Blogging Income
ByJennifer
You’ll find a lot of people who will tell you to start a blog as an easy way to make money. Yes, you can make money blogging (a lot of money, in fact) and it can be an enjoyable and fulfilling career.
But it’s not as quick and easy as throwing together a free blog and posting about your life and watching the cash flow in. Our goal is to show you how to create a business with your blog, work smart (and hard) and stay authentic to yourself, your beliefs and your audience.
Starting a blog:
Let’s briefly talk about what starting a blog looks like at a high level. There are many different platforms you can use, from Squarespace to Blogger to WordPress and more.
For anyone wanting to monetize a blog we almost always recommend using WordPress.org. We will discuss the reasons for this in more detail in a separate post.
A few of the most important factors when setting up your blog include:
- Niche – narrowing down to a specific topic that serves a specific group of people
- Speed – your site should be optimized and run smoothly
- User experience – navigation should be simple and intuitive and serve the readers (from your targeted niche) well
We will spend more time in separate posts about the technical and other aspects of setting up the blog. For now we want to focus on the various ways that a well designed properly set up blog with the right kinds of content can make money.
How to Make Money Blogging
- Ad Revenue – our favorite way for bloggers to make money is via an ad network. On almost any site you visit, you’ll notice various display ads. A high quality ad network will pay you per 1,000 page views, not based on clicks.
- Google Adsense – many people like to start monetizing right away and Google Adsense is one option that does not require a minimum number of page views. We actually don’t generally recommend this to our clients, as the pay is fairly low, and the trade-off of site speed and user experience is rarely worth it.
- Mediavine – requires 25,000 monthly sessions
- AdThrive – requires 100,000 monthly page views
- Payouts on either of the above can vary, but are typically in the $12 – $35 per 1,000 page view range.
- Affiliate Revenue – this is one of the quicker and more natural ways to make money from your blog. Affiliate revenue involves an agreement with another person or company in which you will recommend their products, use a special link, and received a percentage of the sales (anywhere from 1% on up, this can vary wildly) made via that link. A few things to keep in mind:
- Stay true to your purpose and beliefs and only promote products which you use yourself or whole-heartedly recommend
- Don’t be afraid to negotiate rates if you are making a significant sales for a product
- Always keep in mind the products that will best serve your audience
- Amazon Affiliates is an easy affiliate program to sign up for and carries almost any products you might use. Payouts are typically 4% – 7% of the sale.
- Sponsored Posts – related to both of the above, sponsored work involves contracting with a company or person to promote their product or services for a set fee. For this purpose, we are only going to talk about this from a blog perspective and we will discuss sponsored work via social media only in a separate post.
- Having a niche audience is one of the best ways to get sponsored work
- Be sure you track your stats so that you can show the brands how successful the campaign was
- Just like with affiliate work, make sure to work with brands you can naturally support and believe in
- Products and services – the sky is the limit. Think of things like digital downloads, ebooks, online services, physical products you can sell and ship. Really, anything you are good at is an option. There are too many ideas and platforms to discuss in detail in this post, just know that that is a great opportunity to be creative and offer your gifts to the world.
- Unrelated to the actual blog itself, but as an offshoot to it’s success, many people are able to grow their business even more via freelancing, speaking and offering courses and workshops. Again, you are only limited by your dreams here.
Now, before the money can start flowing, a lot of hard work takes place, including driving traffic to your site. Be sure to sign up for our email list so that you can be first to read all of our tips for blogging and growing your business.
Ready to take the next step and want to get your blog started on the right foot and without the stress and hassle of doing it yourself? Set up a free consult call today!
