Is it possible to make earnings through blogs alone? Blogging is a popular way to generate content online. With enough traffic to your blog website, you can start generating income in a few ways:
- Through your own business/products
- From advertising
- By selling affiliate products – other people’s products/services
But just how much traffic is enough to make blogging pay and when can you quit your day job?
Earnings Through Blogs – Competition
It’s useful to remember that there’s millions of bloggers out there blogging about pretty much everything. To attract the search traffic from the organic results pages (SERPS – search engine results pages), your blog needs to be better established than the others. A blog which has been around for decades, has hundreds of posts and many backlinks will tend to rank much better than a brand new blog with only a few posts and zero backlinks.
So if you’re just starting out blogging, be ready for a long journey. Another factor is of course the topic of your blog. In a very competitive area, you’ll need to work a lot harder and for longer to compete with the top websites in that particular niche.
Affiliate marketing, for example is a very competitive niche. So if you’re starting out with a brand new affiliate blog, you’ll have your work cut out. It will take several months or years to generate the kind of traffic you’ll need to make even a small amount of income from your blogging efforts.
However, there’s many less competitive topics than affiliate marketing. If you have an interest or passion for something less mainstream, it can be a considerably easier journey to generate an income from blogging.
Earnings Through Blogs: Free Traffic & SEO
On the whole earning through blogging requires you to attract free traffic. You can of course use paid marketing too, to attract people to your blog. But this makes it more difficult to become profitable. Since bloggers are concerned with attracting the traffic from Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. they need to learn the strategies needed to get traffic from those search engines; Google being the main source.
Google uses a number of criteria which bloggers should be aware of so they can optimise their efforts. They number into the thousands but the main ones are:
- The quality of your blog content – length of posts, content, links etc.
- Visitor activity on your posts gives Google feedback too: (e.g. if they click away too quickly, it’s a sign the content wasn’t useful/appropriate)
- Back links – the back link profile of a website gives a strong signal of it’s quality: backlinks are like “votes”. the number of them and quality of them determine to some extent your ranking ability (see also building backlinks for SEO)
- Social media presence – how are your posts being shared on social media, are you active on social media platforms etc.
- Domain age – older domains tend to fair better against newer domains on Google
Bloggers need to get good at optimising their content for the search engines as well as creating quality content. SEO – or search engine optimisation helps bloggers reach more people through the SERPS – search engine results pages.
Earnings Through Blogs – Monetisation Methods
If you don’t already have a product or business of your own to help monetise your blog, the most popular methods are advertising and affiliate marketing. An advertising platform (e.g. Google Adsense) allows you to place code on your blog content which is transformed into ads which are relevant to your content and visitors). When your visitors click on the adverts, you earn commissions based on the advertising revenue. In some topics you can earn more than others. A very competitive topic can pay several dollars per click whereas a less competitive topic may only pay cents. As the blogger, you earn a percentage of this advertising revenue which is typically only tiny amounts per click.
So if you use this form of monetisation, it helps to be in a competitive niche and get lots of traffic. Without huge volumes of traffic, you’ll likely only make small amounts. So traffic generation is key.
Another monetisation method is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can promote other people’s products and services from your blog and earn revenue based on what sales you refer. Affiliate marketing can be more lucrative than advertising if you have the right audience for your products. Audience is more important if you’re monetising with affiliate products because you need your website visitors to be a good match for your products.
Earnings Through Blogs – Email Marketing
Most bloggers who are earning from their online content use email marketing. Email marketing is a method of promotion which can help bloggers gain more notoriety and control the flow of their traffic better. They can also use their email lists to promote affiliate products.
When you’re relying on a single source of traffic such as the search engines, your earnings from a blog can be very uncertain. With a list, you put yourself better in control of traffic by building an email list of subscribers. On a website too, a visitor only has a small opportunity to buy a product from you. But once you get them to subscribe to your email list, you can extend this time period to weeks, months and even years.
See also the power of email marketing and free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Bloggers build email lists by offering something useful on their websites. This can be anything which is suitably valuable to their visitors and also which connects your blog posts to your affiliate products in some way.
Earnings Through Blogs – How Long Does It Take?
How long does it take to make money blogging? This is the million dollar question! Blogging is definitely a long term and slow strategy to gain traffic. Over time though your older and new content can gain traction and your efforts can compound to generate a passive income. (See passive income and affiliate marketing). But this can take months or even years of hard work. Depending on the niche you choose to blog in, it can be shorter or longer depending on the competition, what your daily actions are and your ability to create valuable content in that particular topic.
Ideally choose a topic you’re inspired by and passionate about, that way, you’ll enjoy the journey and stick at it for long enough to gain traction.
A useful analogy to blogging I like is the Chinese bamboo tree which takes several years of gestation before it even breaks the surface of the soil. But once it does it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks! Blogging can be like this too. You can work for months or years without much happening. Suddenly your efforts compound and you find you’re generating free traffic, leads and sales without much work!
How Much Can You Make?
The amount you can make from blogging is potentially unlimited. However, many bloggers make nothing from their work. See also how much does the average affiliate marketer make? Top bloggers can make over six figures from their blogs if they gain enough traction.
Those who have been at it long term tend to make the most from blogging, since they are able to build huge authority over time. The amount you make from blogging is determined by how you attract traffic but also how you monetise your blog. If you choose the affiliate marketing route, for example, you can increase your earning potential by choosing high ticket affiliate products and through using subscription affiliate programs which pay you recurring commissions.
Expect to work at blogging for several months on a daily basis if you’re serious about making money from it. Over time, your efforts compound and this increases exponentially if you stick with it long enough. Initially though it can be tough because it takes a while for your efforts to bear fruit.
See also advantages and disadvantages of blogging.
Using Long Tail Keywords
Many bloggers will target long tail keywords with their blog posts. The keywords which attract a particular section of search traffic can be found using Google’s keyword planner. The most competitive keywords are the shorter phrases of two or three words. These keywords attract a huge volume of monthly search traffic. See also short tail and long tail keywords.
Longer tail keywords have fewer monthly searches but less competition on the Google search results pages. As such, bloggers have a far higher chance of ranking their content for the long tail keywords which have three or more keywords in them.
To find these longer tail keywords, you can type your main “seed” keyword into Google’s keyword planner and look through the results. The planner shows all keywords which are searched for which relate to the main “seed” keyword. By finding long tail derivatives of your main keyword to create content for, you can more easily get rankings on the SERPS for your content. See also how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Summary
Earnings through blogs varies according to the length of time someone has been blogging for, how much effort they put in and the relative competition in their particular niche. Your monetisation method will also have a bearing on how much you can make from a given amount of website traffic.
Depending on how you monetise your blog, you can even earn more from fewer visitors. For example if you sell subscription affiliate products from your blog, you can earn recurring income from sales you’ve made previously. In a low competition topic/niche, you can only make small amounts from using adverts (e.g. Adsense) because the cost to advertise is generally lower in less competitive areas. In a high competition niche, you can earn more from advert clicks but it’s much harder to obtain the necessary traffic required to get clicks.
