Michelle Schroeder-Gardner – Blogger and Online Course Creator

How does Michelle make money online?

Michelle Schroeder-Gardner is an American blogger who regularly reports monthly earnings of $100,000 or more. She started her blog – Making Sense of Cents – in 2011 at the age of 22, and has since received numerous awards and recognitions for her work.

She mainly earns money from affiliate marketing and sales of her own online courses.

How much money does Michelle make?

Michelle publishes regular income reports on her blog – until Dec 2018 here and more recent here – and has reported significant earnings over the years:

As you can see there, Michelle reported earning more than $1.5 million in both 2017 and 2018.

Since 2016, she has reported earning approximately $50,000 each month from affiliate marketing alone, and often much more…

In February 2019, Michelle reported earning more than $1.1 million in 2.5 years from the sale of her online course about affiliate marketing (reviewed here).

How did Michelle get started?

I wrote a more about this in my review of Michelle’s course, but here’s the short version:

• Michelle graduated university in her early 20’s back in 2012, with about $38,000 worth of student loan debt.
• She started her blog in August 2011 and within 18 months was reporting income of about $6000/month, mainly from freelance work (writing, virtual assistant, etc.)
• October 2013: Michelle quit her day job as a financial analyst and earned $10,442 from “managing other bloggers’ websites, my blogs – direct advertising & Adsense,” $760 from “staff writing,” and another $400 from affiliate marketing.
• Michelle was getting about 100,000 visitors to her blog each month before she really started taking affiliate marketing seriously. In March 2015 she reported affiliate income of $5910 for the month and $17,051 income overall.
• July 2015: Michelle earned $25,138 total and $14,110 as an affiliate. Bluehost was noted as the “main source” of affiliate income. I believe this was the first month that more than half of Michelle’s income came from affiliate marketing.
• July 2016: Michelle earned another $47k from affiliates and $50k from the launch of her new course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing (reviewed here).

So Michelle basically started her blog to document her journey climbing out of debt and earning money online.

She built a pretty big audience doing that, then started monetizing that audience with affiliate marketing, and later by creating and selling her own online courses.

What type of online business does Michelle have?

Michelle runs a multifaceted online business. 

According to our framework it can be broken down like this:

• Freelance (Level 2)
  This was how Michelle first started earning good money online, often more than $10k/month doing freelance writing and virtual assistant gigs.
• Referral (Level 3)
  Michelle has earned quite a lot of money via affiliate marketing.
• Authority (Level 4)
  Michelle has built a big following through her website, email list, and several social media platforms. This has become the core of her business. As an Authority, she now has many monetization options.
• Digital Product (Level 4)
  Michelle started creating and selling her own online courses in 2016.

Follow the links above for more info and examples for each type of business.