How to make money blogging?

Can you make money blogging? It’s a question that many ask, yet very few know how they can earn a living from running their own blog. While blogging does require time and dedication, it is certainly possible to make money from blogging full time or as a side hustle .All it takes is the right blogging strategies.

In this guide, we not only reveal the strategies you need to successfully launch and grow your blog, but we also provide you with the top eight ways you can quickly and easily start making money blogging.

This guide will guide you on how to profit from your blog. If you need guidance on how to start a blog we recommend reading our Step by Step How to start a blog guide.

How much money can you make blogging?

Before we explore the ways you can make money, you’re probably wondering exactly how much money you can make with a blog.

Blog owners with 10,000 to 100,000 monthly page views often earn between 2 cents and 10 cents for each page view from advertising, equating to $200 to $10,000 per month. Sponsored articles range in price from $25 to $750 for each post, depending on the size of the audience, genre, and individual sponsorship agreement.

Bloggers who sell digital items like online courses or guides, on the other hand, often earn up to $10,000 per month or more. Affiliate marketing is an additional opportunity for a blogger to supplement their income. Christine Wang from TheSkiGirl.com, for example, currently earns six figures each month from affiliate marketing. Her top monetization strategy is to utilize Amazon Affiliates with links to the products her blog reviews.

Of course, you don’t have to have a large audience or a well-established blog in order to start generating money. Part-time blogger Nikki Bahan, from Nikkisplate.com, earns around $2,800 monthly from her lifestyle and DIY blog through advertising and affiliate marketing.

Choose Your Niche

When creating a profitable blog, the first step is to choose your niche carefully, as it plays a key role in your potential for success.

Your niche is the main subject for your blog, allowing you to focus on a certain field and attract a specific set of readers. It also allows readers to associate your blog with a particular topic. In doing so, they know exactly what to expect when they visit your blog. They’ll also consider you to be an authority on the subject and make you their first port of call when they need relevant advice.

When choosing your blog’s niche, ensure that it is:

1. Something you’re experienced with or passionate about

To grow a large audience and earn consistent revenue, a blog requires regular and high-quality content. In order for your blog to stand the test of time, you should therefore write about something you’re really interested in.

Consider your degree of professional expertise as well. If you have no previous experience in your niche, it’ll be more difficult for you to establish yourself as a reputable source of information in that field.

2. A subject area that’s low in competition

Prominent blogs, companies, or forums in your niche imply that many are already profiting from it. You can also conduct a Google search to determine the complexity of keyword ranking. It will be more difficult to get organic traffic to your blog if well-known businesses (with much larger marketing spend) dominate the first page of search engine results.

3. A niche with plenty of monetization opportunities

Start by considering the product promotion opportunities in that topic area. If your niche is gardening, for example, then you can write a blog post about the best gardening tools and incorporate brand partnerships or affiliate links.

You should also determine whether or not there are enough affiliate programs that sell goods in that category. This is another strong indicator of a profitable blog niche.

What blogging niches are the most profitable?

According to a blog income report, the blogging niches that make the most money include:

• Food, with a median monthly income of $9,169
• Personal finance, with a median monthly income of $9,100
• Lifestyle, with a median monthly income of $5,199
• Mommy, with a median monthly income of $5,150
• Travel, with a median monthly income of $5,000

Marketing, with a median monthly income of $4,269

Understand Your Audience

Traffic plays a key role in your blog’s profitability. Yet in order to generate the most traffic possible, you need to understand exactly who it is you’re blogging for. In other words, who your target audience is.

Your target audience consists of the readers who benefit the most from your blog content.

Start by considering the types of readers you could attract based on the topics you’ll be writing about. Then, think of your audience in terms of their:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Interests
• Occupation
• Personality traits and behavior
• Income level
• Education level
• Marital status

Since your blog will live online, you should also consider online behavior. Ask yourself:

• Where can you frequently find them spending time online?
• Which social media platforms do they use regularly?
• How much time do they spend online on a daily basis?

Finally, consider the kind of challenges these individuals experience – and the answers they seek – within the area you’ll be writing about. This will help you to establish a blog that’s centered on targeting these groups and giving them the answers they want and need.

Create Content on Large Scales

To generate consistent traffic to your blog and increase your chances of monetization, you’ll need to create high-quality content on a large scale. This will enable you to post new content regularly and signifies to Google that you run a relevant and active blog.

Doing so will involve a lot of writing, however, not to mention hours spent planning and researching each blog post.

Therefore, unless you’re a professional writer who can dedicate your full time to growing your blog, you may struggle to scale your content successfully. Thankfully, there are some things you can do to make scaling your content easier and more time efficient:

1. Base Your Content on Keyword Research

The purpose of keyword research is to understand what your target audience is searching for online and what it will take to rank for those terms in search engines such as Google. When you know this information, you can quickly and easily know which content to develop for your readers.

To perform keyword research for your niche, you can use helpful tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, or Google Keyword Planner.

To take your content planning to the next level, consider hiring freelance keyword research services. These professionals can provide you with high volume, yet low competition keywords that are relevant to your own niche. This increases your chances of ranking highly in search engines on those topics, thus boosting your income earning potential.

2. Outsource to Freelancers

Speaking of freelance services, you can also outsource your blog writing efforts to professional blog and article writers to dramatically reduce your workload. This is particularly helpful for those with little blog writing experience, yet who still want to publish high-quality and engaging content on their site.

Most writers have a thorough knowledge of SEO practices too, so they can also optimize your content to rank higher in search results. You can even outsource your content planning to a freelancer to generate even more blog post ideas for your target audience, thus helping you to truly scale your content production.

3. Allow Experts to Guest Post

Using guest authors is one of the easiest strategies to swiftly increase your scale of content. It enables you to have others create content for your blog while providing them with the opportunity to link back to their own URL. It’s a common marketing strategy that benefits both sides as it increases traffic to each blog or website.

This means you’ll be spending less time writing content and more time working on other areas of monetizing your site. Allowing guest posts on your blog also boosts your credibility within your niche. Plus, it can have positive effects on SEO due to the more varied content (and therefore, keywords) your blog is able to target.

4. Start with Easier Types of Content Then Move to More In-depth Pieces

When you’re just starting your blog, you can enhance your content production by starting with posts that are quicker and easier to write.

Listicles are a great example of these, as they simply involve you rounding up the top ideas or methods for achieving something in particular. If your blogging niche was health, then you might write a blog post on the top 20 ways to naturally strengthen your immune system, for example.

Although they don’t go into great depth, listicles still provide readers with content they perceive as high value, due to the range of information.

From here, you can then work your way up to content that requires more in-depth research and longer word counts. “The Ultimate Guide to Gut Health” is one such example. It would require covering the topic from every possible angle to give readers the most comprehensive overview of the topic.

Promote Your Content

As you know, increasing your website traffic is a vital step toward earning money from your blog. Therefore, you’ll also need to promote your blog regularly and effectively to boost your chances of success.

Here are some ideas for getting the word out and increasing the popularity of your blog. In the beginning, try focusing on just 1-2 traffic sources to increase your engagement.

1. SEO

We’ve already covered an important part of SEO earlier in this guide: keyword research. However, you’ll also want to be embracing other SEO strategies in order to put your blog content in front of the largest audience possible.

SEO refers to techniques and strategies that increase the visibility of your website in Google search results. This can include updates and optimizations to the blog’s content, as well as changes to the site’s structure. These changes often involve navigation, connections to and from blog pages, and even some behind-the-scenes coding. Finally, securing links from external websites to your own (such as through guest posting or sharing your article as a resource) can also boost your SEO.

To help you with your SEO effort, we’ve written a helpful guide to help you learn the Basics of SEO. If you need further guidance, you can always use Fiverr’s SEO services, offered by freelance marketers.

2. Email Marketing with a Newsletter

Creating an email newsletter to promote your blog content is another approach to generating traffic to your site and making money. This also ensures that visitors will return to your blog to read additional content.

To get readers to sign up for your newsletter, try the following two tactics:

Use an Incentive

People are much more inclined to sign up if something worthwhile is given in exchange.

Known as a “lead magnet”, this incentive could take the form of a free guide, masterclass, workbook, or discount code that you provide as a gift when a reader signs up for your newsletter.

Utilize Pop-Up Opt-in Forms

An opt-in form is a banner on your blog that allows a reader to quickly and easily type in their information to subscribe to your newsletter. When this opt-in form is displayed as a pop-up, it’s hard to ignore. You can also use your opt-in form to showcase your lead magnet and show readers what they can receive simply by entering their name and email address.

3. Social Media Strategy

Social media marketing is another effective and free way to attract more exposure to your blog content. You can share your blog posts on your personal social media profiles, but we also highly recommend creating separate business accounts or pages purely for your blog – especially on Facguide, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube.

You can even create social media specific material to support your blog content, like photos or infographics that link back to your blog articles. Similarly, you can repurpose your blog material into YouTube videos, with a link to the corresponding post included underneath each video.

4. Use Taboola and Outbrain

Both Taboola and Outbrain are third-party platforms that offer native advertising. This type of advertising matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears. This means it is a less obtrusive, and therefore more effective, type of advertising.

By enabling advertising to show in certain sections of your site, you can use Taboola and Outbrain to monetize your blog. These advertisements appear in the sidebar, below the content, inside the content, or as a banner. You then receive compensation depending on the number of desired actions taken, such as the clicks, impressions, or video views the advertisement received.

5. Be Creative

Increase your reach even further by using a variety of unique content types. Post helpful how-to videos on your blog, and share your knowledge by launching a podcast or conducting a webinar. The more material you publish to establish yourself as an authority in your niche, the more likely it is that others will discover your blog.

You should also try to write about relevant talents within your niche, such as “the top 10 landscape photographers”, for example. You can then share your blog post with those celebrated within it and encourage them to share it with their own audience. This equates to backlinks to your blog and promotion among a larger audience.

Monetize Your Content

Once you’ve established a solid content strategy and grown your online presence, you can turn your attention to monetizing your blog.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to make money blogging. We reveal the top eight methods below.

1. Sponsored Product Reviews

Every company wants social evidence to convince buyers that their products are worthwhile investments. One of the ways they can do this is by sponsoring bloggers to produce product reviews.

You can get started by contacting any of the brands you use regularly and asking if they would like to sponsor you to review their product on your site. This enables you to earn money by sharing your opinion on a product you already use.

Just ensure that you disclose you’re being paid to write the post. Additionally, share both the positives and negatives of the product so you’re providing your readers with an honest review.

2. Add Google AdSense Ads to Your Blog Posts

Google AdSense is a service that allows you to display advertisements on your blog. Google then inserts those areas with adverts that are relevant to your blog’s niche and visitors. When those advertisements are viewed or clicked, you receive money.

You have complete control over ad sizes, shapes, and placement, allowing you to maximize your chances of clicks and views while providing readers with a non-intrusive viewing experience.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing lets you receive a commission for generating sales of a brand’s products or services. As a result, affiliate marketing is a fairly easy form of passive income.

All you have to do is include affiliate links to various items or services. You can do so by placing affiliate banners, or simply using relevant links to these products or services within the text of your blog posts.

You can search online for affiliate networks relevant to your blog’s niche. Some of the most popular affiliate networks include:

• CJ Affiliate
• Awin
• ShareASale
• eBay Partner Network
• Amazon Associates

4. Sell Sponsored Content for Other Brands Within Your Blog

Businesses may also be interested in paying you to write a blog post about their brand, products, or services. While it isn’t uncommon for brands to approach high-performing blogs within their niche, you can also reach out to brands you admire and ask them if they would like to collaborate in this way.

This sponsored content might be a single blog post or a recurring series of blog posts over a set period of time. This can equate to recurring revenue for your blog.

5. Offer Services

Having a successful blog can also give you the expertise and platform required to sell your own relevant services. This opens up a higher-paying income stream and can ensure you’re earning regular money through your blog.

Just some of the services you can consider offering through your blog include:

• Consulting
• Graphic design
• Social media assistance
• Writing
• Virtual assistance

Depending on your niche, the opportunities can be plentiful.

6. Sell Digital Products

Along with offering services, you can also use your blog to sell digital products to your target audience. Although a digital product will take some time and effort to initially create, it then becomes passive income, as it can be sold an infinite number of times on auto-pilot.

Think about your target audience’s pain points and how you can create a product that helps them overcome these problems.

Popular types of digital products you can consider selling include:

• guides
• Online courses
• Printables, such as planners, worksheets, or artistic prints
• Digital workbooks
• Recorded masterclasses or workshops

7. SpeakingGigs

By using your blog to establish yourself as an authority within your niche, you also increase your chances of obtaining speaking gigs at events such as industry conferences. An opportunity like this can generate a lot of income from your blog, and often allows you to travel to different cities or countries as part of your job.

Ensure you prepare your material as much as possible in the lead-up to your speech. Impressing your audience will help you to get more speaking gigs down the line.

8. Start Selling Physical Products Once You Become an Authority

Once your blog has grown to the point where it’s a household name, you can capitalize on that success and start selling your own merchandise. Doing so allows you to further establish your brand, while generating even more awareness, recognition, and traffic for your blog.

Just some of the most popular types of merchandise include branded:

• T-shirts
• Hoodies or sweaters
• Coffee mugs
• Posters
• Tote bags
• Notguides
• Stickers

You can use a print-on-demand service such as Society6, Printify, or Redbubble. Alternatively, you can have the merchandise produced through a manufacturer and sell and distribute it yourself.

Make Money Blogging

Many dream of leaving their traditional 9-to-5 to become full-time bloggers, and thankfully, this isn’t hard to achieve. All it takes is an in-depth knowledge of how you can make money blogging, which starts with choosing the right niche, understanding your audience, and being able to create and promote your content effectively.

Once your blog is generating plenty of buzz, all you need to do is monetize it through the methods that work best for you, whether that’s creating sponsored content for brands, selling your own merch, offering digital products, embracing affiliate marketing, or more.

By dedicating this time and effort to your content, you will soon be successfully making money from your blog.