If you want to make money blogging you need to have a plan. There are many ways that you can make money from your blog and this is the problem. When you start, everything looks like a great opportunity to make money.
But if you want to make money blogging as fast as you can, you should have a plan. In this page, I list the best ways to make money from your blog, and what I do to make money from my website.
Best Strategies To Make Money Blogging
Once you’ve chosen a niche for your blog and have set up a website, you can start planning and setting goals.
The first thing you must focus on when you start a blog is writing quality content for your readers. Once you have published at least 10 optimized posts, you can start working on increasing your blog traffic with Pinterest. Make sure to read my Pinterest guide for generating 200K+ monthly pages views (which helped me earn over $8K in August 2023).
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 significant money from this business. It all depends on your determination to succeed.
The truth is that there are many ways to make money blogging, which makes it fascinating and challenging at the same time.
While there are numerous guides on how to make money blogging, most only discuss different ways to earn money, with only a few detailing exactly how to do it and discussing various business models for blogs. This guide stands out for providing practical insights.
Many of us already know the common methods of earning money through blogging—displaying ads, promoting products via affiliate links, selling products, etc. But the question remains: How exactly?
Let’s delve into the most popular business models for making money from blogging and what it takes to get started.
Blogging Business Model No.1 – Ad-Based Revenue Model
The ad-based revenue model appears to be the easiest way to earn money blogging, especially 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 platforms like Mediavine, AdThrive, or other ad networks 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, the 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, which stands for 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 a $50 RPM?
Yes, it is.
Here is a screenshot of my Mediavine revenue from November 2023 when I reached a $53 RPM:
This is pretty exciting for me because two years ago, my RPM was only $20. I managed to more than double my RPM, which boosted my revenue significantly. Things I did that helped me improve my page RPM include writing longer and better content, adding videos, improving the visuals on my website, and more.
Here Is a List of Tips to Help You Increase Your Page 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 and invest in creative and beautiful graphic designs
- 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 successful bloggers emphasize creating multiple income streams, Jon is focused on increasing his ad revenue, and it definitely works for him. He shares insights into his unique SEO strategy, which centers on targeting long-tail keywords with low search volumes, making them easier to rank.
Reading his weekly newsletters, I can tell that Jon is a fascinating person, and I love how he challenges traditional SEO rules.
I dislike building backlinks, and everyone talks about how crucial it is for scaling 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 your goal is to focus on writing articles and make money blogging, know that with the right SEO strategy, it is indeed 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 asap.
- Publish great content
- Increase traffic with Pinterest – Make sure to read my guide on how to get 200K monthly page views.
- Join an ad network – I work with Mediavine.
- Optimize your website for Google
- Publish tons of great and optimized content as fast a possible!
Check my favorite tools for bloggers in the menu.
Blogging Business Model No.2 – Affiliate-Based Revenue Model
If you want to make money from blogging, you need to know how to treat your blog as a business. This means that if you have no idea how to blog for profit, you could end up with hundreds of thousands of monthly pageviews and only make a few hundred dollars a month. I’ve been there, and it’s frustrating!
On the other hand, if you’re very experienced and know exactly what you’re doing, you could have only 30K page views a month and easily make $5K a month.
This is because bloggers have numerous options to earn money, and this 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 into 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, allowing you to earn money by selling other companies’ products.
Many successful bloggers earn more than 50% of their monthly income through 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.
Steps 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 asap.
- 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.
- Increase traffic with Pinterest – Make sure to read my guide on how to get 200K monthly page views.
- Optimize your website for Google to increase affiliate income.
- Join an ad network to increase your profits
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, incorporating my affiliate links. While I also display ads on this page, once it becomes highly profitable and people are making purchases through my affiliate links, I remove the ads to boost the conversion rate. This prevents readers from leaving the page by clicking on an ad.
- ‘How-To’ posts: Here, I teach, review, and explain how to use certain products, linking back to the ‘Best Products’ post. This method is the best way to gain your readers’ trust and assist them. Once you’ve helped and gained their trust, they are more likely to follow your recommendations. I include affiliate links in this type of post and display ads.
After writing the ‘Best Products’ and ‘How-To’ posts, I link every new related article on my blog to these two for two reasons: firstly, it helps me build a website hierarchy that signals to Google that these are important pages I want to promote. Secondly, every reader visiting my website will have access to these profitable pages. To rank these pages high on Google, working on backlinks is crucial.
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. If you want to read how I make money with my blog – read this income report where I share how I made over $8k per month in August 2023.
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.
