Interview With Nikola Roza: Making Money From Freelancing and Affiliate Marketing

Have you made money online?

If not, you are missing out something!

There are several ways to make money online. We talk to all the legit ones, and those which make us money

To put some more light into it, we brought Nikola Roza in our interview Series this time.

I am pretty much sure if you are not making anyone right now, you will be after going through this interview.

Nikola Roza is well known for his Freelance Content writing, apart from that his blog makes him a good income through Affiliate Marketing.

Let’s explore and know, how he does that, and what is another online money-making strategy he uses.

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Learnings from this Blogging Interview?

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Hi Nikola, great to have you on QuestionCage. I am sure our readers will learn a lot from your Online Presence and money-making strategies.

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1. Please tell a few words about yourself and Your Online Journey?

Before I start, I just want to thank you, Navin, for accepting me and my 2c on your awesome Question Cage.

I know and see clearly who my friends are and those peeps can expect great things from me, going forward.

Let’s all grow together!

Now, allow me to introduce myself properly…

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Personal Touch

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Hi folks! My name is Nikola Roza and I blog at nikolaroza.com. I’m from Serbia, a small country in Europe.

I started my blogging journey unsuccessfully in 2015 when my mother fell terminally ill and shortly died, and I had no way of helping her avoid that fate, and later had no way of supporting myself as I never had any “normal” job in Serbia.

Serbia is a poor country, we were always pretty poor as a family and I fell into debt after my mother passed away because I borrowed money left and right in a bid to save her life.

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Failure and Learnings

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I failed then but also decided that there’s no good life for me in Serbia and that it was time for a big change.

The names of that change were blogging, SEO and freelance writing.

And I finally took a plunge and became a full-time freelance writer in 4.12. 2017. It was a big and scary decision for me but it was the right one.

After a long stint of non-stop cold email outreach, I landed my first client and that client was blown away by the quality of my writing (his words, not mine) and he recommended me everywhere and I got more and more work.

I’ve been full time ever since and loving the journey, though recently I’ve started to transition to affiliate marketing. That is my next big goal.

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2. What makes you unique from the other Bloggers?

Money doesn’t inspire me at all. I see money as the means to an end and that end for me is achieving everything else I want in life.

So, I blog to earn money so I can achieve far greater things in life.

I think that makes me somewhat unique because so many bloggers are fascinated and impressed by being numbers and they don’t realize that you only need enough money to get everything else you need and that after that point chasing more money makes you delusional.

If, for example, having 1 million dollars per annum is enough for all your needs and dreams, then having 10 million makes no functional difference.

But even though it makes no difference, you will still have to spend a tonne of time and energy chasing those millions that you don’t’ even need.

I’m very clear on that and I think that many bloggers make a mistake of wanting more money and don’t realize they really wouldn’t be able to spend it if they had it.

So they pursue blogging for the wrong reasons.

That different way of thinking is what makes me unique, but m sure I’m not the only one who thinks like that.

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3. How Nikola Makes most of the Money Online?

Currently, though freelance writing, I average about $2000 per month without killing myself with work.

I’m also getting to the point of making affiliate marketing my number #1 source of income.

Namely, my review of Wealthy Affiliate, which is the product I promote and have promoted for the last two years now, has finally pushed on to the first page for literally everything.

So I have around 200 keywords from the Wealthy Affiliate keyword cluster that all sit comfortably on positions 8-12 in Google.

I’m getting more than 1000 impressions per day from it. But barely any clicks.

And the reason is that only the first five results get clicks.

But I’m almost there and now it’s only a matter of patience before I rank, especially since the first three sites are black hat spammers who Google’s bound to demote eventually.

Anyway, once that page ranks, I expect a minimum of $1000 monthly from it.

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4. How an Online Career Changed Your Life?

It gave me financial freedom and security. And it gave me a chance to control my life and destiny and do what I love for a living.

I’m living a great life now and it wouldn’t be possible without the internet.
So I’m grateful for it.

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5. Freelancing has Enough scope, What do you think?

Yes, that’s true. If you have a skill and it’s something that interests other people too, or they need it somehow in their lives, then you can freelance and monetize it.

So, when we say “freelancing” the first thing that comes to mind is writing, at least to me but there’s actually a market for everything.

Whoever you are and whatever you know how to do really well, I encourage you to look into freelancing.

You will almost definitely find someone who’ll pay you.

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6. Freelance Vs SEO VS Affiliate. Where is more money and Why?

Freelancing comes at the bottom because you’re exchanging time for money that can’t scale.

Doing SEO for others is much more lucrative because you can scale that, especially if you have a team.

Then you can also have multiple clients…

Affiliate marketing has the largest potential but is slowest to get going. And to really strike it rich you need to know what you’re doing and you need to have big traffic.

So we’re talking years of work.

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7. What are your biggest failures and what you have learned from it?

My biggest failure in SEO was that I tried to rank my site on authority alone. Meaning, I created my Wealthy affiliate review, (the article I mentioned before) and I started to funnel authority to it aggressively.

And it worked to a certain point, and then it stopped working, And I failed to realize that in time.

• Google wanted to see I was relevant to the query (by having more content about Wealthy Affiliate and affiliate marketing in general) and since I wasn’t, I couldn’t rank, no matter the links I got.
• It tools me a long time to realize that.
• Had I worked on bulking up my site in parallel to building links, I would’ve been ranking by this point.
• My biggest failure in business is that I haven’t learned about SEO sooner. Literally, the first time I heard the term was in 2015, and I don’t know how I managed to miss it by that point.

I say that because I’m a very techie guy. I’m in love with everything tech related, and SEO seems like it was made especially for me.

I wish I had learned of it sooner, especially pre 2012, when it was so much easier to rank.

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8. Five Tips you would like to share to be a Better Freelancer?

Have some ambition and gut and find a way to turn your freelancing into a system that works on its’ own and generates you passive income

For example, a freelance writer with very good rates could hire a few writers with cheaper rates and then have them write for him while he gets paid and splits the money with his writers.

So he becomes a manager and a true business owner.

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9. Six Strategies You follow To Make Money from Affiliate Marketing?

What I mean is, I look for blogs in my niche that are similar to mine. Then I run them through SEMRush to see if they rank for some money terms.

If they do, great. I see what those pages are and if they fit with my blog’s theme.

If they do, I create a better article and aim to replace that blog with my own.

It’s a strategy that works really well for me, though it’s not a silver bullet.

It’a lot of hard work.

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10. How Do you Promote Your Blog Posts?

I do several different things.

First, I always link to influencers from my blog posts. Then after the post is published, I email them to tell them they got a link.

This really helped me establish a connection with several high profile bloggers. Including you Navin. I still remember you invited me to be a guest on your awesome site and I jumped on the opportunity.

The end result was this post on using HTML sitemaps for SEO.

Second, I schedule my posts in Missinglettr so that the tool promotes them for me.

Third, I build links to my posts. And since I target long tail keywords, it usually takes one link to rank for those.

Sometimes it’s even possible to rank with no backlinks, just with keyword rich internal linking.

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11. Do You Read Books? If YES, recommend a few good ones.

Yeah, I read a lot. I think reading is essential for growth as it fills your mind with ideas.

Here are some of my favorites:

As for the business book, my favorite is “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.

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12. Please, share some of your Social Media Strategies

As a one-man team, I have a lot of my plate as it is and I can’t allow social media to interfere with my content creation and link building.

It’s because I think that creating helpful content and building good links Google likes are two best and biggest levers I can pull right now to grow my business.

And that is not true just for me, but for anybody.

And what about social media marketing?

Well, I like to think like this:

“If I spend more than 15m per day on social media- I’m wasting time.

And if I spend less than 15 minute per day- I’m wasting free traffic.

So, I use Missinglettr, which is a smart social automation tool that handles everything for me, and I simply approve or deny and recreate campaigns.

The rest of my time is spent promoting my friends and sharing their blog posts. I like that it is a nice and easy way for me to genuinely help other bloggers succeed with their blogs.

We’re all in this together and we should stick together.

Because as Napoleon Hill said:

“It is true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed”.

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13. What are Your Future Plans to Make Passive Money?

In the future, I will focus more on earning money directly instead of being an affiliate for merchants.

What I mean is, I will create a paid product, a simple ebook that will revolve around affiliate marketing and freelancing, and I will charge money for it.

Similarly to what Anil Agarwal does with his keyword research e-book. And I will promote my e-book via banners and in-text links on my site.

And in fact, my writing schedule has changed to reflect the topic of my products. Asn now I only write articles that naturally tie into my future product.

I will get it done by the end of the year.

Thank you, Navin, for having me on your site. I will be here to respond to comments as they come through.

Thanks again and stay safe everyone!