How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs

Posted on 30. Jul, 2009 by Isaac Yassar in Uncategorized

make-moneyHello there!

Can people actually blog for a living? Yes. Many bloggers can live from blogging. The successful ones  can even make up to seven figures of income per year (in USD) from full-time blogging.

How do they make money from their blogs? This post covers all the popular methods of make money blogging, including when to use each, how they work, how to succeed in each, and a few relevant links to start your own make money blogging experience. Ready? Here they are:

1. Review

Writing product / service reviews (in form of permanent blog posts) can generate money quite easy for intermediate bloggers. For bloggers whose traffic is not enough to use other methods effectively, writing reviews might be the only option. A review minimally earns $2-5 each, compare it with  CPC (cost-per-click) ads: $0.05-0.20 /click.

How it works? First, bloggers sign up to a review company. The company chooses to approve or not based on their rules.  If accepted, bloggers will get the offers to write reviews by only waiting or actively bidding, depending on the system used. After getting offers / jobs, they have to write based on guidelines. If the results are not against the rules, bloggers will be paid.

How to succeed? Bloggers need to have a credible blog, showed by good rankings in blogosphere (pagerank, link popularity, Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking, RSS readers, subscribers, etc). Having a visually impressive blog is also good because some companies apply manual approval system by human staff (in the signing up). However, each review company usually has its own unique requirements. Bloggers whose rank are not too good might not get accepted in the company, let alone receive any job / offer to review.

Example of famous review companies: ReviewMe, Blogsvertise, SR.

2. Affiliate

Becoming an affiliate of a product or service can also become the source of income. They pay good. Some affiliate program share up to 40% of sales. It does not really need much traffic also, though having more is better.

How it works? First, bloggers sign up to affiliate programs of  products / services. Afterward, bloggers will get an affiliate link / banner to put on their blogs. If a potential customer clicks the affiliate link then buys the product / service, the blogger earns a commission.

To be successful in affiliating, bloggers needs to find the affiliate programs that are relevant to their blogs. Having more traffic is also helpful in increasing the chance of earning commissions. Becoming an affiliate of companies that are reputable / delivering genuine value is always better. Don’t promote bad products / services.

To find affiliate programs to join, find services/ products that are in the same field as your blog. See if they have an affiliate program that you can join.

3. Advertising

Advertising is the top-tier income source in blogging industry. Most of successful bloggers earn a good deal of money from this method. It is a stable and reliable method, once you have grown solid traffic.

How it works? First, bloggers sign up to an advertising company. Afterward, they can get codes to put in their blog. After the codes are installed, the ads will appear in the blog. Bloggers receive money depending on the methods of payment.

Ads are paid in variable ways, such as pay-per-click, pay-per-million, and direct payment. Pay-per-click means bloggers get money every time a visitors clicks the ads. In pay-per-million, bloggers earn money for every 1000 pageviews of ads. Direct selling advertising means advertisers buy the ads directly from the bloggers.  The price of direct selling ads is usually in monthly basis and defined by the blogger.

Ads have many forms and sizes. Banner is a very popular form, including horizontal banner and vertical one. Button is another form, along with text-link ads. Each advertising company might have different support regarding the form and size. Some support more, some support less. The most popular sizes of banner ads are 728×90 and 468×60 horizontal banner (size in pixels), 160×600 vertical banner, 125×125 button, and text-link ads. All major advertising companies support those sizes.

To be successful in advertising method, bloggers need a lot of traffic daily, at least 1000 visitors / day. That number is considered a minimum to generate decent amount of money. If your traffic is low and you insist on advertising method, you might not get significant results.

Example of well-known advertising companies: Google Adsense, Chitika, LinkWorth, Performancing Ads.

How to receive the money?

The most popular method to receive the payment from the methods above is using Paypal. From your Paypal account, you can easily transfer your income to your local bank account / credit card.

If you are serious about making money from blogging, you should have a Paypal account to receive international payments online. If you don’t have one, you will be crippled in making money from blogs. Checks are ice age.

When to start make money blogging?

After you set up your blog, you can’t just make money right away. It takes time to get the bargaining position and traffic you need to monetize well, according to content-is-king blogging strategy. Meanwhile, you might want to read: What You Can Do before You Can Make Money from Blogs.

Growing your monetizing ability means growing your blog. The higher you grow your readership and traffic, the more revenue you can gain from monetizing your blog. The faster you grow your site, the faster your monetizing strategy works. Therefore, to build the earning from your blog better, you need to build your blog better and build it fast.

Alright folks. I hope this article can give some clues on how to make a good income from your blog. However, making money from blog involves broader discussions. But don’t worry, I will write about them more.

For now, if you have any question or comment, feel free to use the comment box below :-)

Tags: Monetizing

35 Responses to “How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs”

  1. Jim Hardin

    31. Jul, 2009

    Isaac excellent post! I didn’t know about advertising. I thought it was all affiliate links. Well I guess I did know about google adsense. I had thought about using google adsense and tried it out a little bit, but it just didn’t look right and I thought to myself who is going to click on this ad anyways. You are definatly right about waiting a while and get visitors. I had put up some affiliate links, but nothing happend. It was too early. So I stripped it all back. I want to gain real vistors that really want to come to my site. I think thats when you have real success.

    Reply to this comment

    • Isaac Yassar

      31. Jul, 2009

      Hi Jim, thanks. I put some affiliate buttons and banners here also for aesthetics. They make my site look better and more professional. They also function as a sketch of where I’d put ads later on :-)

      Reply to this comment

  2. Nicola

    02. Aug, 2009

    Hi Isaac,

    Here, my favorite programs to make money blogging:

    Reviews:

    1) Linkworth, is the best 2) sponsoredreviews 3) Reviewme, 4) blogsvertise.

    Advertising:

    1) Adsense is the best 2) Infolinks

    Affiliate Networks:

    1) Clickbank is the best 2)Commission Junction 3) e-junkie 4) pepperjamnetwork.com 5)publisher.ebaypartnernetwork 6) Amazon 7)paydotcom

    Regards,

    Nicola

    http://www.the3dtechnologies.com

    http://www.nickdeiana.com

    Reply to this comment

    • Isaac Yassar

      02. Aug, 2009

      Great lists, Nick. I’ll try them later on :D

      Reply to this comment

    • David Lindsay

      12. Jan, 2010

      Thanks for sharing that very interesting list Nicola. Are the different programs in order of usefulness? In other words do you generate the most money from the ones at the top of you list?

      Reply to this comment

      • Nick

        12. Jan, 2010

        Hi David,

        I’ve generated income from all these programs. In my case, Linkworth, Clickbank and Adsense worked better than others. These three are higly reccomended.

        Nick

        Reply to this comment

  3. Doug Dillard

    06. Aug, 2009

    Isaac… first time visitor. Nice blog you got going here!

    As for the post… very good stuff. We are thinking about starting to do reviews, but we will probably wait until we get a little more traffic built up.

    As far making money with blogs, we have found our most success (as far as generating income) is from affiliate links in our actual posts. As long as the links have something to do with what you are writing about they can bring in a nice chunk of change.

    Reply to this comment

    • Isaac Yassar

      06. Aug, 2009

      Thanks Doug. That’s an interesting method you have. I will try to apply it more often here and see what will happen :-)

      Reply to this comment

  4. Jared | The Money Cult

    15. Aug, 2009

    Very good list. Not sure if I agree with the advertising as a top tier for income maybe for bloggers not internet marketers. I think most would say their own membership sites, own products and e-mail marketing are the best money producers. If you build these with easy tools to promote you now have something special that others will promote. Super Guru’s make millions on this stuff not advertising.

    Doug is right I also seem to get a lot more clicks on the affilate text link in post vs. sidebar ads also. Also how do you like the frugal theme I am serious considering switching. It appears so nice and clean.

    Reply to this comment

    • Isaac Yassar

      16. Aug, 2009

      Thanks Jared. Yes it is specifically for bloggers. They use content to attract visitors and then monetize the traffic. They don’t have ‘real’ products, just content. Internet marketers uses different methods and they usually have ‘real’ products like ebooks, scheme / membership, services, etc.

      It is quite easy for bloggers to be internet marketers because the boundary between the two is thin. Many successful bloggers can be a good internet marketeers, such as the 6-figure blogger Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. After his blog is established, he starts creating ‘real’ products e.g. the famous ebook 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

      Btw, I’ll send you an email about the theme.

      Reply to this comment

  5. ZXT

    07. Sep, 2009

    Isaac, a really excellent post. I’m bookmarking this and next month I will go over it again and maybe I can start trying to make money from my blog.

    Also very good response from those who comments.

    Thanks.

    Z

    Reply to this comment

  6. Een Rockstar

    08. Sep, 2009

    My main income source is from advertising include paid review..From my experience, to earn money from advertising you need 2 factors which are your Pagerank and alexarank..besides you can sign up with sitemeter dot com and put in sitemeter code in your blog as your blog resume…

    Reply to this comment

  7. Ricky

    09. Sep, 2009

    Paid Review,adsense and twitter are the best source of earning for any blogger. Affiliate marketing is also one more way but not as much easy as paid review.

    Reply to this comment

    • David Lindsay

      12. Jan, 2010

      Ricky, I was interested to see you mention Twitter as a prime source of income. There are active debates about this in other places. Have you found that your income from Twitter has increased or decreased recently?

      Reply to this comment

  8. Isaac Yassar

    09. Sep, 2009

    Thank you Een and Ricky for sharing your point of views. Make money blogging is truly a hot and dynamic topic. There are many things that help and needed to achieve solid results, like what you mentioned: pagerank, alexa, and other ranks.

    Reply to this comment

  9. bbrian017

    10. Sep, 2009

    There’s so many ways to make an online living today. The hardest part is keeping up to date on what’s new an emerging. Someone programs that generate excess income today can perhaps bring nothing in tomorrow. Determining who your readers are and understanding your target market will make you the most profitable you can be.

    Reply to this comment

    • Isaac Yassar

      11. Sep, 2009

      Good points Brian, I agree with you. The realm of make money blogging is indeed dynamic and always changing, we need to keep up with it or otherwise we won’t make satisfying results.

      Reply to this comment

      • bbrian017

        11. Sep, 2009

        Easier said then done right?

        I’m still having a hard time learning how to make end meet on blogengage. I simply don’t understand my target market or something.

        I’m still working at it.

        Reply to this comment

  10. Asswass

    14. Sep, 2009

    Hey Isaac, how much do you charge for a review? I’m using pay per post but I haven’t gotten any offers yet.

    Reply to this comment

    • Isaac Yassar

      15. Sep, 2009

      Hi Asswass, I don’t write reviews any longer because I don’t enjoy writing them. Except for the service / product that I use myself, I review them when I feel like.

      Reply to this comment

  11. exodian1

    20. Sep, 2009

    Great post really helps me since I’m thinking about monetizing my blog.

    Reply to this comment

  12. Crazy blogger

    29. Sep, 2009

    now im giving a try to make money from my blog by writting reveiws as u said.

    Reply to this comment

  13. Ben Lang

    09. Oct, 2009

    Hey,
    Here is a similar post in case you are interested on how to make money through ads on your blog…

    http://ben-lang.com/make-money-with-advertising-on-your-blog/

    Reply to this comment

  14. bloggerspayback Dan

    10. Oct, 2009

    Wonderful post! I loved that you included when you should start making money with blogs. It is something that will take time to develop a money making blog and you let your readers know that it is not something that you just jump into. Thank you so much for including that in this post.

    Reply to this comment

  15. Dustin

    27. Oct, 2009

    Hi Dude, Great point about promoting affiliate products, not all products are good and worth promoting so while you need to make money is it worth tarnishing your name with a crappy product? Hell no!
    Bloggerspayback is a great program well worth checking out for people who want to know all the tricks of the trade.
    http://www.bloggerspayback-bonus.com

    Great Post

    Reply to this comment

  16. the ska

    08. Nov, 2009

    I agree, being an affiliate and advertising is the source of income for bloggers. here’s a related article on how to promote your blog. http://theska.org/seo-categories/website-promotion/earn-money-online-blogs/

    Reply to this comment

  17. Ellisa

    19. Nov, 2009

    Internet marketing and home based business has become more popular in todays generation and it is right time for us to learn and make money through internet. Have a great time learning and enjoying internet marketing.

    Reply to this comment

  18. Health And Fitness Life

    18. Dec, 2009

    Perhaps the fact is making money online is what many crave, but not many know the path to success. Always shed light for others on the path you used in case you have made it online. We shall always appreciate it.

    Reply to this comment

  19. Isaac Yassar

    18. Dec, 2009

    Wow, there are many comments here since my last visit to this page. I didn’t notice them. Anyway, thanks for your comments folks. I hope all of us will find a way to succeed in make money blogging. Cheers :-)

    Reply to this comment

  20. Fatin Pauzi

    30. Dec, 2009

    Thanks, Isaac. You’ve given me some sources to make money from blogging. I’ve sign up a few of them. :)

    Reply to this comment

    • Isaac Yassar

      30. Dec, 2009

      You’re welcome Fatin. Don’t forget to keep enjoying blogging with passion. Passion is the key to every success ;-)

      Reply to this comment

  21. Sushant @ techooze

    02. Jan, 2010

    This is the best post on monetizing your blog, let me add busellads for selling direct advertisement.

    Reply to this comment

Leave a Reply