How Do You Make Money Blogging?

Copywriting Tips

Mar 6

Written By Emily

If you’re tired of click-baity blog titles like “Make $50K a month blogging” and “How I paid off my mortgage with a part-time blog”, I’m right there with you.

It’s true that you can make money blogging, but it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, and you won’t make money without dedicated effort. Watching people “sell” strategies when their websites don’t have anywhere near the traffic they claim is wildly frustrating.

So, in this post, I’ll show you how to make money blogging using real strategies. I’ve been creating content for high-profile clients for years, so I’m going to share the truth with you here—no sales pitch, no click-bait titles, just real-world strategies.

Here are 10 copywriting tools that will make your blogging journey much easier!

How Much Money Can You Make Blogging?

There are websites that easily make $10,000 a month through affiliate marketing, PPC advertising, and sponsorships. Is that the norm? No. Is it easy to get to that point? Also, no.

However, it is possible to monetize your blog with some consistent effort. The amount you can make depends on your niche and location, but if you can consistently get around 150 daily visitors, you should be able to start monetizing your blog and make a few hundred a month at minimum.

The key is consistency. You might not see results in your first month or two, but you will if you stick with any of the strategies I’ll talk about here for 6+ months.

How Do You Make Money Blogging?

There are 4 key strategies for blog monetization:

PPC ads
Affiliate marketing
Products & Services
Sponsorships

I suggest choosing one strategy to begin with and putting all your effort into it. Once you start seeing results, you can add another strategy to boost your monthly revenue once you start getting results.

PPC Ads with Google Adsense

Google Adsense is easily one of the most popular strategies for making money blogging. It allows you to earn money by displaying ads on your blog and requires almost no input from you.

It works on a pay-per-click basis, and you’ll get paid 68% of the revenue for every click (Google keeps the rest). For example, if an advertiser pays $1 per click for an ad placed on your website, 68 cents will go to you and 32 cents to Google.

If you use Google’s Adsense revenue calculator, you’ll get an estimate of how much you can make a year based on your location and niche, but these are very generalized figures.

If you’re asking yourself, do people make money blogging? You need over a million monthly views to make around $30K a year from Adsense.

That’s an average figure, and it depends on your industry, location, and niche.

If you want to monetize your website through ads, you need massive amounts of traffic, so here’s what you should focus on:

Consistently post high-value, content-rich blogs that keep people on your website for as long as possible.
Work on your technical blog SEO to make sure your posts get seen in search results.
Make sure your website is indexed with Google, and you don’t have any technical errors preventing your pages from being ranked.
Create a solid keyword strategy that gives you targeted, niche traffic.

Until you’re getting at least 150 unique visits a day, it’s not worth signing up for Google Adsense. You won’t make money writing blogs, and the ads will detract from your website's user experience.

Once you start getting consistent daily views in that range, PPC can be a great way to make money off a blog.

Affiliate Marketing

service provider tracking money made blogging

This strategy to make money blogging involves placing affiliate links on your site. When someone uses your link to buy a product, you get a commission for the sale.

Amazon Affiliate is an easy program to sign up to, and you’ll make between 1% and 10% of each sale.

The great thing about the Amazon program is that there aren’t really any requirements, so even the tiniest websites can sign up and start using links.

However, affiliate marketing is another numbers game. You won’t get enough clicks to make money writing blogs unless you get strong, consistent website traffic.

There are tons of affiliate programs available, but many of the top earners require a set level of website traffic before you can sign up.

If you want to know how to make money off a blog and affiliate links, here’s what you should focus on:

Research the programs you want to become an affiliate for – it should be products, services, apps, or programs you know, like, and use.
Begin creating content-rich, high-value blog posts about those services and products. Don’t worry about becoming an affiliate yet, your first goal is boosting your website traffic.
Ensure you have a strong keyword strategy that revolves around your affiliate products or services.
Sign up for any programs that don’t have any traffic minimums and add those links to relevant places throughout your website.
Keep track of any programs with traffic minimums and sign up as soon as you hit the thresholds.

Unlike ads, affiliate links don’t hurt the user experience of your website, so there’s no harm in adding these in before you get your traffic up.

Important: You need to add an affiliate disclosure to your website and to every blog post that contains affiliate links. Here’s a quick affiliate disclosure template you can add to the top of each blog post to ensure you comply with Google policies:

“This post contains affiliate links. If you click on a link, we might make a small commission (at no extra cost to you) to help keep the site running.”

Products and Services

example of product page used to make money blogging

This one is fairly straightforward, but you can sell products or services through your website using either a client-based model (services) or a shop-based model (products).

Selling services

I was a copywriter for over seven years, so I sold my copywriting services through my website. I created a landing page that outlined my services, and potential clients would get in touch. Then, they would receive invoices with embedded secure payment methods.

Although I wasn’t technically making money blogging, it was an important showcase for my services and helped funnel potential clients into my inbox.

Here’s what you’ll need to focus on to start selling services on your website:

Choose a niche and service in which you can provide value (e.g., copywriting for beginners, graphic design, coaching, etc.).
Create a dedicated landing page that highlights your services, the value you offer, what’s included, pricing, testimonials, and a way to contact you).
Start publishing high-value blog posts that show you’re an expert in your niche and know what you’re talking about.
Optimize your content for keywords that potential customers use to look for your type of services.

You’ll find it incredibly hard to get organic traffic at the start, but the more time you dedicate to building a content-rich, valuable website, the better your results will be!

Selling products

Making money online with products is much simpler. All you need is a landing page with a check-out enabled (which is available on all the major hosting platforms).

Selling physical products is far more time-intensive and requires investment in stock and supplies up-front.

However, digital products allow you to create something once and sell it on autopilot – no need for stock, packing, shipping, etc.

Digital products can be PDFs, video presentations, slideshows, templates, tutorials, courses, or any other online material that your customers can download.

Selling physical products is a whole different ball game (and one I’m not familiar enough with to give you real advice), but here’s what to focus on if you want to know how to make money blogging with digital products:

Create a valuable digital product that solves a specific problem. The simpler, the better—people are looking for solutions to specific problems.
Make it look professional with unique graphics, layouts, and design (Canva is a great free tool for this with loads of free templates).
Create a landing page highlighting your product, the problem, and who it’s made for.
Set up a check-out process on your website that allows customers to instantly download their product after going through a secure payment process.
Come up with blog content ideas that answer questions within the same niche to help market your new digital product.

Remember, simplicity is your friend when creating digital downloads. You don’t have to write a 300-page eBook – you could create a short video tutorial that walks your customers through a common pain point and sell it for a low entry price.

Sponsorships

Last but not least on our list of how to make money blogging is sponsorships. If you have an engaged, niche audience, brands will pay you to promote their products and services through blog content, videos, and ad space.

This strategy relies heavily on consistent traffic, but engagement is more important than visitor numbers here. You could have a smaller, more dedicated audience and get more sponsorship opportunities than larger sites with less engaged visitors.

Interested in how to make money with a blog? Here’s how to get started:

You’ve guessed it – create high-value, content-rich blog posts that showcase your expertise and niche.
Build up your website traffic using the strategies we’ve already covered.
Create a professional-looking media kit that shows your website stats (visitors, bounce rate, topics, etc.).
Reach out to brands and pitch a sponsored post collaboration.

Reaching out to brands you know and love for sponsored content opportunities can be daunting, but it’s the best way to connect. If you have solid website metrics, you’ll find it much easier to get positive feedback.

How to Make Money Blogging in 3 Months

how to make money blogging in three months

If you want to start making money blogging within three months, here’s your complete step-by-step. It’s going to take dedicated work, but you’ll get results if you follow this guide:

Set up a website (I recommend Squarespace since it’s beginner-friendly and requires zero coding knowledge).
Pick a niche (pick one topic to write about and become the expert in it).
Design a clean, user-friendly website (each page needs to be content-rich with unique graphics).
Use Ubersuggest to create a starter list of keywords.
Use Answer The Public to find questions to answer in long-form blog posts.
Post at least two blogs a week — make sure each one is valuable, high-quality, and optimized for specific keywords.
Once you have 10 blog posts published, head to Google Search Console and get your website indexed. This will ensure your blogs can show up in Google searches.
Post consistently every single week to build a high-quality bank of blog posts.
Sign up for affiliate programs and add relevant, useful affiliate links to your content.
Use Pinterest to promote your blog posts using pin graphics made in Canva (there are tons of free templates you can customise to match your brand).
Find high-authority publications to guest post on for backlinks (remember to use MOZ to check the domain authority before you pitch).
Once you hit 2k visitors a month, look into sponsorships with related brands (you’ll need a professional-looking media kit for your pitches).
Once you get to 150-ish visitors a day, sign up to Google Adsense to begin monetizing your traffic.
Analyze your traffic to see what keywords are doing the best and create a digital product aimed at those keywords.

Ta-da! It’s a lot of work, but the only thing standing between you and success is consistency.

Make Money Blogging: Your Next Steps

You’ve probably noticed that all of these blog monetisation strategies have one thing in common: boosting website traffic by posting content-rich blog posts.

Marketing tactics will come and go, but high-value blog content will always be the best way to boost traffic, improve SEO, and monetize your website. Whichever strategy you decide to focus on to make money blogging, content creation should be your top priority!

Wondering if you should buy a blogging course to improve your website? Head to the next guide to find out if blogging courses are worth it — spoiler, I’m not a fan!