How Much Do Bloggers Make? [150 Bloggers Told Me Their Income]

I asked 150 bloggers how much they make and their favorite sources of income.

I got a fantastic resource for how bloggers make money and what you can do to make money online fast. In this video, I’ll not only reveal how much bloggers make but three secrets to making money that will put you in the top tier of online entrepreneurs.

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Not only do I understand what it’s like to be a newbie blogger, but I also understand what it takes to scale a blog to where it makes thousands of dollars every single month. In addition, I understand how difficult it is for beginning bloggers to make money because they don’t have an audience and they’re just trying to grow.

For most people looking to make money online or start a blog, the first question that comes to mind is, “How much do bloggers make?” Here, I’m dedicated to teaching you how you can be a high-paying blogger, how much money you can make, and the different ways you can do to monetize your blog! I’ll be honest in showing you how to make massive cash by blogging and why you should start blogging now.

How Much I Make Blogging

Blogging and building online assets have changed my life. I started freelancing for bloggers in 2012 and then started my own blogs in 2014. After five years of developing my digital business, I broke ten grand a month this year and have made over $222,000 with my online assets.

blog income — How to Make More than the Average Blog Income

How Long Does it Take to Make Money Blogging?

I’m proud of my online business and love growing it each year, but you’ll notice immediately from the chart…that it wasn’t always the money-maker it is today.

It took me six months before I made any money blogging and at least a year to start consistently making $2,000 a month. Of course, making money blogging doesn’t happen overnight, but no small business is up and profitable in a day.

Still, there’s no other business idea where it costs so little to get started, and you can grow your income consistently yearly. You can be making over a thousand a month within that first year. Since beginning the blogs six years ago, I’ve grown my monthly income by more than 25% yearly. So even if your blog isn’t an ‘overnight success’, you’ll still make money in a job you love.

And this is all from something that most people don’t even know you can make money doing.

In this video, I’m using a survey of 150 bloggers to show you exactly how much bloggers make. I’ll walk you through the most popular income sources and reveal three secrets to making money online.

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How Much Money Do Bloggers Make a Month?

This graphic shows the breakdown of blog income by month for bloggers in that survey. Now what we see might not seem too impressive. Just under half of all bloggers make less than $1,500 a month but understand that, on average, 8 hours a week, bloggers reported spending on their blogs.

how much do bloggers make each month — How Much Do Bloggers Make?

That means even the bloggers at this low scale are making about $42 an hour.

Now I’d say most of these part-time bloggers still grinding it out in a 9-to-5, but it starts to get interesting when you look at this other 50% of the graphic. Here at the top end, we see 23%, more than one-in-five making five thousand or more a month, and we’ve got almost one in ten making ten grand or more a month.

You can make a lot of money blogging, and I will show you exactly how to break into that top 20% by income.

What are the Best Blogging Income Sources?

Now I want to share some other results from that blog survey, which will show you how that top tier of bloggers is making their money. This is what I got when I asked bloggers to list out the income sources they were using.

how do bloggers make money sources — Most Popular Blogging Income Sources

First, this isn’t necessarily a list of the most profitable sources. I’ve got another graphic for that in a bit. This just shows the most popular, most often used income sources.

So we see that nearly all bloggers, seven of ten, use affiliate marketing, and more than half make money on sponsored posts and pay-per-click ads. I will explain each of these next, but I just want to list them here. At the bottom of the list, fewer bloggers sell courses and books and use membership sites.

Before we look at how profitable each of these sources is and how you can use them, I want to share one of those three secrets to making money online. There is an immutable law of business, you can take all your MBA classes and boil them down to this one truth. You need one of two things to make money, product or distribution.

Distribution is getting things in front of people, so you have TV, websites, billboards, whatever it is you own that gets a product in front of buyers. Now, if you have this but nothing to sell, you make money by advertising other people’s products.

The flip side to this is you can have a product but no distribution. All those commercials you see on TV. That’s companies with a product but no way of getting it in front of people. They can make a lot of money selling the product, but first, they have to make that sale.

So as we’re looking at some of these blogging income sources, understand that a blog is a distribution. This digital real estate you own can get products in front of people. Bloggers are turning that traffic they get every month into cold, hard cash through some advertising.

This is something we’ll see in those income sources and how that top tier of bloggers makes ten grand and more each month. Making more money means being on both sides with the distribution and the product, being able to sell your own products through your blog.

Most Profitable Blogging Income Strategies

Now when I asked bloggers what percent of their income they made from each source, so we’re now talking about the best income sources, we see something entirely different.

which is best income source for bloggers — Best Blogging Income Source

Of bloggers saying they made money on membership sites, remember that’s only about one-in-20 bloggers; they reported making 67% of their income from the source. Another one here, online courses, only about one-in-four bloggers said they had online courses to sell but of those they reported making half their income from it.

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You see that idea we just talked about, having the product and the distribution in these numbers. Look at the advertising types of income sources; affiliates, sponsored posts and pay-per-click ads. Most bloggers reported using these sources, up to 70% of bloggers said they made money on affiliates, but these three sources account for about a third or less of the total income for those bloggers.

By comparison, look at the product type sources; membership sites, courses and books that make up a bigger portion of total income.

You can make money on advertising. I average $3,500 a month on YouTube ads on this channel alone and another $3,500 on affiliate marketing but you will never reach that top tier of income without hitting it from both sides and with your own products to sell.

How Much Does Blogging Cost?

So you can start a blog for almost nothing. In fact, through a special offer I set up with Blue Host, you can get web hosting for less than $3 a month and that’s all you need to get online.

But really taking your blog to the next level, making a business out of it, means treating it like a business and is going to mean investing in that business.

Here we see how much bloggers reported spending on their blog each month. Just over four-in-ten said they spent less than $50 a month so they might have that web hosting and a few resources they use. You’ve got another 26%, about two or three in ten bloggers that spend between $50 to $200 a month. This 68% or about seven-in-ten bloggers are probably those part-timers making upwards of $1,500 a month on their blogs.

how much does blogging cost per month — How Much Does Blogging Cost?

Now that’s still pretty damn good. Spending less than $200 a month to make fifteen hundred but then there’s the group of full-time bloggers. Here we have another group, 29% or about three-in-ten bloggers spending between $200 to $5,000 a month to run their blog. I’m in this group with expenses that average just under $2,000 a month to run four blogs and the YouTube channel.

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This all gets to our second secret to making money blogging, to treat it like a business. Learn how the business of blogging works, the tools and resources that will make your blog more profitable, and don’t be afraid to invest in it.

I’ve seen a lot of beginners jump into blogging, give it six months and then wonder why they aren’t making any money. And I ask them, “Ok what have you done to make your blog more like a business? What are the tools you’re using to get more work done in less time?”

Where Do I Start Blogging

We’ve covered how much it costs to start blogging but that still doesn’t explain where to start blogging or really how to get started.

To start a blog, you’ll need web hosting. That’s where your blog will live and how it gets served to visitors. A web host owns the hardware servers in a data center that holds all the information from your blog; the pages and software. When someone visits your blog, the internet retrieves the info from the servers and shows it on their screen.

It’s probably more tech geek stuff than you really want to know.

There are lots of web hosting services and we’ve reviewed quite a few here on the blog. I’ve used Blue Host, GoDaddy, BigScoots and SiteGround with each having their pros and cons.

For beginner bloggers, I’d go with Blue Host. It’s the best combination of lower price and easy-to-use features. It also makes it the easiest and fastest to get up and running. With Blue Host, you can literally have your website online in less than 15 minutes.

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How to Make More Money Blogging

Now I want to highlight some of those income sources, some of the best income sources for bloggers. This is really going to bring out our third secret to making money, that you have to take advantage of multiple income sources.

If you remember in that income sources graphic, even the bloggers making a lot of money on membership sites, were only making two-thirds of their income on it. For other bloggers, for example those using courses or self-publishing, they were only making between a third or half their income on each individual source.

Few of these sources individually are going to make you rich. I have ten books self-published on Amazon with two more on the way, yet it’s still only a couple of grand a month. That alone isn’t going to pay the bills but when I combine it with courses, affiliates, sponsorships and ads… I’m making a decent check every single month.

Just as importantly here, so maybe this is secret 3.5 to blogging, is that having all these income sources means if one craps out during a month or two, I’m not sweating to pay the bills. The income from a few of these sources, especially affiliates and sponsored posts, can go up and down dramatically from month-to-month. Combining all these together though gives me a stable income I can count on.

My Favorite Ways to Make Money Blogging

Now I want to highlight a few of these blogging income sources but what we’ll do is cover the basics here, then in our next video, I’ll go into each in more detail to show you exactly HOW bloggers use these to make money so don’t forget to click that subscribe button so you don’t miss that next video.

Membership sites are just an extension of your blog, a private area reserved for monthly subscribers. You create these areas with a plugin like Member Mouse or MemberPress and it lets you restrict access to extra content, forums, downloads and other bonus material. So for between $25 to $200 a month, people get VIP treatment and additional information. These are some great money-makers and really just like creating two blogs, one public and the other private.

Courses are the next level of making money for a lot of bloggers and something I just got into last year. In fact, four months into my investing course and I had made just over $9,000 with the income growing almost every month. The beauty of courses is that most bloggers already have one in their blog content, they just need to put it in order and polish it off for an easy-to-follow series.

Affiliate marketing is a great income source for bloggers because you don’t have to go through that work to create your own product. Now I know I said making that big money meant creating those products but using affiliate marketing can help you make money before your products are ready and will help smooth out your income like we talked about.

Affiliate marketing is just talking about a company’s product or service on your blog, linking to their website and then getting a commission if one of your readers makes a purchase. The commission you get will vary by affiliate but usually average from $25 to over $100 per sale.

For those of you in the community, you know I’m a huge fan of self-publishing but we haven’t talked nearly as much about making money with printables. These can actually be just as profitable as books and much faster.

For the first time, I’m revealing the entire strategy I’ve used to self-publish 12 books on Amazon and average over $2,100 a month in passive income. In Self-Publishing for Passive Income, you’ll learn everything you need, from getting a book idea to making writing easy and selling more books.

Printables are from one to ten pages someone can download directly from your blog. This is special content and might be a checklist, a secret process to getting something done or a worksheet planner. It’s anything people are going to find value in that will be worth a few bucks.

The best part about printables is they’re super-fast to create, you can put one of these together over a weekend. Plus they’re highly targeted and this fits with my favorite printables strategy.

So if you’re like 99% of the bloggers out there, just a handful of posts are going to account for the majority of your blog traffic. It’s like the 80/20 rule. About 20% of your articles will account for 80% of your traffic.

What you can do is go through each of these highly-popular blog posts and create a printable offer specifically for that topic. Your blog might be about cooking but let’s say you get a third of your monthly visitors from one post about baking a cake. So you create a Grandma’s Secret Chocolate Cake recipe as a printable and sell it inside that post. You know that people visiting that post from Google are looking for exactly that kind of information, they’re primed and ready for the sale.

I’ve seen these quick-sale printables make thousands when used right and it’s a great strategy.

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We’re following this video up with a deeper look into these income sources, how to get started and exactly how much you can make. Make sure you scroll back up and join the Let’s Talk Money community on YouTube so you don’t miss it.

Making money through blogging can be highly profitable in a year or two. I’ve known other bloggers who have made huge cash in just a span of 10 months and there are also others who took more time before they have achieved their dream income in blogging. The beginning is always the hardest but with grit and determination, everything is possible. Greater heights is just around the corner. If I can do it and if others can do it, so can you.

Read the Entire Blogging Series

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