Ed Latimore runs a fitness and personal development blog and is a successful author and twitter personality. Read our full case study with Ed below.
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Ed Latimore | Blogger Vitals
Website: edlatimore.com
Email List Size: 15k
Alexa Blog Ranking: 402,089
Instagram Following: 17.6K
Twitter Following: 119K
Ed Latimore’s Blogging Case Study
Ed Latimore is not a man that can easily be summed up in a sentence or two. As he aptly puts it “I take the things I learned the hard way and break them down so you can learn them the easy way”.
Former professional level boxer, military man, physics major & tutor, chess player and of course – successful blogger, Ed certainly has a lot to write about.
“I’m quite literally taking everything I learned, and just putting words to it” Ed says, whether; it’s growing up in public housing, getting sober, quitting porn, or ‘what I learned living next to crack dealers’. Ed’s not afraid to write about it, no nonsense and straight to the point.
Ed’s blog posts are often deeply personal and draw on his unconventional 30 or so years of life on this planet. If you could draw a clear theme, Ed writes for people who want to take control of their lives, get focus and better themselves. And while Ed’s articles are deep and thoughtful, they are absolutely readable and easy to digest.
How Ed Makes a Living Online
One of our favorite email marketing tools – ConvertKit highlighted Ed’s story in one of their recent creator series. You can watch that here.
Ed Latimore’s Blogging Story
So, how did Ed get into blogging and how did it become his full-time income?
When I ask him this question, Ed smiles and tells me;
“You never really forget your first dollars you make on the internet, man”
“It’s probably 2015, and we went on a cruise to the Dominican Republic. It was on that cruise that I got my first affiliate commission. I made 6 cent, from someone who bought Scott Adams’ book ‘how to fail at anything and still win big”
“I thought, that’s cool, that happened” – this was of course the seed that would eventually germinate into a full-time location independent income.
Like many people who get into the blogging sphere with the aim of monetising a blog, Ed was looking for an additional source of income which was flexible and was able to fit around the various things he had going on.
Going back to college as an adult, teaching physics on the side, Ed wanted a source of income which would allow him to keep up all these things in a way that a traditional job just never could.
This first 6 cent commission was the starting point that paved the way for book releases, courses, and of course plenty of affiliate earnings, to the point where Ed travels wherever he wants and lives a lifestyle just not achievable with a more traditional career.
So, what does it really take to earn a living through your blog?
Ed says; “When people think about making money online, they don’t understand something really basic – when you make money online, all you are is in a sales job”
It just so happens that the internet allows you to sell across time zones, to sell when you’re not present, to sell to anyone, really.
This is a fundamental that Ed keeps coming back to. We live in an age of huge abundance of opportunities online, but there’s a tonne of work required to get to them. Most, frankly aren’t prepared to put in the work.
To succeed in this game, you just have to put in the hard work – learning about SEO, building and nurturing your list, writing great posts again and again. But, if you do this and you stick at it – the opportunity is there.
Ed says, when you come to this realisation, you see that the only way to do this is to create great content.
While these ideas may sound obvious to some, for others, this simple explanation is exactly what they need to get started.
So, content. How do you write great content?
Writing is about communication, “In some ways I don’t even think I’m a good writer, in the traditional sense” says Ed, “I just have this ability to communicate”.
A lot of the classical formalities of writing didn’t come naturally to Ed, he just put in the time to learn them.
But what he has always had is the ability to make complex ideas simple, if you can break things down for people so that they can understand, if you make things relevant to people – that’s half the battle.
That said, in many ways, while you can polish the edges, you can’t teach the most fundamental thing about writing, Ed believes – you need something to write about, you need life experience, something to say.
Often Overlooked – Own your own infrastructure.
Ed has 111k followers on Twitter. That’s cool, he says, but not half as good as owning a site which gets x visits a month. – Check out our guide to starting your own blog, here.
When you value freedom of speech, you need to own your own infrastructure, you need to own the site, pay for the hosting, own the list.
When you’re operating on another platform, you’re subject to their rules and those rules can change.
“For me, this isn’t the best part of blogging, but it’s a perk”, Ed says, no matter what happens, you have your site and you control it, hands down.
The most important thing about owning your own site: it’s working without you, social media is great – but you have to keep it updated, keep things fresh.
Once you start pulling in traffic on your blog posts, content that you wrote years ago keeps bringing new visitors to you, and new visitors mean more income.
In the blogging world, you invest time in great content and the dividends will come over time. On social media, it’s about the constant grind, constant updates.
On that note.. onto SEO
Content is the art, what about the science?
Ed’s article, “Review of the Wim Hof Method: does it work?” tranks higher for many keywords than Wim Hof’s site itself. The traffic that Ed gets across his site and for such a variety of different themes and keywords is impressive.
But, the truth is, Ed just learned on the job.
Teaching himself AH Refs (read our seo guide here [coming soon]) learning about backlinks and being prepared to re-write and clean up past articles and posts as new information and new best practices come to light, has meant that Ed has stayed relevant and ranked highly, consistently.
While a lot of people complain about the recent changes to the Google search algorithm, Ed doesn’t. When you strip it back to its simplest form, to win the SEO game you need to create great content, pure and simple.
The algorithm will teach you to be a better writer, to write cleaner, simpler, to communicate better.
See this as an opportunity, not an obstacle. We couldn’t agree more.
Closing advice – where is the opportunity for bloggers starting today?
“What people don’t realise is that on the internet space, it’s who you you know, not what you know – just as much if not more than in the normal world”
If you want to start blogging and be successful from scratch today, you need three things:
- Write good content, and you want some diverse experiences to write about.
- Keep making connections – message people with bigger sites than you.
- Stay focused and keep posting content.
If you actually do these things, it is difficult to fail.
Don’t expect blogging to bring you an income overnight and don’t quit your day job anytime soon.
That said, for those who are willing to put in the work; learn how to write, grasp the science of SEO, network and are committed, it will pay off in the end, bigtime.
Ed Latimore’s Tedx Talk
Ed has done an official Tedx Talk at TEDxLakeTravisHigh. You can watch the video below (be aware, there are some audio issues with the recording).
