How Much Can You Realistically Make from Blogging?

As a blogger, one of the most common questions I get is, “How much can you realistically make from blogging?” The answer is not as straightforward as you might think. It depends on a number of factors, such as your niche, traffic, monetization strategy, and more.

There is a lot to talk about and that’s why I will be breaking down the content to share with you guys more about the art of blogging. That’s why in this article, I will share the truth about blogging income, including case studies of successful bloggers, different ways to monetize your blog, and strategies to increase your blog’s income.

Blogging & its Potential

Before we dive into the details, let’s first establish what blogging is and how it can generate income. Blogging is the act of creating and publishing content on a website, typically in the form of blog posts. This content can be on any topic, from personal experiences to industry news and everything in between.

Now, let’s talk about the money-making potential of blogging. A lot of people have the misconception that blogging is a get-rich-quick scheme, where you can make thousands of dollars overnight. While it’s true that some bloggers do make a lot of money, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

One of the biggest advantages of blogging is its scalability. You can start a blog with little to no investment, and as your blog grows in popularity, so does your income potential. The key is to understand the factors that affect blog income, which we will discuss next.

How Much Can You Earn?

Well based on the data collected by Income School and other bloggers out there. Here’s what you can expect to earn.

First 6 months

6~12 Months

12~24 months

24 Months and More

How to get good at Blogging

Your blog’s success largely depends on the quality of your writing. Here are some tips to help you improve your writing skills and create engaging content that your readers will love.

Read Widely and Often

Reading is one of the best ways to improve your writing skills. By reading widely and often, you’ll gain exposure to different writing styles, learn new vocabulary, and see how other writers structure their sentences and paragraphs. Check out our section of books to read related to personal finance and side hustle if you are interested to learn more about them.

Write Every Day

The more you write, the better you’ll become at it. Try to make writing a habit and set aside time each day to work on your blog. Even if you only write for 15 minutes, consistent practice will help you improve your skills over time. For myself, I aim to at least read a newsletter and publish one article a day in order to maintain good readership count into my blog.

Use Active Voice

Using active voice instead of the passive voice makes your writing more engaging and easier to read. Active voice puts emphasis on the subject of the sentence and makes the action more immediate and vivid.

Keep it Simple (USe this 5 Steps)

Avoid using overly complex language and technical jargon unless it’s necessary for your topic. Keep your sentences and paragraphs short and to the point. Use simple language that your readers can easily understand.

As a rule of them, article should be struture like this:

1. Share problem face
2. Be ralatable to reader
3. Share what you did and how it helped
4. What was the result
5. How your readers can get that result

This article itself is a great example. I broke down what reading are looking out for when they first start blogging, what they can expect during each period, how I can help them, what my results are, and sharing my links that helped my readers.

Use this 5 steps on every article to increase your conversion rate.

Tips to Grow Your Audience

The term “hockey stick growth” refers to a phenomenon where a blog’s traffic or revenue grows rapidly over a short period of time, typically after a period of slower growth. For many bloggers, achieving hockey stick growth can be a key milestone on the path to success. It can mean that their content is resonating with a wider audience and that they’re able to generate more revenue from their blog.

Once you’ve created great content, the next step is to get it in front of as many people as possible. Here are some tips to help you grow your audience and increase your blog’s visibility.

Use Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool to promote your blog post and reach a wider audience. Share your blog post on your social media profiles, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Make sure to include an eye-catching image and a compelling caption to grab people’s attention.

As a rule of thumb, each social media has a specific target audience:

• Facebook — Older folks
• LinkedIn — For business outreach
• Pinterest — Women interested in fashion and beauty
• Instagram — Easy-to-read infographics
• Twitter — short description words
• Medium — long content to read similar to reading a newspaper

For myself, I use Jetpack(FREE plugin!) to automate my post to social media pages such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. I have found great success with LinkedIn since my website is all about side hustle. So make sure to try out all the social media platform and determine which one of them have the highest conversion rate. From there, just stick to at least 2 of them and work on optimizing the pageviews.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a great way to reach a new audience and establish yourself as an authority in your niche. Reach out to other bloggers in your industry and offer to write a guest post for their blog. Make sure to include a link back to your own blog in your author bio.

SEO Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). By using keywords, meta descriptions, and other SEO techniques, you can improve your blog’s visibility and attract more organic traffic.

Start by researching and selecting relevant keywords that people use when searching for content related to your topic. You can use tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to find the right keywords. Use these keywords strategically in your blog post title, subheadings, and throughout your content.

Keyword planner tools are one of the most expensive investments a blogger has to pay monthly. I pay for my keyword planner tool $50 per month. While you may think that is expensive, keyword research tools like Ahref or SEMRush are asking for over $100 per month for their services. They are great tools but I wouldn’t recommend it to beginners just starting out.

Instead, I highly recommend RankIQ which is the keyword research tool that I am using and I have made huge progress thanks to their service.

Before getting a keyword research tool, I was getting about 100 impressions per day(you can’t make money off that😅) but now I am able to consistently get over 1,000 impressions a day(10x), and recently I broke to over 3,000 impressions in a single day.

With keyword optimization, all I need to do is get the grade shared by RankIQ in order to increase my chances of getting ranked on Google. To do that, I have to add as many keywords to my content as listed on the right-hand side of the image.

That’s all you need to know about keyword research. If you would like to learn more about keyword research, you definitely need to get RankIQ to try it out for yourself first.

Tips to Monetize Your Blog

If you want to turn your blog into a business, you’ll need to find ways to monetize it. Here are some tips to help you make money from your blog.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a way to earn a commission by promoting other people’s products. You can include affiliate links in your blog posts and earn a commission every time someone makes a purchase through your link.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is when a brand pays you to create content that promotes its product or service. Make sure to disclose any sponsored content on your blog to comply with advertising regulations.

Advertising

Advertising is a popular way to monetize a blog. You can place ads on your blog and earn money based on the number of clicks or impressions. Google AdSense is a popular advertising platform that allows you to easily place ads on your blog.

Sell Products or Services

If you have a product or service to sell, you can use your blog to promote it and generate sales. You can create an online store on your blog or use third-party platforms like Etsy or Shopify to sell your products.

Factors That Affect Blog Income

There are several factors that can affect your blog’s income potential, such as your niche, traffic, monetization strategy, and more. Let’s take a closer look at each of these factors.

Niche

Your niche is the topic or theme of your blog. Some niches are more profitable than others, depending on the demand for the content and the competition in the market. For example, a blog on personal finance or health and wellness may be more profitable than a blog on knitting or gardening.

Traffic

Traffic refers to the number of visitors your blog receives. The more traffic your blog gets, the more income potential you have. This is because you can monetize your blog through advertising, sponsored content, affiliate marketing, and more.

Monetization Strategy

Your monetization strategy is how you plan to make money from your blog. There are several ways to monetize your blog, such as through advertising, sponsored content, affiliate marketing, digital products, and more. The key is to choose a monetization strategy that aligns with your niche and target audience.

Branding and Reputation

Your blog’s branding and reputation can also affect your income potential. If your blog is known for providing high-quality and valuable content, you are more likely to attract advertisers and sponsors who are willing to pay top dollar for your services.

Case Studies of Successful Bloggers

Now that we’ve established the factors that affect blog income, let’s take a look at some real-life examples of successful bloggers and their income.

Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income

Michelle Schroeder-Gardner from Making Sense of Cents

Jon Morrow from Smart Blogger

Determine Your Blog’s Earning Potential

I remember when I first started blogging on WordPress, I didn’t know many factors that could affect my content readership that Google is looking out for. For example, page speed and image size are important factor to consider when optimizing your articles.

Don’t worry too much for now. Here’s how to determine your blog’s earning potential? Here are some steps to follow:

Look at your traffic

The more traffic your blog gets, the more income potential you have. As mentioned in the earlier part of the content, the higher your page view, the more money you can possibly make.

It’s pretty simple, you want to have high page view and most importantly, longer read time. The longer the read time, advertisers will pay you more money since the user rentention is a lot better. What’s more, your affiliate marketing chances of getting click would also drastically increase since you provide enough information to the reader to want to click on the links.

Finally, external reach into your website is also crucial to understand. Consider implementing SEO strategies, guest posting, and social media marketing to increase your blog’s visibility.

If you are in the personal finance or side hustle space and want to get thousands to page views, you may want to consider purchasing our guest post service below!

Evaluate your niche

Some niches are more profitable than others, so consider the demand for your content and the competition in the market. A great way to determine if your niche is worth writing for incoome is checking the CPC(cost-per-click) rating. Typically, advertiser who are competing against each other for top position on Google are considered highly competitve.

A great example of this is credit card business. Banks are constantly focusing on credit card advertising and are willing to pay high advertisement cost to rank on top. Naturally, if your page is all about credit card, you could potential earn high ad revenue.

To check out how much CPC it is for each niche, you can check out AnswerthePublic, a free website for keyword research. All you need to do is type in your niche and it will process your information and share which title searchers are looking out for.

As seen here, the title side hustle near me are what searchers are looking for and advertisers are willing to pay $1.67 per click. A perfect opportunity with high earnings and traffic for you to write a profitable content!

Choose a monetization strategy

Choose a monetization strategy that aligns with your niche and target audience. Everyone has different ways they monteize from their traffic. For myself, my traffic mainly consist of individual looking to learn more about side hustle(like you reading this post🙂) and businesses reaching out to us to work with. My main monetization trend is through advertisement, affiliates, and partnerships.

There are many other monetization strategy such as selling E-books, courses, or discount coupons to use on their websites. Generally, focusing on ad revenue for beginners is the safer approach. Only once you are able to earn over $100 a month on advertisement, then you may want to consider branching out.

Don’t stretch your monetization strategy too much. Focus on one and build on it well!

Research your competitors

A free simple way for you to do this is by Ubersuggest. You can check out your site page comparison with other blog pages. If you would like a paid version with more features, the most reliable tool is Ahrefs. It track every moves your competition is doing and you can try to one up their level of content😅. Look at other blogs in your niche and see how they are monetizing their blog.

Experiment and track your results

Try different monetization strategies and track your results to see what works best for your blog.

Improve your content quality

If your content is high-quality and valuable, you are more likely to attract advertisers and sponsors who are willing to pay top dollar for your services.

Common Misconceptions About Blogging

Before we wrap up, let’s address some common misconceptions about blogging income.

Blogging is easy money

Blogging takes a lot of time, effort, and dedication. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, and it requires consistent work and patience to see results. As what Project 24 shared, it takes on average 24 months in order for most blogs to actually turn into a full-time income.

You need a lot of traffic to make money

While traffic is important, it’s not the only factor that affects blog income. You can still make money with a smaller audience if you have a strong monetization strategy and valuable content.

Tips for Managing and Tracking Your Blogging Income

Finally, it’s important to have a system in place for managing and tracking your blogging income. Here are some tips to consider:

1. Keep track of your income and expenses
2. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google AdSense to track your traffic and earnings
3. Set financial goals and create a budget
4. Hire an accountant or use accounting software to manage your finances

Tools to Help with Blog Monetization

There are several tools available to help with blog monetization, such as:

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is an advertising network that allows you to place ads on your blog and earn money when people click on them. By far this is the most basic level when it comes to earning passive income and you need to do the best to get approval from Google Adsense. Only then can you reach out to muliple higher paying ad platforms to earn higher income.

WordPress Ads

Even if you aren’t Google optimize, you can still make an income from your readers if they spend at lest 5 second on page with the advertisement. Isn’t that awesome!

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In conclusion, the truth about blogging income is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on a number of factors, such as your niche, traffic, monetization strategy, and more. However, with dedication and hard work, it’s possible to make a full-time income from your blog. Remember to focus on creating high-quality content, diversifying your income streams, and tracking your progress to achieve your financial goals.