She Quit The 9-to-5 Grind To Become A $500K Blogging Success Working 2 Hours A Day

This story is part of a new series of features on the subject of success, Benzinga Inspire.

If you are interested in personal finance, you may have stumbled upon a story from the Making Sense Of Cents blog once or twice. The mom who started it as a side hustle now travels the world on a sailboat while the site generates close to half a million dollars per year in passive income.

It Makes A Lot Of Cents: In 2011, Michelle Schroeder-Gardner launched her personal finance website and within a few years she was making enough money to quit her full-time job. Now the site generates $40,000 a month and she works just two hours a day, according to a CNBC report. 

In the beginning it was a lot of work, but in recent years, Schroeder-Gardner has worked to make her income stream from the finance blog as passive as possible. Here's how she did it.

When she first got started, she found ways to generate income from more than one source. If you are dependent on one source of income, you can get into trouble quickly if things don't go as planned, she said.

See Also: How To Make Passive Income

She generated passive income from affiliate marketing, banner advertisements and online courses. Some things required more work than others, but as her site grew, she was able to be more selective with how she spent her time. 

"Plan your streams around how much time per month each will require from you. Then you can start creating your dream workweek," Schroeder-Gardner said. 

A weekly or daily newsletter can be another great source of income. Making Sense of Cents has 130,000 people subscribed to its newsletter, which sends users different blog posts from the site based on their interests.

One way to help cut down on the daily time required to work is to automate tasks. She groups similar tasks together and knocks them out at once. Anything that you can automate will help, like social media posts and newsletter emails, she said. 

She can't do it all on her own, though. She's managed to get to the point where she only has to work two hours each day by delegating tasks. 

She hires freelancers for things she is not as knowledgeable about like video editing and graphic design. She also hired a virtual assistant and an editor for the finance blog. 

"The key is to hire people you’ve thoroughly vetted, or those that you already know and trust. My virtual assistant is my sister and my editor is my sister-in-law," Schroeder-Gardner said. 

Read Next: Entrepreneur Makes 175K Per Year Selling T-Shirts He Never Touches And He Works Just 1 Hour A Day

This illustration was generated using artificial intelligence via MidJourney.