It’s a question I get a lot so today I’m breaking down how to make money blogging.

I’ve been writing about the basics of blogging since I started this blog. I started with the reasons to start a blog, the reasons you shouldn’t, I broke down how to get a blog up and running and I even went into how to market your posts after you’ve launched your blog with Facebook, Pinterest and email.

I felt this was important to do so that bloggers have the basics down pat but the question that’s on every blogger’s mind is, how the heck does one make money from a blog?! This seems like a good junction for me to tackle this question with the 4 main ways a blogger makes money.

Blogging is STILL one of the best ways to make a fulltime income online. Take my free course How to Start a Profitable Blog today to learn how to create a blog that makes money from the start. 

How Do Bloggers Make Money?

The first thing I want to note here is that you can totally get into blogging solely for the purpose of making money. Don’t listen to anybody telling you to blog for passion or blog for the love of it and the money will come. Blogging is absolutely a profitable business idea that you can get into and make a substantial income from. Bloggers get paid.

However, many many many bloggers that get into it for money fail. This is because of one reason, and one reason only. They didn’t approach their blogging business as such. A business.

This isn’t to say that your blog will be pushy and salesy because I’ve definitely seen some bloggers write posts that come across as nothing but sales pitch after sales pitch, shoving affiliate links down my throat under the guise of helping me make money.

No.

There’s a whole art to making money from blogging and the top bloggers have figured out how to do this. The bloggers in the middle tier will figure it out too because they’re excited about the prospects. They will research, pay attention to their data and keep going. New bloggers either get burnt out and frustrated when they realize that blogging is just like any other business that takes time and effort, or they make it work.

That is where the passion part comes in. Blogging does take loads of time and effort. Nobody makes it BIG in their first few months of blogging. In fact, many bloggers don’t make it big in their first year.

But those who apply this passion word that gets thrown around a lot tend to be the ones who make it. The passion lies in the love of blogging (or the love of money that keeps them pushing). I love to blog and will do it even without the money. Therein lies my passion. If you’re in it solely for money without understanding what it takes to run a blogging business, then eventually it will begin to feel like work and you’ll get burnt out really quickly just like any other job.

End rant.

Let’s get into the four main ways that bloggers make money. Actually, before I get into the four ways, let’s talk page views.

How Much Traffic and Followers Will You Need?

Everybody wants to know what’s the perfect number of social media followers they need to have in order to monetize their social media platforms. Same for blogging, what’s the magic number of page views?

You know the answer to this already. There’s no magic number. Engagement is where it’s at. It’s important to find your tribe, your audience, your die-hard fans that love you, listen to you and trust you.

Different monetisation networks will have their minimums for you to reach before they allow you in, but they care more about how much your audience engages with your content. They want to know if you have a low bounce-rate, lots of comments and can influence people to click on your links and actually buy whatever it is you’re promoting.

Having huge numbers does not automatically convert and ad networks know this. They’re not fooled by the influencer with 50,000 followers if they’re only able to get 3 comments at best. Strive to get to know your audience intimately and connect with them. Find the places that they hang out and engage with them there. Provide solutions to problems they’re facing and get them on your email list. That’s where the big money is.

Check out 21 ways that you can drive more traffic to your blog here. Now, let’s get into the monetization methods.

The four main ways bloggers make money are

• Sponsored posts and brand partnerships
• affiliate marketing
• ads
• offering your own products and services

I talk about them in the video below as well as explain how I can help you to work through them as a blog coach.

Sponsors and Brand Partnerships

Way number one is sponsored posts or some sort of brand partnership. This works in several ways. You can either (a) apply to blogging/influencer networks that act as the agency for several different brands, (b) connect directly with the company by pitching them yourselves or (c)  sometimes the company will take note of you and approach you.

As a Jamaican this has been very tricky for me. Brands in the US are generally wanting to work with blogs and influencers who are also based in the US. I’ve been able to still connect with a few international brands since over half of my audience is from the US, however, for the most part, you will want to connect with brands local to you for this option.

I have taken this route successfully, reaching out to local brands here who would be willing to pay me to create content for them. Brands always want content that they can reshare on their own social media channels. The more aligned with their product your audience is and the more engaged your audience is with your own content, the better your chances are of getting a partnership. Content coming from someone else can have a whole different impact than the brand constantly sharing their own story so more and more brands are jumping to work with influencers and bloggers.

This kind of partnership also lends itself to repeat business, leading to a brand ambassador type of relationship where you create content for them for a long-term period and are paid a monthly/yearly contract. Don’t be afraid to reach out to brands that are within your niche that could benefit from you creating content for them.

I like this method more because it means I get to charge what I want instead of the brand network determining a fee. If you can show that you have considerable influence then the formula that’s widespread for what you charge is somewhere around $100/10000 followers or pageviews. Therefore if you have 50,000 followers or consistently bag 50,000 page views per month on your blog, you can feel comfortable charging a brand $500 per post.

What you charge is your call but don’t undersell yourself. How do you show that you have considerable influence? That brings me to way number 2.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing happens when you recommend a product and link to it from your blog using a unique code given to you by the product’s company to market said product. Did you catch that?

I wrote extensively about affiliate marketing here to get you started. It’s one of the ways bloggers can begin earning income online quickly without massive amounts of traffic, though traffic certainly helps. 

For instance, Amazon has an affiliate program called Amazon Associates. By becoming an associate for Amazon, you’re allowed to place a link to almost any product from Amazon on your blog. This is a link that has been generated for you by Amazon and has your special code within the link that is unique to you. This is how they will track the fact that this product was sold through a link on your blog.

When someone clicks on the unique link that you have placed on your blog and subsequently makes a purchase on Amazon, you will get a commission on the sale. The sales have to be within a certain time period. You’ll see this being referred to as the cookie length.

Cookies are unique codes your browsers hold to track your activity and they expire within a certain time. For Amazon, the cookie length is only 24 hours which means when someone clicks on your link, they have to make a purchase within 24 hours in order for you to get a commission.

Other affiliate programs are much more generous with their cookie length. Amazon also has a sucky commission payout of only 4%-7% on most products. It’s still a very viable option since everyone trusts Amazon and so it will be easier to get the sale from them than an unknown website.

There are many affiliate networks available and chances are whatever niche you’re in, you can find products to promote on your blog. Some companies have their own affiliate programs set up while others go through affiliate networks such as Shareasale and Commission Junction. Within these networks, you can find big brands in every category from clothing to electronics to office supplies and home decor and even departments stores like Walmart, TJMaxx and Overstock.com

The best way to find out if a product or company has an affiliate program is to simply search product + affiliate. So if you’re a travel blogger who’s blogging about going hiking and you want to recommend your favourite brand of hiking gear to your readers, search for the brand name plus the word affiliate to see if they come up.

I recommend doing this even if you find the product on Amazon as the brand you’re after may also be a part of another affiliate network or have their own affiliate program with a more generous commission and cookie length.

If you want to tackle affiliate marketing as one of the ways you monetise your blog, I recommend taking Michelle Schroeder-Gardner’s course in affiliate marketing. She consistently makes over $50,000 a month through affiliate marketing on her blog Making Sense of Cents and teaches her methods in this course. I have taken it and definitely recommend it to you if you’re wanting to get into affiliate marketing as a primary source of income on your blog.

A more advanced affiliate course is this one. It goes even deeper into the strategies behind affiliate marketing that will get you more sales.

Blog Ads

Placing ads on your blog is the third way bloggers make money. This can be broken down into joining ad networks or placing individual ads on your blog manually.

New bloggers usually begin with Google Adsense because they will accept you into their ad network with low traffic and as a newbie. This is however because their payout is excruciatingly low which means you would need to have page views in the hundreds of thousands per month to actually make any kind of decent monthly income with them. So it’s a catch 22 really, as a new blogger you will be making pennies with them so does it actually make sense to clutter your blog with ads that aren’t making you money?

Once you grow your pageviews to 25,000 per month and over, other ad networks will accept you but many of the ones I’m aware of rely on US advertisers which means you’ll need to show that the majority of your traffic is from the US. The plus side is that the payout is usually much better and you can actually make a couple thousand dollars per month with significant traffic.

You can also place individual ads on your blog, whether you choose to approach companies on a one-on-one basis to advertise for them or you place banners from your affiliate networks. I’ve chosen not to place network ads on this blog so I’ve chosen this route. You’ll see an ad for Elegant Themes and ConvertKit in the sidebar and one for Siteground in the footer.

Product Creation

The last main source of income for bloggers is product creation. This is the one that will bring you big bucks before you hit major traffic IF you have built up a tribe that trusts you and will want to buy your products. A product can be physical or digital, though most bloggers usually rely on some type of digital product like an ebook or course or services like coaching/membership programs.

The awesome thing about digital products is that once you create the product, you can keep selling it over and over as your traffic grows and you market to different audiences. Digital products are usually delivered automatically so by setting up your email sequences correctly, no matter where someone joins your email list they can be sent through your sales funnel making you money in your sleep.

Most blogging income sources can be fitted into one of the above categories. Other methods are opportunities that can come because of your blog but aren’t necessarily ways that bloggers make money in general. Things like freelance writing, public speaking, photography, graphic design, VA services etc are all things that you can market via your blog, but I wouldn’t categorize them as a method that you use to make money on your blog. These are different gigs entirely that you simply use your blog to market.

If you’re a new blogger my recommendation is to focus first on creating stellar content that people engage with and share. Once you’ve built up a catalog of very useful content, focus on marketing this content fiercely while always creating more. They say the ratio of content to marketing is 20%-80%. So start with a solid base and then add 1-2 posts to your blog per week, spending the rest of your time marketing your content.

By marketing your content and building up your traffic, you’re also building your tribe and engagement numbers and are ready to tackle monetization methods. There’s no right time to start monetizing your blog, that’s up to you.

If you’re going the ad/affiliate/brand network route, then the quality networks will have minimums that you need to meet before they will accept you into their program. You can start with other methods until you’ve reached their minimums.

Now it’s your turn. What does your monetization mix look like? Which ones work more than others for you? Let me know in the comments below.

Need more traffic to your blog? Are you using Pinterest to get massive traffic for FREE from the platform? Learn how to use Pinterest the right way in my Pinterest for Blog Traffic course! This course is only $49 and will become your best tool to increase your blog traffic quickly!

All courses on Udemy are currently $10.99 and so I thought I would share with you these courses that can benefit your blogging journey if you’re in this to make money.

These courses aren’t all about blogging. Some of them complement your business in some way, whether marketing the posts, converting social shares into customers or improving skills like photography and videography.

It definitely benefits you to always invest in your business, always learn and evolve. That’s how we grow as bloggers and business owners. I’ve selected courses from the best Udemy has to offer so let’s dive right in.

Writing Courses

I begin with writing courses since improving upon your writing is one of the best ways to improve your blog overall. Great content will convert readers into long-term fans of your blog and customers of any products you happen to put out.

The Four Levels of Writing Mastery

Writing Tools and Hacks for Blogging and Content Writing

Write Killer Web Content That Sells

Copywriting Secrets: Write copy that sells

Selling Courses

These courses are for bloggers who may also want to sell physical products online, whether your own products or reselling products from other suppliers (dropshipping) Maybe you’re interested in a t-shirt line or promotional items with your logo on them or maybe you want to sell items in your niche like clothes, art, cooking accessories etc. Dropshipping is a great way to sell products without having to carry loads of inventory in a physical store.

Build a Shopify Dropshipping Business

Dropshipping, the Complete Blueprint

Photography Courses

Stock photography is great but using our own photos will take your blogging efforts to the next level. Depending on your niche, you may rely heavily on your own photography and so I’ve included niche-specific photography courses on this list.

Complete Photography Course – Camera, Lighting, Portrait modes etc

Travel Photography Course

Food Photography Course

Easy DSLR Course for Beginners

iPhone Photography Course

Videography Courses

Video is the way to go! If you’re not including some aspect of video in your blogging efforts then you will be left behind in the evolution of earning income online through a blog. Whether it’s turning your blog posts into video for Youtube, capturing content that relates to your post or simply posting smaller snippets to social media, learning video mastery will help to elevate your blog in a crowd of bloggers.

Final Cut Pro Mastery Course

Make Explainer Videos in Powerpoint

Facebook Courses

Facebook is something we could all stand to learn more of. It’s a monster of complexity especially if you want to grow your Facebook page audience or try Facebook ads. Take away the mystery of Facebook success by picking up a course specifically relating to this social media network.

The Complete Facebook Marketing Masterclass 

Facebook Ads Mastery Guide

The complete Hands-On Training for Facebook Ads

Instagram Courses

One question I get asked all the time by bloggers is how to make Instagram work for us. It’s a wonderful social media channel that we all love to consume but getting it to convert into blog readers is tricky. Perhaps these courses can help you to figure it all out.

How to get Famous on Instagram

Master Instagram Stories

Instagram Marketing for Small Business

Youtube Courses

If you’re going to pick up video for your blog, mastering Youtube marketing then should be a natural next step. Learn the tricks and secrets to going viral on Youtube and getting your video seen by more people on this network.

Vlogging on Youtube Course

Youtube Marketing Course 

How to Become Famous on Youtube

Virtual Assistant Courses

Ever thought of adding VA services to your online business? A virtual assistant is a great way to pick up a side-hustle while building your blog and you may like it so much that you decide to make it a full-time hustle.

Learn How to Become a Virtual Assistant

Entrepreneurship Courses

Guy Kawasaki is one of those big names in the social media and entrepreneurship world. It would be awesome to pick up his secrets of getting to his level.

Guide to Entrepreneurship By Guy Kawasaki

Podcasting Courses

Do you want to start podcasting? It’s gained in popularity so much and we now all have our own favourite podcasts. Whether you want to add it to your blog as a way to repurpose your content or start up one on a separate topic all on its own, it would do you well to pick up a course in best practices first so you can shortcut your way to podcasting success.

Guide to Podcasting

Google Analytics

Ever dived really deep into the Google Analytics beast? Knowing the data on your blog is a surefire way to create content that brings in traffic and to know where, when and how to market your blog posts. This course also comes with Google certification just in case you wanted to add to your social media marketing service offerings online.

Become Certified in Google Analytics

Social Media Marketing

Do you want to get a handle on marketing your blog posts on all social media channels in one course? These social media marketing courses are for you. Become an expert in social media marketing and add it to your skills whether to grow traffic on your own blog or to offer SMM services to others.

Social Media Marketing Masterclass

Social Media Marketing Ads Guide

SEO Courses

The SEO monster many bloggers are afraid of has many facets and link building is one of them. This course promises to lay out the path to building strong links back to your blog which helps you to rank higher in Google for your chosen keywords.

Link Building for SEO

General Marketing Courses

Of course, general marketing courses are always a good idea to invest in as business owners. Stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and study things like buyer behaviour and how to influence others. This can only help you to stand out in your marketing efforts.

Marketing Psychology, Become a Master of Influence

Affiliate Marketing

This one is specific to making money on your blog. Master affiliate marketing with this course and take the mystery out of earning your next dollar through your blog.

Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategies

As time goes by I’m sure I’ll add to this list. Many of these blogging courses I have picked up for myself to go through at my leisure. I believe that investing in yourself and your business is one of the best ways to grow. We will never know all that there is to know and it’s always good to see what works for another blogger, especially one that is already successful so I can find more tips and tricks to incorporate into my own blog or tweak something I may already be doing to get better results.

Speaking of growth, you should take my free blog traffic growth challenge. It’s a 5-day intensive challenge meant to push your traffic to the next level.

Have you done any blogging courses recently? Which course on this list are you interested in?