Make money with a blog can have very different meanings. It’s true that most bloggers earn less than $100 a month, but it’s also true that many earn more than $1,000 a month, without forgetting successful bloggers who earn staggering sums.
Let us say that the income of a blog is usually determined by two factors:
- The topic you choose
- The time you spend
To make money with a blog, the topic is even more important than the number of visitors. There are blogs with few hits that make a lot of money because advertising in their topics is very profitable (for example, finance or online courses), or because the authors have a good reputation among their readers and sell very expensive services.
Generally, the more general the topic of a blog, the more daily hits it needs to earn a decent amount of money. A blog that deals with wellness or nutrition will probably need far fewer hits to earn good revenue.
Many think that making money with a blog is a very simple thing. It’s just a matter of writing an article from time to time when you feel like it. But that isn’t the case at all. To get results, you have to spend a lot of time, especially in the beginning. But even after that, you can’t slack off to avoid being overtaken by your competitors. Today, the web is much more competitive than it used to be. While earning opportunities have increased because almost everyone uses the Internet today, it has also become more difficult to be visible.
Let’s say that after 1 or 2 years of activity, depending on the topic and the time spent, a blog can generate an income of 100/200 $ per month up to 2,000/3,000 $. If you just want to make a monthly extra income, you don’t need to spend so much time on your blog. But if you want to live from your blog, you need to work hard.
How to make money with a blog?
These are the most common methods of earning a blog:
- 1. Advertising
- 2. Affiliate marketing
- 3. Selling physical products
- 4. Selling digital products
- 5. Sale of Services
- 6. Donations
- 7. Selling the blog
1.Advertising
Monetization with advertising is still one of the most popular options for many bloggers due to its simplicity. Even though many think that it is not possible to earn high revenue with advertising, it is not always true, it depends on the theme of the blog and the number of daily hits.
For example, a blog aimed at the unemployed will make less money than a blog aimed at realtors, which is easy to understand based on the purchasing power of the site’s visitors.
There are different forms of advertising, but the most popular ones are:
- PPC
- CPA
- Banners
– PPC (AdSense)
Adsense is Google’s PPC advertising network. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, which means that every time the reader clicks on one of these ads on your blog, you get paid. Adsense owes its popularity to its ease of use and the large number of advertisers. It’s enough to sign up, and once Google approves your request, it’s very easy to insert advertisements in the article (you can do this manually or automatically with the help of plug-ins). Google, will offer you the advertising messages that best fit your site.
Every time a reader clicks on the banner, you earn 68% on that click. Remember that each click is remunerated between 1 cent and one euro. (on average we are at 0,25 € per click). There are also cases where several euros are earned per click, but these are rare cases, such as: Forex trading, online trading, etc. Therefore, it is easy to understand that you should have at least 500/1,000 visits per day to earn a significant income. There are other platforms for PPC, but either they are only for the UK market (media.net), or they require a very high volume of traffic (Taboola, Outbrain).
– CPA (cost per action)
With CPA advertising, the advertiser does not pay when the reader clicks on the ad, but only when the user performs a specific action. This action can be, for example, buying a product, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading a document.
Therefore, the effectiveness of this advertising is lower, since the reader must not only click on the ad, but also perform another action. In return, however, the fees are also much higher.
There are several websites that offer CPA, although some of them have run into problems with the Privacy Commissioner due to the improper use of user data.
– Advertising banner
Once your blog is well ranked, you may be contacted by companies who wish to advertise in the form of banners or links on your site. This is similar to an ad in a newspaper or on a billboard. The more visible the ad, the more expensive the space will be. And the more visitors your blog has, the more money you can charge.
The first requirement for selling advertising space on your website is an interesting blog: the more niche-oriented the site is or the more it specializes in a particular area, the more likely you are to make money selling ad space. The requirements for selling online advertising are:
- Good traffic volumes, considering that already 600 – 1000 target daily visits can already be considered interested by potential advertisers
- Valuable, up-to-date, interesting, useful and professional content
- Web site authority
Also, without waiting to be contacted, you can contact companies related to the topic of your blog and offer them to buy advertising space on the pages of your website. I recommend that you contact companies that already advertise through Adsense or on other websites. So you should do some research in advance about the companies you want to contact.
The cost of a banner varies according to:
- the type of product
- the volume of daily visits
- the size of the banner
- the position on the page
There are also sponsored posts, even though it is indirect advertising, it is advertising. Once your blog has gained some notoriety, you will be contacted by some advertisers who will offer you money or free products in exchange for an article about one of their products.
There are also platforms like Coobis that bring together bloggers and companies who want to write sponsored reviews for their products. These types of reviews usually pay upwards of $30, depending on the topic and the number of visitors. They can be disguised as a normal post, or it’s clearly indicated that it’s a sponsored article.
2.Affiliate marketing
Besides Adsense, it is one of the most popular forms of monetization for many bloggers because it is so easy. In practice, it involves recommending the purchase of certain products. There are several companies that offer their own affiliate programs, such as:
- Amazon
- Awin
- Tradetracker
- Clickbank , no physical products are sold here, but digital products such as online courses or software. On this platform, advertisers present their products and bloggers choose the products they want to promote. For example, if you have a blog about music, you could search Clickbank for online courses to learn how to play the guitar. You could then recommend that course on your blog with an affiliate link, earning commissions on the sales you make.
3.Selling physical products
Selling physical products through your blog is another good way to make money, as the profit margin is higher than affiliate marketing or advertising. But you need to have a very strong brand. Otherwise, you will not have much success. However, the biggest disadvantage is that you usually have to take care of storing and shipping the products, which comes with a cost, and it’s not an automatic income.
Or you can use dropshipping to save yourself the physical, bureaucratic and economic burdens of a physical warehouse. Dropshipping is a sales method that consists of selling a product online without having a physical warehouse. The items are not owned by the seller, but the blog owner only acts as an intermediary between the customer and the supplier. This is possible because at the base there is a commercial contract between the dropshipper and the seller. The most used platforms are:
4.Selling digital products
If you have loyal users, this is a great opportunity to sell your digital products. This is certainly a good way to make money with a blog. Minimizes sales commissions and has no distribution costs.
However, creating your own product takes time and effort, as well as a good marketing strategy. These digital products can be e-books or photos, but the most profitable product is certainly online courses. With digital products, there are almost no costs for creation and none for distribution.
As for e-books, it must be said that today, with Amazon’s self-publishing, it is very easy to publish a book. Once the book is written, it is enough to upload it to the platform and in a few hours it is published on Amazon, the advertising costs are at its expense and the sales commissions (30%) are low. The problem is that if you do not run marketing campaigns, the book will not be visible on the Amazon platform, but in this case what really interests you is the sale of the ebook, just through your blog.
However, as far as courses are concerned, an online course can be in video or PDF format, and if it is connected to an automated sales system like Active Campaign, it could have a good sales performance. There are online courses on so many topics. So it makes no difference to create another one. The important thing is that it solves a problem for your visitors by giving them something they are willing to pay for.
Another great advantage of courses is that they generally have quite high selling prices: People aren’t willing to pay a few dozen dollars for a book, but they’re willing to easily spend $200/300 and more for a training course. But don’t think that it’s easy to create and sell an online course.
- You need users with whom you have established a relationship of trust
- You need to offer the exact solution to the problem your users need
- You need to create a marketing campaign for your product
But if you can do it well, this kind of activity will give you satisfaction. If you are a particular expert in a field, you can try creating your own online course. The courses are a bit like blogs, you can create them on virtually any topic.
All you have to do is record a series of short instructional videos explaining how to do something or achieve a specific goal. Show the results you have achieved and explain well to others how to achieve them step by step. Many will be willing to pay to learn your experiences and secrets. Once the course is ready, you’ll have to upload it to an e-learning platform to sell it, the most popular ones are:
5.Sale of services
Once your blog has gained authority, offering services is one of the fastest ways to make money. The most important thing is that you build a reputation as an expert through the content you publish, and eventually you will find many people willing to pay for your services or advice.
But in this case it is not a passive income, you need to actively spend your time doing:
- Consulting
- Writing of articles or advertising texts
- Translation of texts
- Lessons
- Programming or SEO assignments
- Online seminars (webinars). The term webinar is composed of the words web and seminar, which means online seminar. So a webinar is an event that takes place in a virtual space. There is one person (the teacher) who speaks and others (the students) who listen and can intervene with questions. To create a webinar, there are many digital platforms, the most popular are: Zoom, ClickMeeting, GoToWebinar
6.Donations
Recently, it has become common to accept donations or sponsorships from individuals through platforms like Patreon, which are integrated with WordPress and allow you to add payment buttons directly to your blog that automatically manage donations. It’s always better to sell something, but do not forget about donations as an additional source of revenue.
7.Selling the blog
If for some reason you no longer feel like or have time to spend on your blog. In this case you could sell your blog through special platforms like Flippa
Generally, the selling price of a website is calculated by multiplying the monthly revenue by 20 or 30. So if your blog brings in $500 per month, you could sell it for $10,000 to $15,000. Even if the blog has not been monetized yet, it’s possible to sell it if it has good content and traffic.
How to make money with a blog in practice
- Find the right topic
- Create the blog
- Write the content
- Search for users
- Monetize the blog
1.Find the right topic
This is the most important thing you need to know before you start. Who are your users? Most people think of a blog as a kind of diary where you share your thoughts. But if you don’t already have thousands of fans following you on other channels, or if you’re an explorer with an adventurous and passionate life, that won’t work.
To make money with a blog, you need to provide people with useful, valuable content. This is the only way you can be sure that your blog will grow over time. So you need to choose a topic on which you can write interesting content that will answer your audience’s doubts and questions.
So which topic should you choose? Before you decide, you need to consider a few things:
– Look into your passions, your interests, your hobbies, you will surely find a topic that is very close to your heart and that you will never tire of talking about. Even if you are not a super expert in the field, do not be afraid, the most important thing is that you like the subject, then through writing and studying you will become real experts in the field.
– Check if the topic you have chosen is popular among internet users. This is a service for those who want to advertise on Google. Google informs them about the number of people searching for a certain topic. If you do not have an account yet, you need to create one. Once you are registered, in the ‘Search for New Keywords’ section, type in the word you are interested in, and Google will show you a list of words related to yours, along with the number of monthly searches for each of them. It’s completely useless to blog about a topic that does not interest you and that no one is searching for in Google.
–Check the competitors, check how many other blogs there are on the topic and how they rank in the search engines. Study them and see where they have weaknesses, consider where you could do better or where you could specialize in a particular sub-niche of the topic. In short, you are looking for a way to differentiate yourself from others.
2.Create the blog
Nowadays, creating a blog with platforms like WordPress is very easy and cheap. Once you have chosen a name, bought hosting and a domain, all you need to do is buy a WordPress theme (there are free ones, but I do not recommend them). The investment for a blog is really small and is around these numbers:
- Domain and hosting: $50 – $60/year
- Purchase of a WordPress template: $50 – $100
3.Write the content
Content is what will determine the success or failure of your blog. Considering that several million articles are published on the Internet every day, it is easy to understand that only posts with original, interesting and deep content will be rewarded by Google and users.
4.Search for users
With the amount of websites that exist on the internet today, a newborn blog has a good chance of being seen and making money with a blog, so it is necessary to look for strategies to make yourself known.
The first option is to write guest posts. You need to contact the authors of other blogs (that are not in direct competition with your blog) and write a post for them, so that you can make yourself known to the visitors of these blogs.
Be present in the social networks where you have the opportunity to make yourself known without spamming much, but by offering interesting content.
Work on search engine optimization (SEO), which is extremely important to position your articles, especially if you work with highly competitive topics. If you can invest a few hundred dollars, I recommend you to contact a good SEO agency that will set up your website properly and explain to you exactly how to write a correct article SEO friendly.
5.Monetize the blog
After blogging don’t expect to start earning the next day, it’ll probably be months before you see results, in any case the results will come if you work consistently and with quality.
Make money with a blog, conclusion
To be a blogger, you have to learn two essential things:
- Copywriting, that is the art of writing texts and especially captivating titles that aim to engage the reader, first to fascinate him and then to convince him to click on the post.
- SEO, ranking on the web is essential, Google is the most important search engine, you can not ignore it, but many bloggers do it anyway. I am not saying you have to become an SEO expert, but learning the basics will be enough to get the most out of Google and help your posts appear on the first pages of search engines.
If your goal is to generate income with a blog, it is essential to carry out preparatory actions before launching the website. Remember that the difficulty of your work and the economic return can vary greatly depending on the topic. If you invest a few days in research before you start working, you can choose a topic that can increase your income 10-20 times compared to another.
Therefore, it is essential to do a market study in advance to find the right niche where there is not yet so much competition and at the same time profitable enough to be worth blogging about.
If possible, choose topics that guarantee high profits. Look for niches that have higher CPMs. If possible, try to find a compromise between the profitability of the topic and personal interest. If you choose a topic that does not interest you just because it’s profitable, it will be difficult to stay motivated in the long run. Writing articles about the different types of insurance might be commercially interesting, but it will be very difficult to maintain the desire to continue if this topic does not interest you at all.
Start from the beginning with a serious platform. Do not even jokingly think of starting with a free blogging platform. That’s like taking a bike to a motorcycle race. The only real choice is WordPress. You can not think about making money with a blog if you are not willing to make even a small investment.
Do not just rely on online advertising. If you want to make money with a blog, you need to diversify your revenue streams. Making money only from Adwords is too simplistic. It may be fine in the initial stages, but then you need to expand your revenue streams.
Create your products. An e-book can be a promotional tool if you offer it for free, but it can also make you good money if you sell it through your blog
Earn revenue with affiliate marketing. Generally, the blogs with the highest revenue are the ones that have good affiliate products.
Try to set up a mailing list. For the most important bloggers, it is no longer the number of visitors to their blog that matters, but the number of subscribers. A large mailing list is a valuable thing, because it can be used to send purchase suggestions to users and thus generate sales
In summary, if you are not discouraged by the fact that writing a blog takes time and you are willing to wait even 1-2 years before making significant money, you may be among those who can aspire to earn $1,000 – S2,000 per month and more.
For those interested in learning about all the ways to make money online, I recommend reading the guide posted on the blog.
Those interested in making serious money with online surveys can read the related article.
