How do bloggers make money? Here are 6 main methods of making money for bloggers.
If you’re thinking about becoming a blogger, you’re probably wondering, “How do bloggers make money?”
I’ve been personally blogging since 2015 and have two blogs so sharing from my own experience, there are 6 main methods:
- Advertisements
- Affiliate Marketing
- Sponsorships
- Digital Sales
- Physical Sales
- Services
In this post, you’ll learn what these methods are, which ones are my absolute favorite and the best way to get page views in order to make money.
Please note that this is a reader-supported site.
Purchases made through genuinely recommended links may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
What is a blog?
What does a blogger do?
Several questions might come to your mind, like: Who is a blogger? What does a blogger do? How do bloggers make money? How to become a professional blogger? If these do, then you’re at the right place!
A person who owns and maintains a blog is called a blogger. A blog can be maintained by an individual or a group of people. Blogger regularly updates the latest information and happenings in a specific niche or he might be covering multiple niches at a time. This is exactly how a web log is arranged reverse chronologically.
Why would someone want to be a blogger?
The reasons for why someone wants to be a blogger vary from person to person. Blogging is a very diverse field so you can start your own blog in any niche. But before moving forward, you must have a clear goal or destination in your mind.
Do ask yourself – why do you want to start this blog? What are your expectations from this blog? Well, if you just want to make it an online diary or take it as a source of interaction with the world, go ahead and start writing on whatever topic you want.
However, in case you want to adopt blogging as a career to earn money, there are a number of things you need to focus on. You can find the exact steps of how to start a money making blog with my free blogging course.
How do bloggers make money?
Just think about how great it would be to connect to hundreds of thousands of people each day? How amazing is it that you’ve the power to change the world through your words? And what if you get paid for it?
It’s not just a fantasy. You can do this all with a laptop and internet within your reach because blogging is a legit business that you can start right from your home.
Here are the most common ways that bloggers make money.
Advertisements on Your Blog
Once you’ve built a strong online community, there are a number of ways to monetize your blog. What companies and brands want is to spread their products and services to maximum number of people.
One way they do this is by advertising on your site, which ultimately means that you sell space on your blog to show ads.
You don’t have to manually place these ads though, which makes putting ads on your blog really easy.
There are third party advertisement management companies that place these ads on your blog with a code in the back end, which is why having a self-hosted blog is key. They take care of working with brands and companies to find the best ads to show your readers.
You’re probably already familiar with these ads. Think about when you go onto a website and there are ads every few paragraphs.
Every time you pass one of these ads, it counts as an impression. The website owner then gets paid out a few cents for each impression, which if you have a lot of page views, can easily add up to hundreds or even thousands a month.
Best Ad Management Companies to Work With
The most common ad management company that bloggers work with is Google AdSense, but I actually don’t recommend signing up with them.
Bloggers work with them because Google AdSense accepts any number of page views and new bloggers are eager to make money, but Google AdSense’s payoff is so low that it’s not worth cluttering up your blog and distracting readers when your blog is so new.
Instead, it’s really best to wait until you have:
- 50,000 sessions/month to sign up with Mediavine, a premium ad network,
- or if you don’t want to wait that long, then Ezoic has been accepting bloggers lately with 10,000 page views/month*.
*You can get these numbers from Google Analytics.
I joined Mediavine in 2018 (back when they were accepting 25,000 sessions/month) and I was immediately making a consistent $500+ a month.
How to Get 50,000 Sessions to Get Into Mediavine
Getting 50,000 sessions/month might seem like a lofty goal, but it’s achievable with consistent and strategic blog posting in 2-3 years.
The best way to do this is by search engine optimizing your blog so you can get traffic right from Google and right from the readers who are searching for exactly the content you’re writing about.
You can learn more about SEO here and how to create a strategy to get into the ad network of your choice.
If you’re thinking about taking my SEO course and found it through this blog post, you can email me (hello@sarahchetrit.com) for a $40 off code.
Affiliate Marketing
While you’re getting your page views up so you can get into the ad network of your choice, you have another great option to make money with your blog, and the best part is, you don’t need a lot of readers. You just need targeted content.
This other method of blogging income that brings me in $25,000/year is through affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is how a majority of bloggers make their money (in addition to ad revenue and sponsorships).
Basically, affiliate marketing is about adding links to certain products or services in your blog content. Each time a person clicks on that affiliate link through your blog to buy something, you’ll earn money.
Showing ads on my site and affiliate marketing are my top two favorite ways to make money because it’s passive. That means blog posts I wrote months or even years ago still bring me in hundreds today.
To make the maximum amount of money with affiliate marketing, you’ll need to:
- write about products and services with a good commission rate,
- and most importantly, write search engine optimized blog posts to target readers who more or less already want to purchase the product/service you’re writing about and are willing to use your link to make the purchase.
If you’re thinking about taking my SEO course and found it through this blog post, you can email me (hello@sarahchetrit.com) for a $40 off code.
Sponsorships
Sponsorships are another form of paid advertisement on your blog but instead of displaying advertising banners, you get hired by brands to write blog posts about them or include them in your blog.
For example, since I’m a travel blogger, Discover Los Angeles (Los Angeles’ tourism board) flew me out to Los Angeles and paid me to write a Los Angeles itinerary blog post including various vendors, restaurants and activities.
You can get sponsorships through influencer sites, or in the case of Discover Los Angeles, once you become more well known and brands discover you through simple search engine searches, they will start reaching out to you via email.
If you do sponsorships, make sure to tweak your influencer contract template to have both you and the brand to sign! This will protect your time and money.
Digital Sales
Digital selling has a vast scope in blogging. You can sell digital products like eBooks, templates, virtual learning courses, workout plans and many other products.
A good way to promote your own digital products is by writing blog posts about them or including them in blog posts.
Physical Sales
If none of the above options works for you, you can start selling physical products through your blog. It’s just similar to what brands are doing online. What makes it different from them is that in addition to offering products, you also share blog posts in that particular niche.
You can simply start with writing blog posts and then start selling your product when you get a certain audience on your blog.
If you don’t like keeping inventory on hand, you can also use print-on-demand services and sell anything from notebooks to sweaters one at a time.
Services
With blogging, you can offer your services or skills online to generate revenue. For example, if you’re good at writing, you can share blogs on improving writing skills and also online writing services to your audience.
I hope this post helps you answer your question, “How do bloggers make money?”
Which method is the most enticing to you?
No matter which one you choose, always make sure to write search engine optimized blog posts so the readers get to your blog posts simply by Googling exactly what you write about!
Want to learn more? You can find more helpful blog posts here, get consistent page views to your blog with my SEO course, or follow me on social media to get daily tips:
- TikTok for blogging + social tips @sarah.chetrit
- Facebook Group to ask me anything Blog and Make Money
- Instagram for travel, blogging and Korean food @sarchetrit
Until next time,
Sarah Chetrit