How Do Bloggers Make Money?

Ever since the internet became part of our daily lives, blogs have been in exponential growth. In fact, every year there are more blog posts and more bloggers making money from their content.

It became such an important part of our culture, that there are whole industries that revolve around writing for blogs or being a blogger. So the question now is “How do bloggers make money?”

There is not one single answer to that, because there are many ways you can make money as a blogger writer and we will go through some of the most efficient ways to do it. The main focus is to reach multiple revenue streams and not only have one or two.

We’ll divide this article into two separate parts, the numerous ways bloggers make money with their content, and a guide on the necessary steps that you need to do to achieve that.

Advertising

Advertising is most likely the first answer that popped in your mind when asked how bloggers make money, and it is true. Advertising is many times the biggest revenue for bloggers, but there are many different ways to do this.

Sponsored Content

You are probably familiar with how many companies advertise their products or services through influencers on Instagram or other social media platforms. It is not very different for bloggers. This is a great strategy for companies to expose their product or service to certain niches and create brand awareness.

If you have a specific niche and you are popular enough, you can get contacted by companies that cater to your audience and get paid to mention their products or services on your blog posts.

If you don’t want to wait for the famous brands to contact you, check out ConvertSocial social media traffic monetization platform. This is an entry point for bloggers and influencers that allows them to access a massive variety of brands worldwide.

With ConvertSocial, content creators and influencers can select a product or store, tell their audience about it, and earn every time someone makes a purchase following their link. The solution is totally free to use for content creators and they don’t have to waste time searching for advertisers. Sign up, create and place referral links and let your followers get the job done.

You decide on the promotion format.

Display of Ads

This is probably the most used source of revenue for any blogger. Displaying ads on your blog posts can make your revenues go up and create a sustainable income for you. Every time someone clicks on an ad that is being displayed on your blog, you earn a certain amount. These are called pay-per-click (PPC) and they are very common in every blog, or even across the internet.

There are some disadvantages to this PPC advertising. For instance, it might turn people off if you clutter your blog with advertisements. In addition, if you allow so many ads on your blog page it also gives a feel of being unsafe and prone to having viruses.

Another thing to take into attention is that regardless of the amount of traffic that your blog might have if no one clicks on the ads, you won’t get any money from it. You would need many people clicking on the ads for you to make a decent income.

There is an alternative to the PPC, called CPM (or cost per 1,000 impressions), and these are ads where you get paid a certain fixed amount based on the people that have seen the ad.

Google AdSense is one of the best tools to allow this type of advertising on your blog, this way you don’t need to be in contact with any advertisers and the program does everything for you.

Affiliate Marketing

This is another great way to make a reliable source of income from your blog. This is when you use referral links to promote certain products. The way this work is, for example, you write a blog post about the best skincare products. By using referral links on your blog post to the products you use, the company will be paying you because you have mentioned and made a link to their product page.

However, you will have to continuously update your blog post if the company comes out with new products.

Through Digital Products

Sometimes you might not want to advertise other people’s products and instead create and advertise your own. That’s perfectly normal, and it’s another great way to create income through blogging. Besides that, it is also a good way to establish your brand online.

The products you intend to sell have to be related to what you blog about, of course. But there are some products that can easily fit in any type of blog you might have.

Ebooks

Ebooks became extremely popular over the last few years, especially with the introduction of tablets and Kindles. Anyone can just bring out their device and start reading regardless of where they are. And so, it is no surprise that bloggers started to write their own ebooks and sell them in order to generate some income.

There are many ways that you can make your ebooks appealing to your audience. For example, you can add exclusive content that you don’t share in your blog, or write concise content of the information you have on your blog posts so your audience can easily have all the information they need in one place rather than separated into several blog posts.

Memberships

Once you reach a certain number of followers, you could start adding memberships and that way creates a sort of online community. For paid subscribers, you could allow them access to premium content that they couldn’t find anywhere else.

It might take some work to do for you to create premium content, but if you have a large enough audience that is willing to pay for the premium service, it is without a doubt one of the best ways to generate a sustainable income.

However, gathering such an audience might take some time. If you are not there yet, continue to grow your audience and narrow down your niche if you need.

Your Blog as a Portfolio

You can use your blog as a way to advertise your portfolio and your skills. Besides writing about what you like, you are also sort of showing what you can do to your potential customers.

However, there are other ways to showcase your blog and earn in different ways.

Freelancing

As a writer, sometimes you might need to write for other people. Some writers love it and make it their main source of income, others don’t like it as much, but sometimes it’s something necessary.

Besides receiving an income, you are also progressing in your writing and honing your skills. Another way to look at freelance writing is to use it as a way to put your name out there and start to gather more clients.

Digital Marketing

There’s a lot more to blogging than just posting content on it. You have to pay attention to how many people visit your blog, as well as how to profit you can make with it.

Doesn’t matter how good your content is, if you can’t make people see your content, you won’t make a decent profit from it. You need people visiting your blog and for that, the best way to accomplish that is through SEO strategies. This is the way you optimize your blog post to appear on a search engine. The better optimized it is the better chances you have to rank up on Google searches for example, and that will automatically give you more visitors.

There is a lot of business to be done in the SEO world with more companies becoming interested in ranking up as high as possible in a search engine.

Monetize On Your Skills

If you have great skills that not everyone has, you should try to monetize them. Skill-specific blog posts are great because they already have a niche in mind, and you would be more prone to profit from those niche subjects.

Besides writing about your skills, you can go a step further and offer services related to the unique skill that you have for example. Here, you can get very creative by offering classes, instructional videos, or any other activity related to your skill.

A Step-by-Step Guide

Now that you know the best practices when it comes to profit from your blog, let’s see how we can make that happen.

Step 1 – Your Niche

The first thing you need to do is to decide on the niche that you are going to write for. Even though it might be hard to write something completely new, you should focus on trying to write something in your niche and with your own voice.

Once you decide on your niche, you need to understand what you can do to set yourself apart from the competition and worry less about what you are going to write about.

Step 2 – Start Your Blog

You will need to set up your blog and there are a few ways that you can do that. The first one that comes to mind is WordPress. This is a sort of blueprint for blogs and it is extremely easy to set it up.

There are a few options that you can choose once you are setting up your account. You have the “Free WordPress” which allows you to set up your blog for free, or you have the “Self-Hosted” option which is paid but allows you to have more flexibility with your blog and you are also allowed to monetize it.

Step 3 – Your Content

You will need to plan the content that you are going to write. You can use a content calendar for that, allowing you to map out the progress of your content, as well as when the content should be ready and when it should be posted.

At this point, you should know exactly the topics that you are going to write about, so this shouldn’t be an issue. In case you still don’t know where to start, you can have a look at what the top bloggers in your niche are writing about and get inspired to write your own content.

You have to remember that every single piece of content that you post has to have a meaning behind it. You shouldn’t write a blog post just because your competition is doing it, you should post because it is necessary and you will gain something from it, as much as your audience will.

Step 4 – Choose a Social Media Platform

You need to promote your blog if you want to drive traffic to it, and for that, being active and having a following on social media is one of the best tools for promoting you can find. Now, if you think that you can just sign up for every social media platform and advertise your blog there, you might get discouraged quite quickly. This is because it is not easy to manage 4 or 5 social media accounts, plus run a blog where you write all the content.

Instead, you should pick one or two social media platforms and focus on them to achieve better results. Pinterest is perhaps one of the best social media platforms out there to promote your blog.

In order to do that, you can set up a business account, so you can have access to analytics about your blog. Pinterest has many great features that allow smooth and efficient promotion of your blog, such as the use of “Rich Pins”, which allows you to promote pins for free for example.

The point here is to focus on a couple of social media platforms and work your way up from there.

Step 5 – Set Your Blog up for Monetizing

Now you are ready to turn your blog into a money-making machine. It is important that you have followed the steps above and that you have everything ready to start making money from your blog.

There’s no easy money from blogging at the beginning, you need to know how to work and have the foundations laid before you do that. A great way to start making money with your blog is through affiliate marketing. You have already picked a niche, so it can’t be too hard to get in touch with a company that has products that you can write about.

This is one of the easiest ways to start and will give you enough experience to start earning money from your blog. You will need to sign up to ConvertSocial platform to find brands that might potentially interest your audience. Then create engaging content promoting products and services.

This is not a straight road, and you can start monetizing your blog from any of the other strategies we talked about, but this is certainly a good starting point.

Conclusion

As you have seen, there are many ways you can monetize your blog. The important thing is to set up everything properly before you rush to make money. You need to know exactly what you are going to write about, who your niche is, and what companies and products you can write about that will bring you the most profit.

Once you have that down, you just need to start from scratch. It is not an easy thing to do but sure is worth it once you start seeing your revenues go up.