Professional bloggers are people who blog professionally, that is they get paid. But how do bloggers get paid? Good question, let’s drill down into the ways you can make money from your blog!

This is a follow-up article to my post over at Problogger, titled How to Start a Professional Blog and Make Money.

Pro Blogging Income Streams

Before we get into the details, realize there are three main benefits of building a popular blog that attracts a great percentage of new bloggers:

1. Authority – Gain a community and influence by building your online brand, get a book deal, get booked for speaking gigs, and launch an online course or membership site.
2. Traffic – Grow a huge audience, drive traffic to promote a business with digital marketing, or for you to sell your own products and services.
3. Income – Directly make money blogging through advertising networks such as AdSense, or get sales commissions from affiliate marketing.

While all three goals were more distinct back in the day, over time the lines have become more and more blurred.

For example, if you can grow an engaged community then you will likely be able to make money from membership subscriptions and focusing on a paid version of that online community. If you grow influence then you will do well with affiliate marketing whereby people take your advice and use your affiliate links for what to purchase.

Another big shift has been more and more people looking to social media to generate authority and visibility. YouTube and TikTok are now the first places people think of when they set a goal to become the next Mr Beast or Kardashian, and for them having any kind of owned website, email marketing, or a blog, is a much lower priority.

Beginner Blogger to Professional Blogger

A huge shift in terms of the types of blogs and bloggers has been the rise of the full-time professional blogger, which obviously Darren played a large part in.

Many, if not most, blogs today are at least launched with the goal of generating income but that was not always the case. In fact, Darren and I, along with many friends, faced some challenges from a large part of the community who wanted to keep monetization out of the field entirely.

Why did we blog if money wasn’t the primary motivator? The idea of earning money, let alone going full-time, did not occur to most of us.

We were blogging about things we were passionate about, intrigued by, or we were learning. Darren’s main blog to this day was born out of his obsession with digital photography.

Even Darren didn’t make a full-time living from his blogs until he was quite deep into the whole thing. Read his journey about “Becoming a ProBlogger”, it is a fun read. Fortunately for us, his wife was very understanding!

Our original goal with our blogging was to put our thoughts out there and hopefully reach like-minded people. It certainly worked, it was through blogging that Darren and I came together to write a book without having met in person, and I can trace all my opportunities ever since to connections I made through blogging.

Keep this all in mind as you discover what is in front of you, the journey can be just as rewarding as the destination!

Pro Blogging – How Blog Owners Go Full-time

The people who go from blogging beginners to successful bloggers don’t have any secret strategy. You simply need to answer these three questions:

• Readership – How do I get readers to come to my blog?
• Content – How do I consistently create high-quality articles?
• Revenue – How do I make money from blogging? Not how do other bloggers make money, but how will you earn your income from your blog?

A successful blog is not necessarily one that makes a lot of money, of course, you define success for yourself, but a blog that can sustain itself financially is usually easier to continue long-term.

I already mentioned that there are a few key ways bloggers make money:

1. Showing or selling advertising
2. Affiliate commissions from recommending and reviewing products
3. Creating and selling products and services

How to Make Money Blogging with Ads

Advertising is the most reliant on having a great deal of traffic, in fact, many of the premium advertising networks have a minimum number of monthly visitors before they will consider you.

With advertising you will either get paid by the click (minus the ad network percentage), paid rent for ad space for a set duration (ie. header banner placement for $ per month, or a six-month sponsorship), or paid by the 1,000 views of that ad.

The last type is the one favored by the most well-known ad networks and is called a CPM model which means Cost Per 1,000 impressions (M stands for 1,000). This means if you currently get around 10,000 page views per month on your blog, and the ad network sells ad spots on your website for $5 CPM, you would expect to get around $50 (10,000 / 1,000 = 10 x 5 = 50).

This is why advertising networks will often specify a minimum traffic level before considering a new blogger joining their network.

Google Adsense pays by the click or by impressions depending on what the advertiser chooses, and they do not have any minimum traffic requirements to join. Depending on the blogging niche you are in will depend on how much advertisers are willing to pay. Outside of super high competition niches where you can get up to $30 per thousand impressions, Google Adsense is more commonly paying in the $2-$5 per thousand range.

If you are willing to have multiple ad slots per page you can make more than just one ad slot, so balancing out user experience with your income goals becomes important. For example, you might feel fine having an ad slot tucked out of the way in your sidebar, but having ads right in your content will get more people to notice and therefore click.

Yes, it takes a lot of visitors to make a full-time income if your only monetization strategy is selling advertising, but the ads income stream can be complimentary to the others and usually just involves copying and pasting some code from the advertising network into your blog, so it can be real easy to get started.

Is the income enough? Only you can decide that but I would suggest most bloggers can at least cover their hosting costs, which could be worthwhile, but you do need to balance that against how much people really dislike to have ads interrupt their reading experience.

I’ve been trying Adsense out again for the first time in, well, decades, over at RetroGameCoders.com. Personally, I dislike how they look, and I have only made $26 (it’s a small, super niche blog). I am considering writing a plugin that will allow people to remove them for like $1/mo Patreon style (or even integrating with Patreon). Let me know if you would like me to write about that.

Affiliate Marketing – Getting Paid Sales Commissions from Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing has always been my top or second-to-top income stream from my blogging.

For three months this year (writing this in April 2024) I basically took time off, and it was only because of my affiliate income that I could do that. One merchant paid my mortgage for three months in a row. Compare that to the meagre Adsense cheque above!

I love affiliate marketing for a few reasons:

1. Selling your own products or those of others requires fewer monthly visitors overall.
2. Getting known for writing good reviews means you might get sent free products to review. Some of my favorite (and expensive!) tools in my workshop were sent to me to review, with no threats or arm twisting for them to be positive reviews either.
3. Once set up, affiliate marketing can be a very passive income – I have commission cheques that still arrive years after promoting their affiliate programs.

Not all affiliate programs are equally lucrative, it depends on a few factors:

• Does the affiliate program “convert” to sales well? If you send a lot of traffic, how many people purchase?
• How much commission do you get? 5{b35c98fb0b5373898aeb6e2d0db4f287402c3d8e7e09edb32fb78fc4e77f672b} might not sound like a lot, but 5{b35c98fb0b5373898aeb6e2d0db4f287402c3d8e7e09edb32fb78fc4e77f672b} of the cost of a $2,000 camera lens certainly adds up! Plus some programs pay not just on the first transaction but the lifetime of the customer relationship, those really add up over time.
• Affiliate cookie lifetime versus purchase consideration – A chocolate bar is an impulse purchase, a new car is not for most of us. If you only get credit for sales made right away and people need to go away and think about it, then you are not going to make a lot of money no matter how good the deal is.

Amazon Associates is commonly criticized because while a lot of your audience is going to go ahead and buy something from Amazon, potentially earning you money, you only have a short window of time for that sale to be credited to you.

How much money can you make from affiliate marketing? The sky is the limit. Yeah, some of the products are going to be cheap, but Travel Bloggers who refer a full family to book a Disney cruise are likely going to be very happy, and as I mentioned earlier, I do very well indeed when someone buys an expensive workshop tool.

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income made $10,000 in one month just from Convert Kit, an email marketing platform, and at one time he was making over $30,000 just from the BlueHost web hosting company affiliate program!

Darren’s got more information in this podcast episode on “how to make money as a blogger through affiliate marketing”.

Freelance Blogging – Get Paid to Blog

Take a look at the Problogger jobs board and you will see people advertising for bloggers to get paid to write for them.

Depending on your level of experience, the difficulty of the topic, and the amount of research required, you might get paid only $0.05 per word or you might get paid $0.25 per word or more. Some will pay a flat fee per post ($50-$80 is typical), and a few will even pay hourly.

It depends on the work they need and expect, for example, some just want raw Google document content while others need final ready-to-publish articles, fully search engine optimized, formatted, and with pictures.

Keep in mind that there are one-off gigs and regular writing gigs for established blogs and online magazines, but also you can make a real living and not just a side hustle income working for digital marketing companies and online agencies that routinely need writers to prepare content for clients.

These gigs will come from browsing job boards like Darren’s but also can come to you through networking, so make sure you show that you are open to opportunities on both your website and your LinkedIn. A great way to turn these gigs into a full-time income is to put that you are a freelance blogger or writer right into your author bio!

I love freelance writing, especially for topics that I am super fascinated about (and that is a lot of subjects, once my ADHD circuits latch onto something it is hard to get it to think about anything else).

For my Python on Microcontrollers article, for example, I got paid $200. Not terrible, but it was a lot of work (at a time when my daughter was in and out of hospital – tricky to juggle) so as an hourly rate it wouldn’t really work out as my only income source.

Unfortunately, ChatGPT and dedicated writing tools have convinced a lot of people who used to pay for writers that they don’t need humans and can replace quality and insight with quantity and “automated SEO” tricks. They are wrong, of course, but stupid is as stupid does.

“AI” tools can help us a lot, they just don’t replace actual human experience, nuance, and relationships.

Sponsored Content and Sponsored Posts

Having someone pay to be a sponsor of your blog, your podcast, or your newsletter can be an excellent way to make serious income even if you have not yet achieved a massive amount of traffic because what a sponsor is paying for is your relationship with and your influence with an identifiable audience.

It is an area that I have personally only been on the buying side of, I have yet to allow a business to sponsor any of my content (I go for affiliate marketing instead, see above).

Companies are willing to pay from a couple of hundred dollars to multiple thousands, depending on how busy your traffic is, how long the sponsor relationship lasts, and the audience they need to get in front of.

Darren says this about sponsorships:

The key if you’re going to take this approach is to target advertisers in your niche that have products that closely relate to what you’re writing about. There are a variety of ads that you can offer them including banner ads, buttons, text links, mentions in newsletters and even individual post sponsorships. I would highly recommend that you always make it clear to readers that your post is a sponsored one when you’re writing a sponsored post.

One thing I would add as a way of a warning, in my experience people do not like product reviews that are really sponsored posts.

Make it clear that your reviews are 100{b35c98fb0b5373898aeb6e2d0db4f287402c3d8e7e09edb32fb78fc4e77f672b} unbiased and uninfluenced. By all means do an “unboxing”, announcement, product highlight, or whatever as sponsored content but never let your audience even get a hint that you might have been paid to say nice things about a product or service if you also say that you write fair reviews.

Selling Digital Products from Your Blog

You are likely already aware that I have made and sold a bunch of digital products over the years, mainly ebooks and courses, and Darren’s digital photography series is a great example of doing very well selling digital products that a niche audience loves.

If you have a fan base of people who love your content then chances are you have an opportunity to provide a percentage of them with a deeper understanding of what you write about in return for their money. It’s a win-win

Ebooks are the obvious answer because they are low-cost to create and sell, and you have a lot of practice writing about your topic if you are already blogging regularly.

Your own blog content can be a source of the first draft of your book. Darren did this with his 31 Days blogging series.

Templates, checklists, and worksheets are all options too. If you have figured out a great step-by-step process for how to achieve something with excellent results, sell the checklist for how other people can do the same thing!

Paid Newsletters

Paid newsletters are quite simply that people pay to be on a special email list that you put out on a certain schedule. These newsletters obviously will contain exclusive content that the subscribers find useful, valuable, or compelling enough to pay your subscription fee.

Some niches will have different reasons they find them compelling than others, for example, it is common for people in investing to pay a lot of money to get an edge or head start on investment information, whereas another newsletter might be pure entertainment but still worth the cost of a fancy coffee once a week to the subscriber.

Get Paid Subscriptions

If you have been around YouTube at all you might have come across content creators inviting you to join their Patreon campaign or become a member of their channel.

These paid subscriptions often add up to more than the channel owner makes from YouTube in advertising payments, so they are understandably a popular monetization method!

While paid newsletters are more obvious in how they work, being digital versions of the newspaper or magazine subscription model, services such as Patreon work a little differently.

How it works is the content creator will promise certain perks for subscribers, in return for their subscription. Depending on the amount of money the subscriber pays depends on the level of perk.

An example might be:

• $1 per month – Join the channel Discord discussion server and chat with other subscribers.
• $5 per month – Get exclusive content, early access to videos, and Q&A streams.
• $10 per month – All the above, get to ask questions for the Q&A, plus receive a sticker/downloadable files/etc.

You get the idea. The key to long-term success with subscriptions is that you have something that your audience wants to get in addition to the satisfaction of supporting you.

I have supported Patreon campaigns where I received 3D models to download and 3D print, where I had access to the creator’s database of technical settings and configurations, and where subscribers get exclusive access to a behind-the-scenes podcast.

Without considering the subscriber’s self-interest you are effectively running a tip jar, which is great and worth considering, but not a sustainable income.

From Blogger to Online Business

My own main blog, this one with my name on it, was created and promoted to position myself as a consultant and coach.

The way I made money was by writing about online marketing and then linking to my services.

Enough people wanted my help that it paid my mortgage and more, for a long time, and for that, I am amazingly grateful.

In addition to consulting and coaching, I also ran the Authority Blogger online course and membership program, and sold a bunch of smaller digital products as mentioned earlier. Again these were things that my website promoted but happened off of my blog.

Prior to my “blogging about blogging phase” I taught Microsoft ASP and .NET programming (online articles lead to in-person classroom teaching) and prior to that, I built websites as a side gig (in raw HTML with Notepad!).

Using your blogging to promote yourself as a service provider can be one of the quickest and most profitable ways to earn from your blog.

Using Your Website as a Demo

Once you have set up your own website you might get asked who set it up for you or how to get one just like it – this is an excellent opportunity to make money.

Potentially a lot of money.

Back when I was starting out building websites I was doing everything from scratch, eventually I even coded my own content management system. There were no WordPress-style projects with one-click installers like you get at many web hosting companies, and there certainly were no off-the-shelf professional templates I could just drop in and activate, unless you include the started styles that came with Microsoft Frontpage or Adobe Dreamweaver.

Now with professional and SEO-friendly WordPress themes, you can not only activate and customize all without code, but you get many different templates for your client to select from to match their style and brand!

Get one client and you have more than made back your investment, and then you are into pure profit from that point on.

I still build websites for other people, but rather than being “I need a website”, people now tend to want something more goal-oriented, and that means being a site builder is funnily enough less of a commodity than it was years ago, even though the tools have improved to make it easier.

Selling Physical Products from an Online Store on Your Blog

Speaking of having a goal for your website …

There was a time when if I suggested you add e-commerce functionality to your blog I would be laughed out of the room.

My first experience of working on an ecommerce site was for a florist near York. Her orders came in on the website and were then – get this – sent via a third-party email gateway to her fax machine. Still, it worked!

A far cry from when I worked on the Tesco site with a massive database of SKUs and IBM Websphere/MQ/Java backend.

Thankfully WordPress now has a secret weapon in the form of the WooCommerce suite of products. This means what was once just a blogging platform now runs a lot of successful e-commerce stores, some even that you will have not been aware of even having WooCommerce under the hood.

Now, obviously, selling physical products is a lot of hard work, let alone the work in sourcing or making the products in the first place. Therefore a lot of bloggers go another route and choose a print-on-demand platform for their products, especially merchandise such as t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, and mouse mats.

My wife and I make what you might call “crafts”, and we sell them online. It started out as a way to recoup some of my, um, enthusiastic? machine expenditures but Clare quickly made it into a real business over in Canada and she recently relaunched in the UK.

While Etsy made it quick and easy to get set up, they help with payments and taxes, plus the big advantage that they have their own ecosystem of buyers and sellers, there is one big flaw with selling on Etsy, and some smaller downsides.

When people purchase from Etsy and other online marketplaces people remember that brand, not yours! So people say “Oh this? I bought it on Etsy/Amazon/etc, and not I bought it from this guy called Chris Garrett who happens to be on Etsy”. There are other downsides as I said, but I don’t want this to be an Etsy-bashing article.

My recommendation is to get started on Etsy maybe, or use Etsy for acquisition, but (within the rules and guidelines!) find ways to get your repeat sales and return custom from your own website that you control.

Ready to Start Your New Blog and Get Paid?

We covered a lot of ground right here and still probably didn’t give you everything that you might need. I encourage you to check out the “Making Money” section on the Problogger site, there is a wealth of valuable insight in those archives!

Next up, if we are actually going to start a new blog, and do it right with the latest best practices, we will need to give it the best possible chance of success against increasingly tough competition.