How bloggers make money

Maybe you‘ve played with the idea to start a blog for a while now or you have one but have absolutely no clue how to make it into a side hustle. Well, let me show you how bloggers make money nowadays.

If you haven’t started a blog yet I can recommend Bluehost* to you to get started. It’s what I’ve been using for years for the blog you’re currently on.

Affiliate Marketing

This is something you‘ve likely heard before. Maybe you know it from Youtubers, other bloggers or some place you shop at. Most bloggers have a couple products and services that they are an affiliate of. This is a great way to make money if there are a lot of products that share the same target audience as your blog. But even with the usual Amazon Affiliate Program you‘ll see some amazing numbers if you actually learn how to properly market products on your blog. 

Freelancing / Commissions

You‘ll sometimes see that a blogger is also a freelance writer. That means they either write for other bloggers or they write for online magazines. Or they have commissions if their writing style is specific, their niche makes sense for it or they simply just figured that it worked for them. Being a freelance writer is definitely not easy, but I definitely wanted to show that it‘s a viable option if you like getting paid for writing.

Coaching

If you have expertise in something and like to work with others you might want to coach people on your field of expertise. I think there is a little bit of a problem in this niche with people not being clear about not being a trained life or health coach and a lot of people don‘t put disclaimers that they aren‘t a trained professional in whatever field they are in. So in case you want to coach, make sure your business is ethical in its marketing.

Digital Products

Have you ever seen a blogger market an eBook or a course of theirs? Probably. A lot of bloggers have this as their main income source. They make digital products in their field of expertise that speak to their target audience. If you really start off with a bank you can even get into low-ticket items for so-called tripwire pages. Or even super high ticket items (like a product and coaching combo) in what is called an upsell. Selling your own products needs some more marketing knowledge. I wrote a post on sales funnels HERE so you can learn some basics, but let me tell you that even I‘m still learning more.

Physical Products

If it fits your business you might want to sell physical items. Maybe your website could use some cool merchandise, or you make stickers. If you‘re a beauty blog you might sell self made makeup. If you have capital to invest for this business you could order something to be professionally produced in your niche. That goes from fashion, over stationary, to gadgets. It needs a lot more organization and investment, but if it works for what you want from your business, you should go for it.

Advertisement

Depending on how much traffic your website gets you might want to consider advertisements. I use Google Ads and it is definitely not a stable source of revenue. You really need a consistent high traffic blog to get into ad networks to place ads on your blog that have a higher CPM (Cost per thousand). This can be a nice extra money on top, no matter your blog size.

Sponsored Posts

This also works with either super niche products and services or with more general products if you have the blog size for it. Sponsored posts can range from a nice extra income to a fully reliable income, based on how many sponsored posts you‘re willing to do per month and how much they pay at the monthly traffic you‘re currently at. In the beginning it will only be here and there, but the more you grow, the more you might want to consider this.

Monthly donations

In my opinion this only works with very specific blog topics or if someone has an immense personal brand, otherwise this is just acting like a tip jar. You can go the Patreon route and create extra content for something niche or you can, like I said, use PayPal or Stripe on your blog itself for people to use as a tip jar. For art related blogging this might be a great idea, for example, but for fashion not so much. It really depends.

This is how bloggers make money usually. It‘s usually a combination of two or more of these and I‘d say digital products and affiliate marketing are the most common ones. I hope you learned something in this post. In case you want to start your own blog I can recommend my email course linked further down to get you started or my free blog setup guide that helps you through planning, setting up and running a blog. You can get it by entering your email here:

But wait…

This entire post is based on a video lesson from my course “Blogging Bossbabe” that is teaching beginners and people to turn their personal blog into something professional how to do it. You can check it out HERE. There will be an entire rehaul of it very soon and an extension on this post of how bloggers make money.

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How bloggers make money by Rabea