Are you thinking of making some extra cash through a side hustle? Or maybe you’re good at something and have the potential to educate the world about it. Either way, blogging could be precisely what you’re looking for. It could be a good hobby that pays as well.
But how fruitful is it? Some might be of the opinion that slaving away at the keyboard is not the best way to earn cash. Others might begin and give up too soon, but it could pay off in the end with the right amount of effort and consistency.
Before getting into the blogging business, every new blogger has one question in their mind, “How much money do bloggers make?”
How Much Money Can You Make Blogging?
The disbelief when people realize that you can make money online is mildly understandable. Yet it is possible, to the extent of earning a six to seven figure income per year. So the question is, how to become a blogger and get paid? Additionally, is the income even worth the time and effort one would put into creating the content?
Bloggers tend to earn from $0 to roughly $100,000 a month. Of course, it all depends on how consistent one is and how much traffic you can build. Most individuals treat blogging as a hobby and do it for fun, some have made actual cash off of it. An example is Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, who, according to CNBC, has managed to earn over 100,000 per month through blogging.
Many bloggers start with high hopes and expect quick cash to start flowing, but that isn’t the case. Once they find no immediate revenue, they throw in the towel and move to so-called real jobs.
Blogging is about commitment and strategic planning of content to make the most of it. If you get the hang of it, revenue will come naturally.
How do Blogs Make Money?
So, how to make sure you won’t call it quits after the first few blogs? For that, you need to understand how blogging works. What key factors influence the rate and amount of income our blog generates. Here are a few factors that you should bring into consideration before you try your hand at it.
More Traffic = More Revenue.
The blogging revenue depends largely on the number of views your blog gets per day. Each page view can pay you from $0.01 to $0.10. This would mean 1000 views in a month could generate an income ranging from$10 to $100 a month. You can find out how much your website could earn with an ad revenue calculator.
The relationship between traffic on your page and the income generated is a direct one. But how do you increase your views organically? Well, it all comes down to the content you produce.
If you regularly update your blog, and the information you put up is genuine and trustworthy, you’ll easily build your market.
Email Lists are Your Most Important Asset
Email lists are a top revenue generator when it comes to blogging. Your email list comprises your regular followers. People who have read your blogs over time and found them useful or informative.
The only way to build a vast email list or at least a consistent, loyal one is to provide quality content. If you put up content just for the sake of filling up your page with unchecked information, it has an impact on your relationship with the followers. Hence properly sourced original and creative content is the key to a modest email list.
This audience will provide you from $1 to $3 a month per subscriber. This could bring you up to $30,000 if you manage to bag around 10,000 subscribers.
Include Affiliate Links in Your Content
The way affiliate links work pretty simply. It can be an optimum way to increase the earnings from your regular blog posts. In affiliate marketing, the blogger advertises a certain product to the audience—the marketing strategy functions on the trust the readers have in the blogger.
When a recommendation is made, an affiliate link to the product is provided in the post. Once readers click on it and buy the product, the blogger will automatically be paid a referral fee.
The significance of a good relationship with the readers needs to be acknowledged here. If the reader doesn’t trust your recommendation, your affiliate links will not be as useful.
Monetize with CPC or CPM Ads
Top money-making blogs utilize the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) to their advantage. Most blogs that have good traffic get approached by companies to a banner display ad on their blog. The CPM is decided by the company that offers you the banner ad.
So you can easily earn by just posting a banner on your page. For example, a franchise offers you $30 CPM for an ad. If your page has 1000,000 visits in a month, you could easily be earning $30,000 in advertisements on your first page. The first page allows a maximum of 3 banner display ads, making you eligible to earn $90,000.
Another monetization technique could be signing up for a CPC ad network that would pay you for various keywords depending upon their value.
Sell Digital Products
Suppose you have ideas and skills but lack the proper funding to start the business, you should consider selling digital products. The convenience and lack of initial investment are the charms of this type of business.
Monetize your blog by advertising your products. The digital world is filled with an array of products that could be sold.
A few things that you could sell to enlist your blog amongst the most profitable blogs may include:
- Ebooks: You could sell informative ebooks according to the type of content you create.
- Photography: If you’ve got a camera or even your phone can generate a good income this way
- Worksheets: Budgeting, management, and parenting worksheets are innovative products to sell on your blog
- Online courses: Sell courses on any area of your expertise or any skills you think you can teach your loyal readers
- Email courses
Sell Memberships
People tend to get attracted to exclusivity. If you have a loyal fanbase that genuinely gobbles up your content, you are highly eligible to use this strategy to monetize your blog.
You could create separate members-only content that would require a paid subscription.
How would this be different from your regular blog? You could add more detailed information and use videos or other visual aids to make much better quality content.
The people who enjoy your content and want to learn more will buy memberships hence earning you extra cash.
Sell Private Ads
An easy way to make revenue is to sell private advertisements on your website. In most cases, the company that wants to put the ad on a website will do all the manual labor, and you can put up a commission. The commission can be a percentage of the revenues generated, but the company takes up large amounts as their fee.
This can be avoided by directly advertising to clients, saving you the extra payment, and doubling your own pay.
Use it as a Content Marketing Tool for Your Business
You can use your blog to make money for your business. This could be a strategy for self-marketing. Your business could channel more customers through your blog and the market you’ve built through the audience.
Use it to Build Your Credibility
The type of content you produce is one way of proving the legitimacy of our opinion. The other is through the products you advertise. If your readers use the products you recommend or click on your affiliate links only to get substandard services or products. They would lose their trust in your content as well.
Hence advertise the right products to increase your audience and also reinforce your credibility
15 Ways to Earn Money with your Blog
Here are 15 definite ways to make money from your blogs:
1. Google Adsense
Google Adsense makes it possible for bloggers to utilize its Google Display network to run advertisements on their websites. However, Google Adsense doesn’t pay much. Therefore, it is a good option for beginner bloggers. Once you get the hang of it, you can shift to better software to run ads.
With Adsense, you can earn up to $50 even at high traffic rates, such as 100,000 views a month.
2. Advertising/Publisher Networks
Publisher networks are your second step towards monetizing your blog after using Adsense. These networks work to manage and coordinate the advertisements displayed on your website. They make sure that you are choosing the best options to make the most revenue from advertising.
They will take up to 40% of the revenue generated, but they are still better than Adsense. You can google these networks and find the ones that suit you best. You could even look for specific ones that are exclusive to your niche, making the advertisement more attractive and increasing the income.
You could easily make up to $20,000 per month just by advertising.
3. Affiliate Ads
Affiliate Ads work on the concept of a symbiotic relationship between the blogger and the franchise that wants to put up the advertisement.
You, as a blogger, might get approached by a company that needs you to advertise a product. You will conduct this by providing affiliate links on your website. Each person that uses these affiliate links to subscribe to the product will become a source for your affiliation fee.
Amazon Affiliate Ads
The good thing about Amazon affiliate advertisements is the vastness of the platform itself. You have a variety of products to link on your website, and you can even do so for multiple products.
This increases the chances of people buying through the links.
Another factor is the price of the products you’re selling. If you link more expensive ones, the commission you receive will automatically increase.
Hence advertising electronics and cars is an optimum way to attain modest cash through affiliate links.
4. Sponsored Content
Once you build up good traffic on your blog, you can expect a huge flow of offers from various sources to put their posts up on your website. The amount you can expect to get offered in this case may range from $50 to a hefty $1000.
This is a big amount for such a simple action. But you need to make sure you don’t get carried away and post too much sponsored content.
The policies Google has for paid content are a little strict. Your blog could be at risk of getting blacklisted in case google takes notice of excessive paid content.
Another downside to this seemingly easy money scheme is the type of content these posts may contain. It might not be up to the mark and contain illegitimate information and links. This will directly influence your credibility and may cause a loss of followers.
5. Direct Display Ad Buys
Banner display ads could be another way to get income from your blog. You could get offers from companies, or you could reach out to specific companies that you think align with the type of content you produce and strike a deal.
By offering to display the advertisement on each page of your website, you could land a promising offer and guaranteed income from ad revenue of around $200 to $2000 on a monthly basis.
6. Social Media Promotion
If you’ve got influence through your blog and have been in the field long enough for people to recognize your name, get ready to be paid anywhere around $500 to $3000 just to post on social media!
All it would take would be a few tweets or an Instagram post, and you’ll be getting paid for typing a few words on your keyboard. Isn’t that amazing?
This does take time since you need to be an expert in your niche, and you also need a large fanbase not just on your blog but also on your social media platforms.
7. Paid Social Media Content Promotion
Getting paid through social media content promotion works when you purchase Facebook or any other social platform traffic for a few pennies or dollars.
This traffic ultimately uses your affiliate links to buy products and ultimately leads to a good income.
Although the method requires investing some money, eventually, a good combination of investment and revenue can help you attain even up to $40,000 in profits per month.
8. Courses
If you have enough knowledge and are good at putting it together in a systematic way to help people learn useful skills or get informed, then look into building a course for your website.
Courses tend to be extremely successful and can even get harder to manage with the number of people signing up for them.
But the income they can generate is tremendous. In some cases, you could get up to a seven-figure income if your course gets taken up.
The key factors to keep in consideration include the usefulness of the course you are offering and the market where you are advertising. If there is a competition, you’ll have to make your content different, unique, and more profitable than your competitors.
9. Consulting with Companies
Further down the line in your blogging career, you might get offers by website development companies or app developers to provide feedback on their products.
This would be in case you prove your expertise through the content you produce and have enough expertise in the required department.
Another way to get consultation opportunities would be through Linkedin, and the cash you could make could range anywhere from $500 to $15000 per gig.
10. Brand Partnerships
Getting approached by renowned brands once you get enough traffic and loyal followers is nothing new. In fact, it should be expected. The brands will most probably offer you to work together, and in this case, you’ll need to have a few packages in mind to be able to help them reach the audience goals required.
11. Podcast Sponsorships
Podcasts are a fairly uncommon method of generating revenue, and even though they would probably provide an income of around $100 to $500 for each episode, the option shouldn’t be completely ruled out.
A good method to increase revenue is by adding ads at the start as well as the end of the podcast.
12. Private 1 on 1 Coaching
Coaching is a great way to get cash online. Especially if you already have an audience that is waiting to gain more knowledge from you based on the optimum content you produce.
You could easily gain students from a single offer on your blog offering classes.
One-on-one tutoring is fairly easy and helps you focus on one student and a single topic. It also helps you polish your own knowledge on a specific topic. It is also a great way to connect with your audience personally and on a one-on-one basis.
13. Conference Speaking
If you get far enough in your blogging career and take it more seriously, you could end up speaking in conferences on your particular niche or even publish a book or two.
Conference speaking is a prestigious opportunity and a great way to earn quick cash as well.
14. Book Deal
Bloggers, due to the nature of their work, get very good at creative writing. They can simply explain complex phenomena in simple words and hence have a good chance at becoming published authors.
Publishing companies are on the lookout for writers, and the best source is bloggers.
15. Freelance Writing Opportunities
Once you start blogging, content writing comes easy to you. Hence it opens the doors of opportunity for freelance writing on various topics. This creates a side hustle from an already present side hustle.
How to Monetize Your Blog the Right Way
Here’s how you can monetize your blogs the right way to make sure you don’t fail in your blogging career.
1. Plan Your Future Blog Monetization Timeline
You should take baby steps to ensure a steady long-term blog income. If you just begin a blog and start flooding it with ads, you won’t get too far.
Since the readers you’ll attract won’t last long due to the excessive ads and lack of valuable information.
2. Master Your Blog’s Sales Funnel
A beginner needs to focus on landing a high price consultation offer at the beginning of their blog, contrary to the typical approach of most bloggers.
Your blog’s sales funnel is based on five steps to lead to a successful end goal in your career.
These steps include:
- Allowing a reader to read optimum content providing a high-end offer.
- You get an email list addition, and they get a one-page freebie deal
- An offer of a lower price to build a loyal audience
- A welcome email to introduce yourself and set up a meeting
- Landing a B2B client at the end
3. Master Your High-End Consulting Offer
A high-end consultation offer is the end goal of a blogger. Consider yourself as a business owner as soon as you make a blog.
For this, your website should be based on keywords and content that would eventually lead to your consultation offer, which should ideally have an end goal of $3000+ in sales to the clients you want to cater to.
4. Use The Magic Email Opt-In Formula
To construct a sales funnel, you’ll need two important components:
- An email marketing software
- on-site email opt-in tool
The magic formula mentioned above is comprised of the following:
ConvertKit + OptinMonster
5. Aggressively Focus on Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing strategizes through search intent mediation. The formula is simple, providing transactional information in your blogs and redirecting through affiliate links.
You need to act as a catalyst to increase purchases through your links ad not just provide mindless information in your blogs.
How Much Money Can You Make Blogging?
So, how much money do bloggers make?
This depends on the niche of your content and how consistently you produce it. If your readers come back and find a dead website, you can’t expect ad revenue or page views.
Bloggers, on average, may earn from $0 to a six-figure income.
Although the higher income isn’t as common among most content creators, on average, $500 to $2000 can be expected by an average blogger.
Key Takeaways
Blogging is a good source of side income, and if one stays consistent in their blogging career, eventually, a modest income can be expected. It’s important to create quality content and build followers organically in the field; otherwise, an early crash and burn are inevitable.
