{ PREMIER ISSUE 2018 } KHARISMA MAGAZINE
39
Kharisma: At some point, were you able to monetize your blog?
Jessica: Yes, yes, I was. I started to get people to contact me and send me things to review. I was doing sponsored posts. I would charge to have a post on my blog about – gosh, I’ m trying to think about what products I did. There were vitamin supplements, protein shakes I was sent. Something that was really cool – I don’ t know if you know what a Vitamix is?
Kharisma: Yes, yes.
Jessica: Probably, my all-time favourite partnership was being sent a Vitamix. I
had always wanted a Vitamix, but as a 23, 24-year-old, I couldn’ t really justify spending $ 1,200.00 on a blender. I was sent one, and I think they sent me a little bit of money as well to blog about it. That just made my day.
Kharisma: I can imagine.
Jessica: I still have it. I still use it when I’ m in Australia.
Kharisma: Oh, nice.
Jessica: Yeah, so I monetized it that way, and I also released an online group program about health and wellness. I released that, probably, about a year into having the blog. How else did I monetize it? I released that, and I was also an affiliate for other people, so I was selling other people’ s e – books. I would have a badge on my site, so if somebody clicked on it and then purchased, I would receive a percentage of the commission. I did a very, very small amount of one on one health coaching as well until I had a handful of clients, and then I realize very quickly that I didn’ t want to be a health coach, and that wasn’ t a route I wanted to go down.
Kharisma: What did you do to make the change, if you realized at that point you were –“ Okay, I don’ t want to be a health coach.” Were you still employed at this time at your full time job?
Jessica: Yeah, I was still employed at the time. While I was setting up my – while I was working on Live Health Simply, my husband and I also launched another website, which was called Shop Healthy. We still have that today. We’ ve outsourced the management of it, so the day to day running of it, we’ re not involved in. But if you go to shophealthy. com. au, you’ ll see that website as well. Through the blog, we were also getting traffic sent to our online health food store, so that was great. I was at this stage when I was getting a decent amount of traffic to my