When people find out we’re professional bloggers, they always wonder how blogs make money, and how they can build a blog to the point that it can actually earn a good living. And, fair enough, those are terrific questions.
Of course the prospect of heaps of money while sitting on a laptop in Fiji is bound to top people’s interest!
It’s been calculated that nearly 23% of the time spent on the Internet is on blogs and social networks. While the top-earning blogs online (like The Huffington Post) can earn upwards of $2.3 million per month, numerous people, including numerous bloggers, still don’t know exactly how blogs make money.
But, numerous of those people are simply blogging as a hobby and have no drive to turn it into a full-time career.
If you’re interested in how blogs make money, and you want to turn your site from a hobby blog to a career, then you’ve come to the best place. We’ve monetized this blog in just about every way possible, without splattering ads absolutely all over and bothersome our cherished readers.
Here we’ll discuss how blogs make money in 2019 and beyond and how you can monetize your blog in a way that’s good for you, your readers and the companies you partner with.
If you’re interested in starting your own blog, or you already have one and you want to figure out how to monetize it, then this guide ought to help you out on your journey.
Jump To:
First You need a Blog
Next You’ll need an Audience
How much money Do blogs Make?
How blogs Make Money
On-Page Advertising
Direct Advertising
Product Sales
Coaching
Affiliate Marketing
Press Trips
Keynote Speaking
Selling Memberships
Sponsorship
Host Twitter Chats
Conclusion
First You need a Blog
If you want a blog that can earn money and you care about how blogs make money, then I’m assuming you already have a blog, but if you don’t, you can start one in about 5 minutes. You can blog about whatever you want. pretty much any topic can be profitable in the blogging world and I’ll discuss how a little later in this post.
You can blog about parenting, fitness, technology, conspiracies, politics, travel, LGTBQ, cooking, martial arts… you get the point. As this post discusses how blogs make money, I think you’ll rapidly realize that it doesn’t always matter what the topic is, you can make pretty much any blog profitable if you’re passionate and well-informed about the topic, and you put in the effort.
Next, You’ll need an Audience
This is the hard part. starting a blog is easy, but building up an audience takes work, focus and time. I’m going to show you how blogs make money in this post, but please don’t be fooled into thinking that blogging is some kind of get rich quick scheme.
It took us over a year to start making money from this blog, and it wasn’t until our third year that its income surpassed what we were making at our jobs in Canada.
But building a blog can be fun, so it doesn’t have to feel like work the whole time. If you’re writing about something you enjoy, then spending a couple of hours per day on the computer will feel like a break, rather than a job. but you’ll need to be consistent and put in the time to build your readership.
Obviously, an audience is the backbone of every blog. The much more people who read your blog, the much more opportunities you’ll have to monetize your blog and turn it into a career. fortunately there’s a proven way to get much more traffic to your site quickly.
It’s called SEO or search Engine Optimization. simply writing messages on your blog isn’t going to guarantee you traffic and readers. You’re going to need to think like Google. SEO is the practice of writing terrific content that your readers and Google will love. It’s actually not that hard.
We have an SEO course that can walk you through the steps, but essentially you’ll want to write long (3,000+ word) articles that extensively cover different topics in your niche. You’ll then want to market that content on social media and you’ll want to build backlinks to it by writing guest posts, being featured on big sites and running collaborative posts.
This will exponentially help your traffic grow. If we had our SEO course when we were starting out, I’m pretty sure we would’ve figured out how blogs make money within 6 months, rather than a year. Basically, with SEO you can jump-start your traffic and make money faster.
See Also: how We Tripled Our blog traffic & Doubled Our income in 12 Months
How much money Do blogs Make?
Some of the top bloggers out there are earning upwards of $3 million per year. According to Bloggingbasics101 only 14% of bloggers are actually making any money and of those, the average wage is around $24,000 USD per year.
We’ve written extensively about how much this blog makes in the past, and we know of numerous bloggers who are earning much more than $20,000 / month from their blogs. The amount of money a blog can make depends on how you monetize your site, what your niche is and how much traffic you have.
The terrific thing is that once you figure out how blogs make money and you monetize your own site accordingly, the sky is the limit. There’s not really a cap on how much you can earn because there are so numerous different money-making methods you can employ on a site (as you’re going to see in this post).
For much more info on how blogs make money, check out Our blogging Section. If you want to know how to make money online in other ways, check out our Make money For travel Section.
How blogs Make money in 2019
Now that you have a blog and you know the easiest way to grow it, it’s time to start talking about how blogs make money in 2019 — which is an vital element in taking your hobby blog and turning it into a full-time business.
The essential is to diversify.
The best blogs out there have figured out numerous different ways to monetize and make money from their content. never keep all of your eggs in one basket. the best way blogs make money is through the diversification of income streams.
Here’s how blogs make money in 2019
On-Page Advertising
We’ve all seen ads plastered over sites in the past. Some blogs overdo it and it can become incredibly distracting, while some won’t even let you view the site unless you turn off your ad-blocker.
Whether you like seeing ads with your content or not, this is how blogs make money and it’s a terrific way to easily monetize your blog traffic.
Basically, once you have enough traffic on your blog, you can flick a switch and automatically show ads on your pages. We use Mediavine on this site and they take ads from Google and from hundreds of other companies and ad networks and automatically place them on our blog.
When we reached a certain amount of traffic (Mediavine has a minimum of 25,000 sessions per month) we simply installed a plugin, activated it, signed a couple of files online and our site magically had ads on it.
We then chose where we wanted the ads to show up.
We have our ads set to very low because we don’t want them to take away from the user experience, but even set to low we still earn upwards of $4,000 / month from these ads alone. If you were to reach the bare minimum of 25,000 sessions per month and turn Mediavine ads on on your blog, you could expect to earn $300 – $700 / month from those ads, depending on your niche and how numerous ads you run.
Without a doubt on-page advertising is the easiest way to monetize the traffic you already have. once they’re turned on, bloggers can earn money in their sleep.
See Also: how blogs Make $900+ / Month From In-Content Ads
If you want to make much more money from ads, then you will need much more traffic. usually with on-page advertising, the much more traffic you have, the much more you can earn. consider utilizing SEO to increase your traffic.
Direct Advertising
This is when a company, brand, tourism board, or individual contacts you (usually through email) and asks to advertise on your site directly. direct advertising can come in the form of paid reviews, sponsored content or sponsored social sharing and it can be very lucrative.
When we were first trying to figure out how blogs make money back in 2012, this was the first method we employed. We didn’t have enough traffic to turn on Mediavine ads, but we had enough that some advertisers saw the worth of our blog.
At that time we were paid around $150 – $250 for each post that was placed on the blog. All we had to do was cut and paste the short article they wrote and hit publish. We were making up to $250 for 10 minutes of work.
Does this sound too good to be true? Well, it is.
Google doesn’t like this form of advertising, so we don’t recommend running sponsored messages on your blog as a main source of income. It’s horrible for SEO and Google can actually penalize your site for doing it and take away all of your traffic. I’m not saying you need to stop all direct advertising all together, but there’s a better way to do it.
The best way to work with companies on direct advertising is through longer partnerships with “no-follow” links. We talk about this alot much more in our SEO course, but essentially as long as companies aren’t paying for links on your site to increase their SEO, you ought to be ok.
It’s not recommended to publish a lot of sponsored messages on your site as Google can penalize you for doing them in a spammy way. To avoid an issue with Google, only accept messages within your niche, only allow branded anchor text (ie: thecompany.com), keep all of the links no-follow and never accept gambling or casino links.
Product Sales
For those who don’t want to just know how blogs make money in 2019, but also want their blog to make money for the foreseeable future, than having a product to sell is the way to go.
Here are a few examples of what products you can sell and how blogs make money through product sales:
Multi-Media Courses: This is one the ways we figured out how blogs make money and because 2017 we’ve been selling our own courses. There are a lot of different ways to make money with your blog by selling multi-media courses, but one of the easiest methods is to sign-up for Teachable.
Teachable is an online platform that can integrate with your blog quite easily. It walks you through the steps of building a course including creating video tutorials, organizing them into modules, creating PDF downloads and work sheets and even handles the transactional part so that you can easily sell your courses and make money.
Ebooks: Because ebooks are so low-cost (most opt for $5 – $10 on Amazon), it’s no surprise that a lot of people don’t understand how blogs make money by selling ebooks. but it really can be a profitable way to monetize your blog. If you’re an expert on your topic, than you can probably write 20,000 – 50,000 words on it.
If so, then you can use a totally free online tool called Canva to easily design a professional looking site. once it’s all put together with chapters, helpful content and photos, you can sell it. the best way to sell books is on Amazon, or you can sell it on your own blog and keep much more of the profits by using a program like e-junkie.
We’ve sold our ebooks both through Amazon and through e-junkie and we find that we earn much more money by selling through e-junkie and not paying Amazon their (very high) commission rate.
T-Shirts & Paraphernalia: another way how blogs make money is through selling t-shirts, pens, calendars, backpacks and all sorts of other branded or customized developed items. selling Goats On The road branded garb was actually the first way we earned money from this blog.
Back in November of 2012 we set up an online store using our blog and VistaPrint and we created a series of products with photos of us and with our logo on them. In total we only made around $600 and that was all from our generous pals and family, but it is still a terrific way to make money through your blog.
Coaching
We’ve met quite a few bloggers who make good money from one-on-one coaching. If you know how to resolve people’s problems and how to get them to achieve their goals, then you can trainer them to that outcome through your blog.
You’ll have to create a sales page on your blog with the different types of coaching you offer with the different pricing options available, and then you’ll have to create a cart so that people can pay for your services through your site.
Just like selling online courses, this can be done through Teachable, or you can set up your WordPress blog to take payments by turning it into a membership site.
However you decide to sell your coaching, you ought to keep in mind that one-on-one consulting will take up a lot of your time, so you ought to charge a rate that you are pleased with. M
