Make money blogging
You can make money blogging. Thousands of people do it and you most definitely can do it too if you put yourself to it. However blogging is probably not something you should get yourself into just because of the potential to make money as it requires a lot of passion and time, and if you are strictly looking a how many $ per hour worked you are making it will probably take you a very long time (if ever) to fill that blank with a reasonable number.
However, if there is a topic you are passionate about and that you enjoy reading about, talking about with your friends and overall learning more about every day, then blogging can be a great way to channel that interest into something with the potential to make money down the road.
How to monetize a blog
There are dozens of ways in which you can monetize an online audience, and there are definitely more extense articles on the topic, even full books, but when it comes to blogging the main 3 ways in which you can make money are the following:
Advertising – PPC advertising is the easiest way to make money from your blog. You’ll basically display some banner adds in your layout and if your readers decide to click on one of them while consuming your content you’ll get paid a some cents.
Affiliates – No matter what topic you choose to write about, chances are there are going to products related to your topic. Well with affiliate programs you can partner with companies who sell those products and recommend them in your articles. Thanks to special links that the company will provide you with if one of your readers follows your recommendation and makes a purchase you’ll get paid a commission on that sale.
Sponsored posts – Companies that sell products or services in your niche will be willing to pay you to write a post that either talks directly about them or includes them in a prominent way.
How much can you earn blogging?
Potentially a lot! There are thousands of bloggers out there who make a very comfortable living out of their blogs.
How much money you make will depend on a series of variables, including:
- Your niche – Some niches pay more than others.
- The were your readers access your blog from – Companies are willing to pay more to be seen by users from high-converting countries like the USA, Canada, UK, etc.
- Your traffic – The more people read your blog, regardless of the niche and where they read it from, the more money you’ll make.
Let’s try to predict how much you could make with each of the above mentioned monetization techniques.
PPC Advertising
A lot of people might feel inclined to challenge the following numbers, and they would be right to do so, but since the idea here is to give a broad overview on the possibilities of making money blogging let’s go ahead and hypothesize anyway.
Let’s say you start a blog on a topic that pays on average $0,45CPC (CPC stands for Cost Per Click, meaning you’ll make that amount every time someone clicks on one of your ads) and that your site has a 0.5%CTR (CTR stands for Click Through Rate, or in other words, how many clicks you’ll get on an ad for every 100 times you show it). Ok, so far we know that an ad will be clicked on only 0.5% of times it is viewed, and that you’ll get paid, on average, $0.45 every time a click happens, which gives us a $4.5CPM (CPM means how much money you’ll make for every 1000 times you show an ad).
Now that we have hypothesized our numbers let’s see what these mean in terms of how much money you can make blogging based on the last variable, how much traffic you have:
- 20 readers per day = $2.7/mth
- 50 readers per day = $6.75/mth
- 100 readers per day = $13.5/mth
- 300 readers per day = $40.5/mth
Now there are two simple things you can do to improve this numbers. The first is show more than one ad per page. Remember CTR represents how many clicks you’ll get on an add after showing it 100 times, so if they see two ads instead of one the above predictions automatically multiply by two as well. The second is invite your readers to see more than one page on your site. The above predictions were considering that your readers only saw one page on your blog and therefore only one ad (or two if you decide two per page), but if they browse through several pages, maybe through a related articles section, one single reader can actually see plenty more ads, increasing the chances of him/her clicking on one.
Affiliates
Depending on the affiliate program you sign up for you can make an average commission of 1% to 8% of every sale that comes through your links. For the sake of this example let’s assume a 5% commission.
In this case, if someone has spent some amount of time reading one of your articles it means they value your opinion to some extent, so if in that article you recommend a specific product that will help them achieve whatever it is that your readers are looking for they’ll be more inclined to click on that link that and make a purchase than they would on a regular banner ad. Conversion rates for affiliate marketing range, on average from 0.5% to 1%, we’ll assume 0.5%. Now let’s assume, for the sake of this example, that you are promoting a $100 product or service. What would this mean based on your traffic?
- 20 readers per day = $15/mth
- 50 readers per day = $37.5/mth
- 100 readers per day = $75/mth
- 300 readers per day = $225/mth
Now remember those are readers who read your article with the affiliate link, if they came to your site but didn’t read an article with affiliate links in it they don’t count towards the above predictions.
Sponsored posts
This one is the trickiest, as it’s not a straight from the shelve monetizing option, you’ll have to contact potential clients (they’ll contact you eventually) and negotiate each deal individually.
That being said small blogs with a few thousand visits per month will be probably negotiating $50 to $150 articles while larger and more established blogs with thousands of visits per day might be in the $300 to $600 range.
How to get started?
Getting started is not that complicated. You create a blog for free at WordPress.com and simply start writing. If after a while you feel like you are liking the experience and want to invest some time and money into upgrading the design of your blog, getting your own domain, etc. you can definitely do so, but getting your first post up on your brand new blog is literally just as easy as creating a Facebook account and posting your first status update.
Getting started might be easy, but blogging is a game of persistence, that is why you should only consider it if there is a topic that you are passionate about and that you don’t mind dedicating time to for 6-12 months without seeing any returns. If you are ok with that blogging can be a great adventure, very fulfilling and, in some occasions, quite lucrative!