They are in it to help you have the best-looking blog you can have.
If it’s your aim to build a following that you can communicate with when you have special news, a sale of a product, or helpful tips and info related to your topic, you’re going to want to start building an email list. You will notice that I have various “opt-in forms” on my site but they all lead to one amazing place: Convert Kit
In blogger terms, your email is your single biggest asset. The beauty of Covert Kit is that you can automate many of your email responses. I don’t know about you, but I’m a one-woman-show here at Moxie Fruit. I don’t have an assistant (except for when I coerce my fiancé into making pins for me sometimes.) I don’t want to forget to send a welcome email when someone joins my mailing list. That’s why I love using their service. I can write and automate emails and sequences (literally a sequence of events) so that when someone opts into a particular form, a preset email or series of emails shoots out to them. It makes my blogging life so much easier!
You can get a free 14-day trial and test out Convert Kit’s features before committing. Plans vary by the size of your email list so if you’re just starting out, you’d want the basic $29 per month plan. By paying annually, you can cut that down to $24 per month.
There are lots of ways to attract traffic to your blog. Chances are, you’re already using some of them: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. If you can tell everyone about the amazeballs crepes you had for breakfast you can surely shout out your blog! But here’s a tip. That’s not nearly enough. Your followers and friends might not care about scrapbooking, or yak’s milk, or midlife women (ahem) the way you do, so a lot of the people who follow you on those platforms won’t necessarily follow you to your blog.
When I set out to start Moxie Fruit, I thought I’d have to figure out how to create, and worse, pay for expensive Facebooks ads to attract traffic to my blog. Not so! I was neglecting one of the most popular platforms out there, one that I frequented and loved – Pinterest! The beauty of Pinterest is that people are searching for what they’re interested in. That means that if you’re creating and pinning content that’s relevant to your blog, you will be seen by the very people who want to know about it!
But who has time to be on Pinterest all day when they are busy running their blog, working their jobs, grocery shopping, or taking Zumba classes? Not you, am-I-rite!? That’s where Tailwind becomes your best friend.
At its most basic, Tailwind is a Pin scheduling tool. But it does SO MUCH MORE. I’ve been able to attract much more relevant, interested traffic to my blog by automating this task through Tailwind. There’s a free trial, it’s super easy to use, and once set up, you can schedule pins directly from Pinterest! I love it.
Learning the Business of the Blogging:
When I first had my BIG IDEA that was Moxie Fruit (actually Moxie Fruit was born out of COURSE CORRECT the 90-day Life Transformation Course that I created to help midlife women correct their current course and instead, head toward the life they truly want) I had what I thought was a great blog idea but I didn’t know diddly about the business side of the blogging sphere.
How were people doing it for a living?
How did they connect all of the various cogs into a working machine that they could run from anywhere and make great money from?
Many of them creating and selling online courses to people who were interested in what they had to teach. What was the platform for providing that instruction?
In trying to search for these answers, I came across a few incredible resources:
Teachable is like a university where YOU get to be the professor. You name it, someone’s teaching a course on it. I knew I wanted Moxie Fruit to be an online resource for personal development, health, and writing and that I’d need a way to create easy to use, professional courses to share what I have to teach. If you want to do more than blog about a subject and actually TEACH what you know, Teachable is a fantastic platform to use. You can upload text, videos, slides, worksheets, and enable comments and quizzes.
I discovered Alex & Lauren, the co-creators of Create & Go through a Youtube review Alex posted. The review was so approachable and real and transparent about things like how much money they make and business strategies, that I was drawn to investigate how they had created such successful (not one, but TWO) online businesses that regularly make six figures EACH MONTH!
I purchased their PRO BLOGGER BUNDLE.
The bundle includes their four best-selling courses on how to start your blog and make six figures or more blogging from home. In the Pro Blogger Bundle you’ll get the following courses:
Build and Launch Your Blog 
Make Money Blogging for Beginners 
Pinterest Traffic Avalanche 
Six Figure Blogger 
Of course, you can purchase these courses on their own, but the bundle provides all four for a reduced cost and covers everything you’ll need to know to get started on the right foot.
I bought the bundle and learned everything I needed to know about creating and setting up my blog, how to strategize to get traffic to my blog, how to use Pinterest for my traffic, how to best utilize my email
I hope that you’ve found this post useful. If so, please consider sharing it! For more tips on blogging and how to take a “bite out of midlife”, consider signing up for my newsletter.
If blogging for fun, freedom, and the extra income is something you’re considering, I sincerely hope that this post helps you get started. Never let fear, doubt, or procrastination rob you of an extraordinary life! Freedom
I promise you if I can do this, anyone can!
I’d love to hear about YOUR blog so be sure to drop a comment and let us know if you took the plunge and how it’s going!
XO,
Tracy
