How To Make Money Blogging

Best Strategies To Make Money Blogging

The first thing you must focus on when you start a blog is writing quality content for your readers. Once publish at least 10 optimized posts, you can start working on increasing your blog traffic with Pinterest. I share the best Pinterest marketing strategies in my Pinterest guide here.

It’s important to understand that it takes time and a lot of work to create a profitable blog. To be honest, it can take a few months or even a whole year before you start earning big money from this business. It all depends on you and your determination to succeed.

The truth is that there are many ways to make money blogging. This is what makes blogging so fascinating and challenging at the same time.

There are many guides about how to make money blogging. While most of them talk about different ways to earn money, only a few of them show exactly how to do it and talk about the different business models for blogs. This is what makes this guide different.

Most of us already know that if you want to earn money blogging you can earn from displaying ads on your site, promoting products through affiliate links, selling products, etc. But the question is: How exactly?

Let’s go through the most popular business models to making money from blogging and what it takes to get it started:

Blogging Business Model No.1 – Ad-Based Revenue Model

The ad-based revenue model seems to be the easiest way to earn money blogging when you know how to generate high monthly traffic to your website.

Once you reach a certain level of monthly visitors, you can apply to join Mediavine, Adthrive, or other ad network platforms, to increase your ad revenue.

Best Ad Network Platforms to Work With:

Mediavine – To get accepted to Mediavine, your website needs to have a minimum of 50,000 sessions monthly (used to be 25,000). I work with Mediavine since 2019 and they are super professional. Love working with them.
AdThrive – They require a minimum of 100,000 monthly pageviews to be accepted to their program. I personally didn’t work with them before but I hear good things about them and I know many bloggers who work with them.
Ezoic – I work with them on another website that I have that gets 10K organic traffic per month from Google. The good thing about working with Ezoic is that they are no longer impose pageview limits upon new sign-ups. This means that you can apply to their platform as long as your blog’s traffic sources are reliable. But the part I liked less is that you need to make tests and courses before you start making money and you need to set up everything by yourself. And you need to pay extra if you want to display premium ads on your website that suppose to be more profitable (I didn’t try it). That being said, Ezoic is usually more profitable than Google Adsense.
Google Adsense – This is the first ad network I worked with. There are no traffic limits and almost every website can join Google Adsense. It is very easy to join and display their ads on your website but you usually get paid less than the rest of the platforms. As a new blogger, you can join Google Adsense and when you hit 50K monthly session, apply to Mediavine family!
SheKnows / BlogHer
Monumetric

What Is The Average RPM?

The average RPM ranges between $7 to $30 and greatly depends on your niche, quality of your content, traffic source, and the number of advertisers on the platform. My Average RPM is $25 and I’m working on increasing it.

RPM = Ad revenue per thousand impressions – is calculated by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of ad impressions you received, then multiplying by 1000.

So, how many page views do you need to earn $5,000 a month?

Let’s do the math. If your RPM is $20, then you need 250,000 visitors per month to earn $5,000. (250,000/1000=250 ->250*20=$5,000).

In fact, you can also earn $5,000 by generating only 100,000 monthly visitors. How exactly? If you manage to increase your RPM to $50 by optimizing your website content, 100,000 monthly visitors will be equal to $5,000.

But is it possible to reach $50 RPM?

Yes, it is. Jess from A Passion And A Passport blog managed to increase her average RPM to $50, which is outstanding. Here blog niche is mainly about traveling and $50 RPM is usually more common on personal finance websites. She said that she achieved this high RPM by writing long and strong articles, which actually makes sense because if you want to increase your page RPM you need to keep your readers more time on your pages so they’ll see more ads.

Here Are A Few Tips to Increase Your RPM:

Display video ads
SEO – Optimize your website for Google (organic traffic usually gets longer session durations, which means that people who get organically to your website stay longer)
Use infographics
Write high-quality content that helps people – at least 1500 words article!
Use quality images
Create a user-friendly, responsive website and your readers enjoy reading
Make sure you display enough ads on your website (usually 30% of your website’s content should be ads)
Consult with the ad company you work with to get custom recommendations on how to increase your website RPM

Best Blogger Who Earns From The Ad-Based Revenue Model

Recently I came across Jon’s Fat Stacks Blog that has this super brave strategy in which he focuses mainly on ad revenue. He published on one of his income reports that he earned $80,204 just from displaying ads on one of his websites. Which is insanely outstanding!!!

While most of the successful bloggers talk about creating a few income streams as a blogger, Jon is working on increasing his ad revenue and it definitely works for him. He talks about his unique SEO strategy that focuses on long-tail keywords that have low search volumes which are easier to rank.

By reading his weekly newsletters, I can tell that Jon is a very interesting person and I love how he breaks the SEO rules.

I hate building backlinks and everyone is talking about how important it is to scale your website. Jon was the first brave blogger who said F*** the backlinking. When you create the best content on the website, people will link to it anyway.

So if all you want to do is to write articles to make money blogging, you should know that with the right SEO strategy, it is possible.

Step for Making Money By Displaying Ads:

Start a blog – If you haven’t already then go here and read the full instructions for setting up a blog on BlueHost.
Publish great content – Here is what you need to know.
Increase traffic with Pinterest – Here is a detailed guide on How I Drove 100K+ Visitors Per Month Using Pinterest.
Join an ad network – I like Mediavine.
Optimize your website for Google – Here is a detailed SEO guide.
Publish tons of great and optimized content as fast a possible!

Here are my top blogging tools I recommend.

Blogging Business Model No.2 – Affiliate-Based Revenue Model

If you want to make money from blogging you need to know how to blog as a business.

That means that if you have no idea how to blog for money, you can end up having hundreds of thousands of monthly pageviews and making just a few hundred dollars a month. I have been there, it sucks!

On the other side, if you’re very experienced and you know exactly what you’re doing, you can get only 30K page views a month and make $5K a month easily.

This is because bloggers have so many options to earn money and here is where the second blogging business model comes in.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. It is definitely one of the most common ways to earn money blogging.

There are many affiliate programs, including Amazon Associates, CJ Affiliates, ShareaSale, Shopstyle Collective, Magiclinks, Rakuten, and many more. In fact, almost every brand that sells its product online has an affiliate program.

Although this method seems to be the easiest way to start with, it is hard to earn big money without having a good marketing strategy.

How To Become An Affiliate Marketer?

You have two ways to learn affiliate marketing; the first way is to read articles online and then try different affiliate strategies by yourself, and the second way is to take courses that will help you get in business faster.

The greatest benefit of affiliate marketing is that you can promote products without having to create them. Affiliate marketing is based on revenue sharing and this way you can earn money selling other companies’ products.

Many successful bloggers earn more than 50% of their monthly income from affiliate marketing. Take, for example, Michelle from Making Sense of Cents blog, she started publishing her income reports back in 2012, and if you follow the reports you will see that affiliate marketing was almost always her highest income generator.

Step for Making Money From Affiliate Marketing:

Start a blog – If you haven’t already then go here and read the full instructions for setting up a blog on BlueHost.
Take an Affiliate Marketing course – I recommend the “Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing” course by Michelle Schroeder-Gardner that shares how she went from $0 in affiliate income to over $50,000 per month.
Publish great content with affiliate links– Here is what you need to know.
Increase traffic with Pinterest – Here is a detailed guide on How I Drove 100K+ Visitors Per Month Using Pinterest.
Optimize your website for Google to increase affiliate income– Here is a detailed SEO guide.
Join an ad network to increase your profits

Here are my top blogging tools I recommend.

My Content Strategy For Affiliate Marketing

In this strategy I create two main types of content:

“Best products” posts – this is where I research and list the best products in a certain category. Here I place my affiliate links. I display ads also on this page but when this page gets very profitable and people are buying through my affiliate links, I remove the ads from it to increase the conversion rate, which means to prevent readers from leaving this page by clicking an ad.
“How to” posts – this is where I teach, review, explain how to use certain products, and link it to the “Best Products” post. This is the best way to gain your readers’ trust and help them. Once you managed to help them and they trust you, they will follow your recommendations. I add affiliate links to this type of post and display ads on it.

Once I wrote the “Best products” and the “How to” posts, I’ll link every new related article on my blog to these two because of two reasons; the first one is that it helps me build a website hierarchy that tells Google that these are important pages on my blog that I want to promote. And the second reason is that every reader that will visit my website, will get to these profitable pages. To rank these pages high on Google you’ll have to work on backlinks.

Blogging Business Model No.3 – Sale-Based Revenue Model

Another very common way to make money blogging is by selling your own products or services online. If you had a business before you started your blog, you definitely can promote your own products or services.

If not, here you have a few ideas:

E-courses
Ebooks
Site membership
Photos or graphics
Audio or video
Crafts
Apps, websites, plugins or themes
Freelance services
Sponsored posts

Before you create a product or offer a service, you should know your audience; who they are, what they need, and how you can help them. Use your blog traffic to promote and sell your products.

My Digital Products Shop

For example, I have a shop on this website where I offer graphic files designed by me. I sell Instagram story stickers and covers, SVG files, printable planners, and more. You can visit my shop by clicking here.

Blogging Business Model No.4 – Multiple Stream Revenue Model

This model is a combination of all the three models above. This model is good for experienced bloggers. Most of the bloggers get to this model eventually to increase their blog profitability.

Bottom line,

By combining multiple revenue models, bloggers can diversify and increase their monthly revenue. Some of the models are easier to start with than others. I recommend starting with affiliate marketing, then when you reach at least 25K monthly visitors you can apply to work with an ad company, and then think about creating your own product to sell.