Last week I introduced you to the five How I Make Money Blogging challengers. These five bloggers came to me asking How do I start a blog and are letting me publicly document their progress as they follow the action plan in my new eBook, How I Make Money Blogging: The Beginner’s Guide to Building a Money-Making Blog. This is a sort of build website from scratch series. Today we are documenting their starting statistics so we can have something to base progress on in the future. 🙂

How I Make Money Blogging Challengers

Here are the starting stats based on the results from for the five HIMMB Challengers that will be chronicling their journeys for the next few months at least!

Weird About Money

Weird About Money is owned and ran by Brett.

Stage of Blog before HIMMB:

Brett had not started blogging yet. He said that he had been interested in blogging for sometime, but hadn’t found that “one thing” to finally get him started yet. He had tried to make money with apps with some success.

Starting Stats:

Page Rank – 0

Moz Rank – 0

Domain Authority – 1

Page Authority – 1

External Links – 0

Total Links – 0

The Budget Professional

The Budget Professional is owned and ran by Wendy.

Stage of Blog before HIMMB:

Wendy had also not started her blog yet. But she was super pumped to get started.

Starting Stats:

Page Rank – 0

Moz Rank – 0

Domain Authority – 1

Page Authority – 1

External Links – 0

Total Links – 0

Contented Momma

Contented Momma is owned and ran by Helen.

Stage of Blog before HIMMB:

Helen had bought the domain already but hadn’t started blogging yet as of the beginning of July 2012.

Starting Stats:

Page Rank – 0

Moz Rank – 2.57

Domain Authority – 10

Page Authority – 22

External Links – 0

Total Links – 10

Motivated Madison

Motivated Madison is owned and ran by Madison (yeah, surprise, surprise, lol).

Stage of Blog before HIMMB:

Madison just started on June 24, 2012. She had a few posts up before joining the challenge at the end of the first week of July 2012.

Starting Stats:

Page Rank – 0

Moz Rank – 0

Domain Authority – 1

Page Authority – 1

External Links – 0

Total Links – 0

Call Me What You Want, Even Cheap

Call Me What You Want Even Cheap is owned and ran by Shondell.

Stage of Blog before HIMMB:

Shondell started on Blogger in September 2011 and switched to WordPress April 23, 2012. She was already posting about 3 times a week, but she wanted to dig in and grow faster.

Starting Stats:

Page Rank – 0

Moz Rank – 4.27

Domain Authority – 23

Page Authority – 33

External Links – 9

Total Links – 158

Questions So Far

From Shondell:

How do I go about reaching out to advertisers to advertise on my site and earn extra money online? I am only taking advantage of Adsense, and your affiliate ebook program right now. What do you think my chances are of getting some advertisers with my stats?

My Reply:

You may be receiving a few interested emails already, right? You’ll get even more when your Moz Rank hits 4.5 or more and/or your Domain authority hits 35 or more.

Basically, when you start receiving a ton of emails from commercial sites about “guest posting for free”, you will know that you are getting tasty for real advertisers too. 🙂

And you will want to look into affiliate advertising like Commission Junction and Flex Offers once you start receiving 10,000 visitors or more a month.

From Helen:

So could I have somehow shut off my RSS? Every other time I posted it showed up in my google reader right away. Today’s post has not. Also how to I find products to promote.

My Reply:

I asked if she installed any new plugins, but she hadn’t. So I suggested a test post. I know there has to be a better way to check though, can any of you give her some solid pointers? As far as products go I would recommend looking at the best dropshipping products so you at least save money on shopping the items yourself.

Stay Tuned

Please remember to stay tuned so you can watch as these bloggers move forward. And don’t forget you can also create your own website! I am really excited to see what happens! Hopefully we can all learn something from each other along the way too. 🙂

And because I am human, here’s another mention my eBook in case you would like to dive in too – How I Make Money Blogging. It covers everything you need to know about how to make money with a blog for beginners and more. If after reading it you feel like there could have been more please email me your questions.

Any advice for the challengers? Any idea how Helen can make sure her RSS feed is working?