If you walk into your boss’s office and tell them that you’re leaving the company to start a blog, they might laugh at you. After all, who makes a living online writing blog posts?
Leaving a stable job to start your blog might seem like a risky affair when you think about the financial rewards.
However, the reality is that thousands of people make a decent living from running a blog.
Sure, it might take some time to get your blog up and running to the point where it sees sizable daily traffic volumes. However, after you get through the initial phase of breaking through obscurity, your blog will start attracting revenue from advertisers and other affiliate sources of income.
So, how much can you expect to earn from running a blog? Let’s take a look at the answer and decide if it’s the career path for you.
How Much Do Bloggers Earn?
As with every other business venture, you’ll need to put in plenty of hard work, in the beginning, to get your blog off of the ground. To give you a short answer, here’s what’s possible if you start a blog and commit to publishing new content two or three times a week.
- Year 1: $1,000 – $10,000
- Year 2: $10,000 – $30,0000
- Year 3: $50,000 – $100,000
- Year 4: $100,000 – $250,000
- Year 5: $200,000 – $400,000
As you can see, it takes some time to get into numbers that can provide you with a full-time living. Many bloggers decide to quit during the first year of launching their blog. They simply can’t find the resources or time and effort to keep their blog running.
The key to successful blogging is persistence and dedication to achieving your goal of a blog lifestyle that earns you an income.
Traffic Is Your Key to Success with Blogging
The more traffic, the higher your earning potential. By registering with Google Analytics, you can track the volume of traffic entering your site, and what pages the visitors read.
It’s possible to earn an income of between $0.01 – $0.10 for each page view in most blogging niches, using affiliate and display ads. Therefore, if you get 1,000-page views in a month, you can expect to earn between $10 to $100 from advertising on your blog.
However, if you scale this figure up to 100,000-page views, then you can scale your income as well, with potential earnings being between $1,000 to $10,000 per month.
The key to attracting more page views is content. The content on your site plays a significant role in drawing new eyeballs to your blog. You need to consistently produce top-quality content if you want to keep your visitor traffic increasing.
It’s All About the Email List
Your email list acts as a list of potential clients that signed up to your blog’s free offer for information. With an email list, you can start marketing to your prospects. Set up a sales funnel using a product like Clickfunnels and start marketing products and services to people that sign up for your email list.
Google updates its algorithm from time to time. During these updates, it might delist some of your pages from its search algorithm. In one fell swoop, Google can kill your profitable blog that’s receiving plenty of traffic and advertiser revenue.
However, if you have an email list, you’ll always be able to reach out to your prospective customers and clients. Research shows that successful bloggers can convert traffic from your email list into customers that buy the product at a rate of $0.5 to $2 per customer.
That means that every new client you sign to your email list has a potential lifetime earnings value of up to $2. Therefore, if you have an email list of 2,000 subscribers, you could be netting a monthly sales average of $2 from each, giving you a monthly revenue of up to $2,000 from your list.
Write What You Know
There are two elements you need to know when searching for a niche to write about in your blog. First, you need to choose a profitable niche. There’s no point in writing loads of great content in a niche that no-one cares about online.
Second, you need to choose a niche that aligns with your interests and values. If you pick a niche that you don’t know anything about or one that you only have a minor interest in, then you’ll eventually stop producing good content that people want to read.
What Are the Most Profitable Niches for Bloggers?
Pick a niche in this list and start your blog. All of the niches in this list are profitable, and there are thousands of bloggers making a full-time living from producing content on these topics.
- Personal finance
- Product reviews
- Fashion
- Travel
- Lifestyle
- Supplements and health products
How You Can Make Money Blogging for Your Income
After building a blog on a popular topic, you can leverage the platform to create income. The internet is the ideal realm for scaling your business, and if you can build a brand that has opportunities for scaling, you’ll end up with a winner.
So, how do you monetize your site and start earning the big bucks? Follow these strategies to start.
Cost-Per-Click Advertising Models (CPC)
Google AdSense is the best platform for launching a CPC campaign. With this model, every time someone clicks on an ad, Google pays you a few cents. If the keyword you’re targeting is popular, you could earn as much as a few dollars every time someone clicks the ad on your blog.
Cost-per-Action Links for Affiliates
After your blog starts receiving traffic north of 30,000-page views per month, you can start an affiliate strategy to earn more income. Manufacturers will pay you an affiliate commission every time someone buys one of its products using your affiliate link.
For example, if you’re running a blog about smoothie recipes, then you could write an article about the best blenders. Hyperlink the text in the article referring to the products, and encourage your readers to take action and click the link to buy that specific blender.
You get a commission that can vary between 5% to 60% of the sale, depending on what you’re selling. It’s crucial to present your affiliate options to your readers as a light selling opportunity. Don’t be pushy, or you run the risk of sounding like a salesperson, and that will cost your blog readers.
Sponsored Posts
After your blog gains traction, you can use it to host and promote sponsored posts. Companies might contact you to write about their website or product offering. Of course, they’ll be paying you for the privilege. Some bloggers can earn up to $30,000 for a sponsored post, and some make even more.
You can also write sponsored posts on other sites to drive traffic to your website and increase page views, as well. The more links you have on other people’s sites, the more it raises your credibility ranking in the eyes of the search engines.
Direct Advertisements
Some companies and brands will reach out to your email address on your site. They might offer you a direct advertising deal that’s worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company places a banner advert on your blog and gives you an RPM of $20. Therefore, you stand to earn $20,000 in revenue from this single banner add if you’re getting 1-million page views per month.
However, it’s important to note that as the world transitions to browsing the internet via mobile devices, the advertising space is getting a lot smaller, limiting these types of opportunities.
Advertising Content on Your Site
Google Ads and Facebook Ads are two of the most popular advertising models for promoting web content. If you’re running an affiliate link in your post, you can use these platforms to push your post.
It costs you money to run an ad campaign on these platforms. However, if you’re running the ad to promote an affiliate post, and it earns you more than what you spend on the campaign – you’re winning.
The issue with advertising, especially on Facebook, is that you need to laser-target your ads for optimal click-through rates. The cost of running a campaign can be expensive, and if you don’t see any results, it could overextend your marketing budget.
The key to using these platforms is to test. Test every aspect of your campaign. Find out what’s working and what’s a waste of your time and money.
Speaking Offers
As the years go by with your blog, you’ll develop a reputation in the online world. As a result, more people start taking notice of your content. This effect could lead to companies asking you to host or take part in speaking events in your niche.
As a blogger, you’ll build plenty of knowledge in your niche, and this opportunity allows you to earn money from your expertise. Speaking fees can range from $2,000 to $50,000, depending on your niche and the popularity of your blog.
Freelancing Jobs
Freelancing is the low-hanging fruit of the blogger-verse. When you’re first starting your career as a blogger, it takes some time to build an audience to the stage where you can start to monetize your efforts.
In the meantime, many bloggers turn to the freelance writing world to earn a few extra bucks. When applying for a freelancing position, having a blog can improve your chances of securing the work. If your blog has plenty of unique content, and the writing is good, it’s an ideal portfolio to present your potential client.
Tips to Improve Your Blogging Skills
Here are a few tips you can use to accelerate your blogging career and get on the fast-track with your writing.
Hire Writers
Many bloggers start their careers full of enthusiasm. They release a new piece every day because they have plenty to say. However, this enthusiasm eventually runs dry, and you’ll find yourself struggling to create unique, fresh content for your blog.
At this stage, you need to hire writers to do the work for you. Advertise for a writer on sites like Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer. These sites have plenty of writers looking for work, and many of them have talented writing skills.
Use Grammar Tools
No-one wants to read content that has poor grammar and no structure. Using an app like Grammarly can assist you in grammar-checking your work to ensure it meets professional standards. For the price of a cup of coffee, you could have a grammar tool that lets you produce flawless work.
Practice
Your writing skills might be somewhat less than stellar when starting your blog. At this point, you should spend as much time writing as possible. Practice makes perfect, and by writing every day, you’ll steadily improve your skill.
Create a Publishing Schedule
While you might be writing every day, there’s no need to publish on the same schedule. During the first 6-months of launching your blog, it’s going to take a while to build traffic.
Unloading all of your best content in the first few weeks is a futile exercise. It’s better to schedule your posts for publication two or three times a week.
Using this strategy, you’ll save your best ammo for when your blog starts to experience higher traffic flows.
Start Blogging and Find Freedom with Your work
Blogging is fantastic for a few reasons. Once you have a model that works, it’s easy to scale your efforts and turn your blog into a money-making machine.
There’s no need to stop with one blog. If you manage to automate most of your processes through the use of VAs and writers for hire, you can start producing numerous blogs in a variety of niches. Each of these blogs earns you a residual income that starts to mount up as the blogs gain traction.
Eventually, you’ll reach a space where your blogs are almost running by themselves. At this juncture in your blogging career, you’ll find that you have more time, and more income, allowing you to chase other business and investment dreams.
