Can Blogging Make You Money?
How I got into blogging:
I started taking blogging seriously when I saw a number of bloggers (at least 10) who were making over $100,000 per month.
My basic premise was this: if I can do 5% of the work they did, I should get roughly about $5000 per month from my blog.
I don’t know about you, but an extra $5,000 from just blogging each month is life changing. I went down the rabbit holes of YouTube and Google and looked at income reports from bloggers and I noticed some trends.
The bloggers who have had their blogs for at least 2-3 years all made over $2,000 per month from their blog. The majority of them were making much more than that.
Once I saw that trend, I started my blog and this is my 50th blog post.
Can blogging make you money?
Yes, blogging can make you a lot of money. There are thousands of people who make their full-time income of blogging alone. The factors that will determine how much you make will be the size of your audience and your ability to monetize.
Blogging is not like what you see on Instagram or Pinterest, where people oversimplify it and look like they travel every day. What those “influencers” don’t show you is the hard work behind actually sitting down and writing a lot of content. Once the content is written and ranked on Google, you can make money from the blog in a variety of ways.
Blogging is not magic. You will make income based on how much value you can bring your audience. If you provide your audience with free and helpful content, you will build trust with them and they can turn into your future customers.
This answer sounds like it’s too broad, but it’s the truth. You and I can both start a blog today. If I produce better blogs that help my readers in comparison to you, I will likely out earn you because I’m helping more people and I can monetize my audience better.
At its core, blogging is very simple:
- Create content
- Get traffic
- Monetize traffic
If you can do these 3 things well as a blogger, you can make a lot of money. The hard part is that it takes time to develop these skills. If you’re committed, you can definitely become great at these in the span of a few years.
Let’s explore the main ways bloggers earn money to get a better understanding.
How do bloggers make money?
There are a handful of ways that bloggers make money with their blog. Each of these ways alone can help get you to a full-time income as a blogger. The main ways that bloggers make money include:
Ads
When you build up enough traffic on your blog, one of the first ways you can start making money is by placing ads on your site. You’ve seen them before, they look like this:
As you can see, these kinds of ads are targeted based on your search history and web traffic. In my case, I’m always trying to learn about SEO and blogging. This results in most of my ads being SEO and similar services.
You can apply for ad networks like Google AdSense, Ezoic, etc. These ad networks will pay you a certain amount for each thousand page views you get.
This number they pay you is called rate per mille (rate per thousand views on your site). The more lucrative your blogging niche is, the higher this rate will be. Generally, what I’ve seen is that this number can range from $7-$30 depending on the kind of blog you have.
If we take a number in between like $18 and assume you can get up to 50,000 page views, you can make $900 per month off of ads alone.
The blogs I’ve seen that have been established for a few years are making well over $1,500 off of ads alone.
Affiliate revenue
Affiliate revenue is one of the best reasons why blogs make a lot of money. When you write a blog post, you can add affiliate links throughout the post and companies will pay you when you refer customers to them.
The great thing about affiliate revenue is that there’s no limit to how much you can make. You can join hundreds of affiliate programs, have thousands of affiliate links, etc.
Affiliate revenue compounds as a blog grows. When you start out, you might be an affiliate of a few products or programs. As you publish hundreds of blogs, you will still be getting affiliate revenue from your old blogs on top of your new ones.
Check out some of the affiliate revenue from some of these blog reports, it’s mind-boggling:
Seeing these kinds of numbers is very motivating. It shows the power of compounding and if you produce enough blogs, you can start seeing similar numbers.
Info products
Info products can be the single most lucrative aspect of blogging. When people think about passive income when it comes to blogging, they are often referring to info products.
Info products are products that you create for your audience. Instead of getting a percentage cut like in affiliate sales, you can get 100% of the profit.
For example, let’s say I launch a short blogging e-book for $10. Let’s say my blog has been active for a few years and I’m getting 100,000 visitors to my site.
If 1% of my audience (1,000 visitors) purchase my e-book, I will make $10,000 off of that one product alone.
Now imagine if you did better marketing and got a higher conversion rate, you could be looking at tens of thousands of dollars just off of one little product.
If you launch a larger priced product, the numbers can start looking unreal.
Launching a successful info product can be one of the best days of your blogging career.
Sponsorships:
Sponsorships happens when a company pays you to write a blog post on their services or company. The amount of money you can be paid will vary based on your audience size and how much value you can bring your sponsor.
The big money in sponsorships is landing deals with companies. Companies will often offer long-term deals to really great blogs. This can be multi 5-figure deals for blogs with a huge audience.
Check out this sponsorship revenue for this blog below:
This screenshot is from The Savvy Couple’s income report. As you can see above, sponsorships can be very lucrative depending on the niche of your blog.
Keep in mind it took them around 4 years to start seeing these kinds of numbers. Be prepared to put it a ton of work for years before you expect these kinds of results.
Taking a realistic approach
The number one thing that will lead to bloggers failing is having an unrealistic approach to success.
With social media and other factors, many people don’t really understand that success is a long, hard grind for years.
Can you succeed overnight? Yes. Is it likely? No.
You should have a long-term approach to your blog or you will end up feeling like you’re not accomplishing anything.
If you’ve built any sort of business before, you will understand this. It takes years of hard work before you’re labeled an overnight success.
The other thing that new bloggers don’t understand is how SEO works. SEO is basically how you get organic traffic to your site from Google.
When you publish a blog post today, it will take nearly 9 months before it gets the maximum views from Google.
It can be very discouraging if you don’t understand this. Many new bloggers start of excited and do a ton of blogs in the first few months and they quit. Once they check back on their blog in a year, they will see the amount of views that their blogs really got.
Here’s a realistic timeline and approach you should take:
- publish 300-500 blog posts over the course a few years
- As traffic comes in, add affiliate links and apply to ad networks
- Continue publishing blog posts and monetizing
This will guarantee you thousands of dollars per month, even in unlucrative niches.
The real issue is that most new bloggers will give up way before that. If you can keep publishing blogs and monetizing them, blogging will make you very rich.
I can guarantee you can make a full-time income from blogging if…
You don’t quit.
It’s honestly that simple. Blogging at it’s core is two things:
- publishing great content
- monetizing content
If you keep publishing blog posts, you will get better and you will make more money.
As your blog ages, it will gain more authority and get more views. You will increase your skills as a blogger and be able to bring in more traffic for your blogs.
The problem is that most people will publish 20 blogs or 50 blogs and give up. Blogging is a very slow grind and it will take a while to see the fruits of the work you put in today.
Take my blog for example. This is my 50th blog post and I’ve made $0 so far.
Why? My site is young (less than 4 months old) and my content hasn’t ranked so far. If I didn’t know how long it takes to succeed with blogging, I would’ve gave up already.
Instead of making my goals something I cannot control (like how much money I make), I make my goals about what’s in my control.
My first goal for this blog is to publish 400 blog posts. I know if I do that I will get enough traffic to at least make $1,000 per month from my blog. This is a very, very conservative estimate, but it motivates me enough to make the next blog post.
By doing this, I will never give up. I will always just make the next blog post and continue getting better.
How can you start your blog today?
Starting a blog is easy. You need several things to get started:
- Choose your domain name
- Choose your hosting
Your domain name can be your own name or it can be something tied to your blogging niche. I prefer it to be my name for branding reasons, but many bloggers opt to choose a name that’s specific to their niche. Honestly, it doesn’t matter, you just need to get started and publish your first blog post.
For hosting, you should use Bluehost. It’s the standard for all bloggers, I’ve linked it here.
Here’s a quick 10 min tutorial that covers everything you need:
Final thoughts
Committing to a blog for a few years can be one of the best financial decisions you will ever make. Not only will you have the added freedom of setting your own hours and working at your own pace, you will likely out earn your day job.
It’s definitely not a get rich quick scheme, but the bloggers who persist will be the ones who succeed. It takes time to build a successful business and a blog is no different. If you commit yourself for at least 3 years to your blog, you can start making a full-time income and blog as a career.
One tip I would recommend for new bloggers is to join a community of bloggers. I don’t care if it’s Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, a course, whatever.
Blogging can be a very lonely experience, especially in the early stages. Having a group of likeminded people who have the same goals as you is crucial to succeeding.
Personally, I like using Twitter. You can connect with me here on there.
On Twitter, I like to track the progress of my blog and I can interact with other bloggers. It’s very motivating and it helps me to just focus on the next step instead of worrying about a ton of random things.
All in all, if you start your blog today and publish continuously, you will succeed blogging. It’s honestly that simple. Get your blog started today with Bluehost here and attain financial freedom.