How Do Bloggers Make Money?

AFFILIATE DISCLAIMER: I may earn a small amount of money from some of the products that I have mentioned in this post at no extra cost to you. Please find the full affiliate disclosure here.

A question in a lot of peoples’ minds is “how do bloggers make money?”. Well, there are many ways that bloggers can make money. Earning money through a blog is also known as ‘monetizing’ a blog.

In this article, I’ll explain the different ways to monetize a blog and exactly how much money people can make through this. But before I get into it, let me just say, it’s not fast money. It is slow money, very slow in fact, and takes a really long time to start generating money. But once you do start generating, it keeps coming in.

Different bloggers monetize their blogs in different ways, but these are the easiest ways to monetize your blog. If you’re planning on starting a blog, you’ll most likely start earning through these ways.

The three main ways that bloggers make money is through:

• Posting Ads on the Blog
• Affiliate Marketing
• Selling their Own Products

Continue reading this article to find out how they do it and how much money they can make.

1. Ads

I’m sure you’ve noticed advertisements (ads) in front of YouTube videos and sometimes at the end. They usually play for five seconds and give you the option to skip it.

When you visit a website, I’m sure you’ve seen ads in the middle of the content that you’re reading. Like this one for example.

This ad above is right in the middle of what you’re reading. This is because I have monetized my blog – with Ads. And we do this with ad agencies like Google AdSense. Google AdSense is a monetization tool for people with a platform (like a blog or a YouTube channel) that pays you money for allowing Google to place their Ads on your platform. When people visit your blog and click on any of these ads, you’ll get a small commission because you helped someone find something that they like, through your blog. It’s as simple as that.

Ads is the number one way that bloggers make money. This is definitely the easiest way to start generating income from your blog. All you have to do is constantly create content, place ads on your posts and drive traffic towards your blog. There are so many ways that you can drive traffic to your blog. I do this by sharing my articles on social media platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can use any social media platform to do this. Once you can get traffic to your website, it will convert to views and then you’ll get more clicks on your Ads.

For example, if you click on this ad right above this, I’ll make a small amount of money. I will get money for every click that every visitor makes on my blog. So if you start a blog, Google AdSense is the easiest way to start making money.

Exactly how much though? – I thought you’d ask.

This is a list of how much you can expect to make with a blog. Of course, this is compiled with my own research. There are some blogs that earn way more than this, and some others that have died. It all comes down to consistency in the end. If you’re consistent with your posting, have good SEO, and are consistently driving traffic to your site, you’ll definitely earn around this range.

I have arranged it in three columns – underperforming, expected, and overperforming for three different amounts of blog posts.

I want you to note that some blogs can be seasonal. For example, if you have a blog that posts about Christmas and has all the Christmas-related items in it, you can’t expect a load of traffic on your website in March. So, your Ad revenue will most probably be highest during the November and December period. So if you have a blog that gets seasonal traffic, your Ad revenue might fluctuate and will definitely be uneven throughout the year.

Google has a ‘Revenue Calculator’ tool that can help you get a good understanding of how much you can make from AdSense for your chosen niche, depending on your location and the amount of traffic you can drive to your website.

Of course, there are other Ad agencies like MediaVine and a few others that also allow you to make money by sharing their Ads on your website. They pay a lot more too, by the way, in case I missed that! But they’re slightly more difficult to get into because they have a lot more criteria that you’ll need to fulfill before you can even apply for them. For example, MediaVine requires your blog to have a minimum of 50,000 page views per month before you can apply for it.

So, Google AdSense is definitely the best place to get started. It’s a little bit trickier now since there are tons of blogs on the internet. But they are definitely the easiest to get approval. So if you’re just starting off, I highly recommend that you start with Google AdSense.

100,000 pageviews a month is a decent target, and you should be able to earn a full-time income with that amount of traffic. Once you know how to get good traffic to your blog, you can lead them to the next type of monetization.

2. Affiliate Marketing

The second way that bloggers make money is using Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is normally done through an affiliate network. An affiliate network is a place where sellers put up their products for people with a platform – like blogs or websites, to share. So, if you sign up with an affiliate network, you can share these sellers’ products on your blog. When your visitors see and click these products and make a purchase, you will get a small commission. The easiest affiliate network to get started with is Amazon. Amazon will generate a custom URL to the product that you like. So, all you have to do is paste this link on your blog.

But how do I make people buy from my link? If you’re talking about a product, find the product on Amazon and link it. Make it easier for your visitors to find the thing you’re talking about. Cookies have been attached to these affiliate URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), so Amazon will know that these customers have been sent from you or your blog. So after this, ANYTHING that they buy within the next 24 hours from clicking your link, you’ll get a small commission. Right now, it’s about 4%. It’s small. So you won’t make a ton of money, but the more traffic you get to your website, the more money you’ll make.

There are tons of other companies that allow affiliate marketing. Apart from Amazon, right now I’m an affiliate of a few other companies.

Bluehost is one of the companies that I’m an affiliate of. It’s a company that hosts websites for people who want to start a blog – just. Like mine. So if you go through my link, sign up and start using Bluehost, I will get a small amount of money.

Canva is another company with that I’m an affiliate. I don’t think Canva needs an introduction – but for those of you who’ve never heard of Canva (I highly doubt it), it’s a platform that allows anyone to design anything they need in just a matter of minutes. Just like Bluehost, Canva pays me money whenever someone creates an account with them through my affiliate URL.

Notice how my affiliate links are all from companies that I use personally. This is because it is easier for me to convince others to start using these brands because I have personal experience with them – and it’s a legitimate recommendation. So if you’re ever interested in getting into affiliate marketing, I highly recommend that you choose to go for companies that you personally know.

3. Own Products

The third and best way that bloggers make money is by introducing their own products. The amount of money you make when you sell other people’s products (affiliate marketing) is very little. It’s not the most profitable and if you ever decide to stop marketing them, you’ll have nothing left of your own. So what you can do is, you can start making money using your own products. You can create digital products or tangible products, or both!

Digital products take a lot less money to get started – it’s very cheap. But with tangible products, the process is slightly more expensive because you’ll have to deal with packaging, delivery, and a lot more things that digital products simply won’t require. I got into digital products very early on. Maybe 2 – 3 months into blogging, I built my own digital products store. Click here to check it out.

Obviously, it is a whole process once you start selling your own products. You’ll need to think about sales tax, designing the website, taking photos, designing graphics, and everything else. But it’s a lot more profitable once it takes off. Digital products are definitely passive income because once you’ve set it up, the only thing you need to do is to update with new designs once in a while or update the dates in ‘calendar’ type of digital products like ‘yearly planners’. With tangible products, on the other hand, there are a lot more things you’ll need to consider. You’ll need to think about where to make them, where to store them, how to ship them, how to deal with returns, customer service, and the list goes on. But even though there’s a lot more work involved, having your own products is definitely more worth it.

I have an entire article on what digital products are and all the benefits of creating digital products. I explained how it’s the best thing ever – that literally, anyone can get into. You should really check it out.

Conclusion

So these three are the main ways that bloggers make money. I hope you have a good understanding of exactly how you can make money blogging. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, earning money with a blog is a long-term game. If you’re trying to start blogging to get easy money, it is easy money but it takes a LOT of initial work. Imagine blogging for months and months without seeing a single dollar coming in. So if you’re going to start a blog, you will need to be patient. Be consistent with your blogging and write articles that people will find useful.

If you found this article useful, please share it with your friends – it will help me a lot. The more views we get, the faster bloggers like me can earn money with our blogs. If you didn’t check out some of the articles I mentioned in this blog, I’ve included the articles that you really should check out down below. Thank you for reading!

Related Articles:

• What Are Digital Products?
• Advantages of Digital Products
• How To Make Passive Income From Digital Products
• How To Save Money As A Teenager (Guest Article by Rumeth Dasanayake)