Do you want to make money with your blog? Or, wondering how does a blogger make money?
This is an entirely valid question that can be answered in many different ways. Because for bloggers, there’s no correct way to monetize your blog. It’s all up to personal preference, niche, and your end goals.
From affiliate marketing to selling courses and even writing sponsored content, you can make money in many different ways with a blog.
Many bloggers are making over six figures a month, more than the average CEO in America. How crazy is that?!
Let’s get straight into how a blogger can make money!
Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links, where I may receive a small commission on purchases at no cost to you. You can read my full affiliate disclosure here.
9 Ways Bloggers Make Money
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an excellent way for a blogger to make money without having overhead expenses.
It’s the process of getting a tracking link for a product/service and putting it onto your blog. If someone clicks on your affiliate link and buys a product or service through it, you’ll make a commission on the final sale price.
Commissions vary from platform to platform but can be anywhere from 1% to 90%. The link also has a duration cookie, meaning it could last for 24-hours or even 30-days.
What does a cookie duration mean?
It means that if someone clicked on the affiliate link, didn’t buy the product at that specific moment, but purchased it a week later, you’ll still earn an affiliate commission.
Again, the affiliate cookie duration is different for all programs, so make sure to research each program carefully.
Affiliate networks to join:
– Amazon Associates (rates vary from 1% – 10%)
– ShareASale / Awin (15,200+ advertisers, 150+ million sales generated in 2019)
– ClickBank ($4.2+ billion paid out)
Practical Tip: Search in Google: [Product/Service] Affiliate Program. You’ll be shocked to find how many companies have affiliate programs.
Read: How to Start a Blog in 2021 (Easy-to-Follow Guide for Beginners)
2. Display Advertising
Another widespread and easy way bloggers make money is from display advertising. There are two different ad types, CPC and CPM ads.
CPC (Cost Per Click): You only get paid when someone clicks on an advertisement.
Example: Make $0.25 for every click.
CPM (Cost Per Mille/Thousand): You get paid a set amount for every 1000 impressions.
Example: Make $35 per 1000 page views.
The great thing about display advertising is that it’s mainly passive income. Once you have 50+ posts and a healthy stream of page views, you can make a good amount of money.
I advise against display advertising for beginners as it can ruin the user interface, and you’ll probably make like a penny a day.
I don’t have ads running on this blog and won’t have them until I join a higher advertiser network than Google Adsense.
Advertiser Networks:
– Google Adsense ($100 minimum payout)
– Ezoic (10,000 monthly page views minimum to join)
– Mediavine (50,000 monthly sessions minimum to join)
– AdThrive (100,000 monthly traffic minimum requirement)
3. Write Sponsored Posts
A great way that bloggers can earn a consistent income from blogging is by writing sponsored content.
A business will pay you to write about a product or service and promote it to your readers. It works the same as how YouTubers get brand deals and sponsorships.
There’s no set-in-stone pricing for writing sponsored articles, as it relies heavily on your niche, page views, and audience loyalty.
You could make anywhere from $100 per sponsored article to even $3000+.
As a beginner, I can’t say that you’ll be pitched many sponsored posts. This is because you need at least 10,000 page views a month to be seen as ‘somewhat’ valuable to a company.
Once you get over 10,000 pageviews/month, you could sign up for a sponsored post opportunities website like Blog Meets Brand or Acorn Influence. Signing up could help you get in touch with various brands and get opportunities to write sponsored content.
Alexis is an excellent example of a blogger monetizing from sponsored posts. She makes $3000+ a month from sponsored posts alone.
4. Sell Digital Products
A somewhat easy way to make money with blogging is to sell digital products.
The great thing about selling digital products is that there aren’t too many overheads included. Once the product is made, you can repeatedly sell it.
Digital products could include:
– Ebooks
– Stock images or videos
– Templates (Pinterest pins, infographics, etc.)
– Printables
I currently sell digital products on Etsy and have found the platform super easy to use. You could also sell digital products on Gumroad or Sellfy.
If you sell digital products, make sure to have them be easily found by your audience. This includes adding a ‘Shop’ tab in your header and even adding a link in your sidebar or posts.
You most likely won’t be making thousands from selling digital products. Still, it could cover the expenses of running your blog.
5. Freelancing
Freelancing is an excellent way for bloggers to provide services to customers and get paid from them. If you’re knowledgeable in your niche, then freelancing may be the perfect job for you.
As a freelancer, you can choose your work schedule, which customers you want to work with, and set your price.
Examples of freelancing services:
– Website designer
– Marketing
– SEO specialist
– Social media manager
– Data entry
Freelancing is a great way to make money from day one of your blog. It can supplement your income until traffic and search engine optimization starts kicking in.
You could offer the freelance services directly from your blog or join a freelance site like Fiverr or Freelancer to get shown to potential clients. These sites do include a fee but may help you get more clients.
Recommended read: How to Make Money from Fiverr in 2021
6. Sell Products
Another way that bloggers can make money from blogging is by selling physical products.
An easy way to sell products is by using a print-on-demand service like Printful or Teespring.
Print-on-demand is where you design and price a product. A company like Printful or Teespring will print and manufacture the products after they’ve been purchased and send them directly to the customer. They then take a cut, and then you keep the rest as profit.
Example products to sell:
– Wall art prints
– Merchandise
– Books
– Stickers
For all different niches, there will be other physical products to sell. I run a photography blog, and it will make sense for me to sell photography wall prints.
7. Host a Webinar
Hosting a webinar is one of the lesser-used ways to make money from blogging, but it can still be quite profitable.
You charge an admission price for people to attend your event. This price can be anywhere from $10 to thousands.
It all really depends on if you’re an expert in the niche and if people are willing to pay to get your advice.
To hold a successful webinar, you need to deliver a lot of valuable information. There are tons of free webinars with good information, so stand out by making yours better.
If you’re new to blogging, I highly recommend choosing another method to make money. This one can be quite costly to run and will eat into your profits if you don’t get many admissions.
8. Sell Courses
Selling courses is an excellent way for bloggers to make money. You can sell classes in a video or simple text format, and they can be about anything.
As long as you’re jam-packing the course with a lot of valuable information, the customers will feel satisfied with their purchase.
Courses can sell anywhere from $9 to $500+ and can even run on a yearly subscription.
A great way that bloggers can get more course sales is to build an affiliate program into the course. This helps drive sales without spending money on advertising and can bring exposure to your blog.
Tip: If you’re doing a video course, try to get a good night’s sleep. I’ve bought courses from people who have sounded bored/tired, which ruins the whole experience.
9. Become a Coach
Coaching is another excellent way to make money as a blogger. If you’re skilled in a niche, you can offer one-on-one services to clients.
You could offer hourly phone, video calls, or monthly packages.
Examples of coaching:
– Business coach: Help guide business owners by aligning their business goals with their personal goals.
– Life coach: Help people improve their day-to-day lives to ultimately feel fulfilled with their life.
– Accountability coach: Help those who set goals but can’t stick them out.
Coaching prices can be anywhere from $50/hr to over $1000/hr. It all just depends on your experience and if people trust you.
Bonus Method
10. Growing an email list
Building an email list from day one is crucial to making money as a blogger. You can drive traffic to new posts, inform your list about new products, and even include paid ads or affiliate links in the emails.
Email lists are still one of the most profitable ways to make money as a blogger. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42.
It’s a fantastic way to build an audience and grow as an online business.
I currently use ConvertKit to build my list and have loved the platform. You can get 1,000 subscribers for free by using my link below. 🙂
How Much Does the Average Blogger Make?
According to Glassdoor, the average blogger makes $32,800 a year, around $2750 a month. This number was based on several anonymous salaries of bloggers.
Remember that this is purely just an average number, and the earnings potential on blogs isn’t capped, which means that you could make from $1/month to over $100,000/month.
It all just really depends on your niche, content quality, and how much work and time you put into your blog.
If you only spend one hour a day on your blog, how are you expecting to make a full-time income if you’ve worked less than one business day in a week?
Making money with blogging is all about putting in the hard work and persevering for months/years.
My recent post on the highest-paid bloggers showed that the top blogger makes over $1,000,000/month from his blog. 🤯
Conclusion
So there we have ten different ways of how a blogger can make money.
Remember that these aren’t all ways bloggers can make money; these are generally just the most popular ways.
Hopefully, you’ve found this post helpful and can use it as a guide to start earning an income from your blog.
How do you plan on monetizing your blog?
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