How much can I earn from blogging? While the potential earnings from blogging is unlimited, this isn’t the experience of most bloggers!
In the beginning you shouldn’t expect too much from blogging, because it will take some considerable time and effort to build up a readership to your blog posts. Your ability to attract an audience will be limited by:
- How often you post new content
- Your existing content
- The quality of your content
- Your SEO strategy (Search engine optimisation)
- Your backlink profile – how many you have, where they are from and how natural it appears
- Your ability and strategy of sharing and promoting your own content
- How well your content is received by your readers
- Your website authority
- Your domain age
This list isn’t exhaustive either and Google (and other search engines) use a number of criteria to determine your authority and ranking on the SERPS – search engine results pages.
To get traction with blogging you need to stick with it for some time. Depending on the topic/niche you choose this could be weeks, months or even years! Since many would-be bloggers will quit during this interim phase, it’s worth planning ahead so it doesn’t happen to you!
How Much Can I Earn From Blogging?
Long term bloggers earn the most and this can be into the tens of thousands of dollars every single month. But that’s not typical and most new bloggers will need to spend a lot of time and effort just to start generating an income from a blog. Initially this will come in dribs and drabs depending on your monetisation methods. Over time, as your blog becomes more established and if you implement certain strategies, this can grow very quickly.
To get off on the right foot as a blogger, you need to understand something very important. That is, money is a by-product of value delivery. Without providing some value to your readers, you’ll struggle to make any money blogging. So as much as it’s desirable to earn money passively from blogging, you will be better off putting value before the money. Otherwise you’re likely to end up very disappointed by your monetary results!
It’s estimated that there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet which means you’ve got a lot of competition! To sustain the necessary effort needed to become financially successful as a blogger, you need to put in a lot of work upfront. Most people won’t be able to keep up this amount of effort without seeing a financial reward.
Often the most successful blogs were not started with financial incentive in mind. They were started as hobbies, passions or interests and many bloggers blog because they love it, not because they want money for it!
To give yourself the best chance at earning from blogging, it’s a good idea to choose a topic you have a passion for. That way you can sustain your interest in blogging over a much longer timespan.
How Much Can I Earn From Blogging: Monetising Your Blog
There’s a few ways you can monetise a blog. Two of the most popular methods are:
- Advertising – e.g. Google Adsense
- Affiliate Marketing – selling other people’s products from your blog
With Google Adsense you can place adverts on your content and earn a revenue share from clicks on your ads. Each click is generally worth only a tiny amount, according to your blog topic. So you’ll need thousands of clicks just to make a small income using this method. With a large enough following though and lots of content, this can ultimately give you a passive income which is potentially unlimited. As a new blogger though, getting enough traffic just to see a regular income can be tough.
With affiliate marketing, you sell other people’s products from your blog for a revenue share. There’s thousands of affiliate products you can use to make money from a blog but you need to align your product offering with your content. Otherwise your visitors won’t be interested in what you have to sell. You can also sell products from an email list which you can build from a blog. Email marketing can be used with both affiliate marketing and with Google Adsense (to bring people back to your content).
The benefit of affiliate marketing is you can earn more substantial amounts if you sell something from a blog than you would from an advert click. You can also sell subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products which pay you recurring commissions and pay out much larger amounts than average (respectively).
Timeline Of Blog Earnings
As a new blogger, expect a few months of drought before you can earn any money from your blog. This of course will depend on many factors the main ones being niche/topic, traffic and monetisation method.
During this time you should aim to create a lot of content and promote it as much as possible. Over time, as your content grows you should find some of it being liked, shared and linked to. This will help compound your efforts and more and more of your content should begin to get found and your Google rankings improve.
Over time there will be a “spike” in your traffic as this happens. Google rewards bloggers who are consistent and who create high value content which is liked by its readers. At around 400 blog posts or thereabouts you will see an uptick in traffic, if you’re done everything right.
Depending on your monetisation methods, and your blog topic, it can take weeks or months, or even years to start generating just a few hundred dollars a mont. But over time, you should find this grows exponentially. If you promote subscription affiliate products and high ticket products from your site, steady income can come a lot faster.