HOW DO BLOGGERS MAKE MONEY? TOP 5 BLOGGERS INCOME REVEAL

  How do bloggers make money? What’s the secret that one-in-five bloggers know that makes them over $5,000 a month while others struggle to make over $500 each month? In this video, I’ll break the myth of blog traffic and detail the blogging income sources that WILL MAKE YOU MORE MONEY. We’re talking making money with a blog today on Let’s Talk Money! Beat debt. Make money. Make your money work for you. Creating the financial future you deserve. Let's Talk Money. .

 I want to send a special shout out to everyone in the community, thank you for taking a little of your time to be here today. If you’re not part of the community yet,just click that little red subscribe button. It’s free and you’ll never miss an episode. My last year as an economist for the State of Iowa, I was making $52,000 as a labor economist. That’s about $25 an hour and after five years working through raises and two promotions. I started building my online assets in 2014,creating four blogs and this YouTube channel. I’ve since made over $222,000 and am nowmaking ten grand a month in 2019. That’s five years of blogging and growingmy online businesses to a six-figure payday. You can make money blogging but you need to know the income sources and how to use them. 

That’s what I’m going to do in this video. I’ll share the results of our blogger survey,with responses from 150 bloggers on their favorite income streams. I’ll be busting the myth that you need lotsof blog traffic to make money and then I’m going to reveal three income streams thatabsolutely must be a part of your blog. Now that survey of bloggers found the averageblog got about 13,000 visitors a month. The average blogger reported spending about8 hours a week and made $1,476 a month. That’s about $42 an hour which isn’t bad,but you can make much, much more. In fact, 23% of the bloggers or just overtwo-in-ten, reported making over $5,000 a month. 

Another 27% made between fifteen hundred tofive grand a month which is still pretty awesome for something you can do from home and setyour own hours. Let’s look at how bloggers make money, theincome streams they use and how you can turn a blog into a money-making machine. At it’s most basic, bloggers make moneyon the traffic they get every month, the people that visit their blog. The problem here is that most blogs get verylittle traffic. We see here that 42% or about four-in-tenblogs get less than 5,000 visitors a month. Beyond the money aspect of all this, that’ssomething spectacular in itself, that even smaller blogs can reach 5,000 people a month. 

On the other end, we have nearly two-in-tenblogs seeing more than ten times that or 50,000 plus visitors a month. But this doesn’t happen overnight. I used the blogger survey to graph age of the blogs by monthly visitors so this dotted line shows the average blog traffic by age of the blog. You see that even blogs that have been growing for two years only get about 20,000 visitors a month and the average doesn’t break 50,000 visitors until about five years of blogging. A lot of new bloggers look at this and get discouraged.

 They see that slow growth but aren’t makingthe money they expected and give up in frustration. In fact, according to web researcher Technorati,more than nine-in-ten blogs on the web aren’t updated after six months’ from starting. That’s 90% of bloggers that give up withina year. The fact is though that it’s not reallyyour traffic that matters. This is something we’ll cover in those individual income sources but we see it in another graphic from the survey. This one shows how much bloggers are making per visitor to their blog and the total monthly income. This shows two things that are going to be important to your success making money online. First is that you can make money on a small blog. While a lot of bloggers are averaging between$0.05 to $0.15 per visitor, there are also bloggers making double that and more on each visitor. 

Average just $0.40 a visitor and you’re up to two grand a month on a small blog of 5,000 visitors. The other thing this shows is that to makethat top tier of bloggers, the ones making $10,000 plus on their blogs, you have to makemore per visitor. That’s going to mean using multiple incomesources and the most profitable ones to increase your income. So let’s look at some of those income sourceswe talked about in the prior video but go deeper into the details of how to get startedand how bloggers make money. We see this graph of the income sources usedby bloggers, by percentage that are using each income stream. So for example, most bloggers about seven-in-tenuse affiliate marketing to make money. A little under six-in-ten bloggers use sponsoredposts with about half using pay-per-click ads like Google or other PPC networks. 

Some of the less common blogger income streamshere include courses, books and membership sites. We also saw in that previous video thoughthat not all income sources are created equal. While membership sites, courses and booksare only used by a small percentage of bloggers, the ones using them are making bank. For example, less than 10% of bloggers aboutone-in-twenty are making money on a membership site, but the ones that are using the incomesource make about two-thirds of their total income from it. Some of these income streams are more profitableand you need them in your toolbox. That’s what I want to do for the rest ofthe video, look at some of these highly profitable blogging income ideas. There are two we won’t cover, courses andaffiliate marketing. These are some of the best income streamsyou can create but I’ve already published detailed video series on each. I’m going to leave a link in the video descriptionbelow to each of those how-to series that will show you exactly how to set up and howmuch you can make with courses and affiliate marketing as well as a free checklist foreach income source. Instead, with this video, I want to covermembership sites, printables and sponsored posts in more detail. First though, if you’re likin’ the videoand the information, do me a favor and tap that thumbs up button below or share it withsomeone. 

The first income source I want to talk about,and this is one of the fastest and easiest you can set up, is printables. So printables are just one- to 10-page downloadsyou create to sell, things like checklists, planners or step-by-step guides. They don’t have to be long or complicated. I know a blogger that sells a simple three-pagehome buying checklist for $4.99 and sells over 200 a month. That’s a grand a month from one single product. I’ll first show you how to figure out whatkind of printable to create and then walk you through the process of making one. The best way to sell a printable is to findtraffic you already have, so a ready-made marketing source. For most bloggers, you’re going to havea few articles on your blog that amount to the majority of traffic. It’s the 80/20 rule that you hear aboutso often, 20% of your posts bring in 80% of the visitors. For example, here we see the seven top postson my Work from Home blog, each one bringing in tens of thousands of visitors from Googleevery month. This top one, Can You Still Make Money onYouTube, is nearly twenty thousand visitors a month. 

I know these people are explicitly interestedin making money on YouTube. Now readers are going to come away with somegood information but there’s still a lot I could talk about when it comes to makingmoney. That’s where a printable offer comes in. I can write up a step-by-step into a specificincome source like using affiliate marketing on your channel or I could do a checkliston everything you need to do to build subscribers and grow your channel. Both of these would be hugely important andcan be detailed in a few pages. Selling the printables is the easy part. You write up a short paragraph talking aboutthe printable and insert it maybe a third the way down the article and then again towardsthe bottom. Within each of these paragraphs, you inserta link that goes to a sales page for the printable and automatically downloads on payment. So what’s great about this idea is thatyou can make a separate printable for each of your most popular posts. Since the printable is going to be highlytargeted to that post, you know people interested in the post are the exact audience you wantfor the printable. It’s a perfect match. 

Most printables sell for between $4.99 to$9.99 but I’ve seen a few selling for $15 and $20 if they’re really detailed. Even at that $5 price point, you make fiveprintables and sell just 150 of each and you’ve got nearly $4,000 income each month. Making a printable is just like writing upanother post for your blog. You’ll want to detail it and deliver onwhat you promise but it’s only a few pages of material. You write it up in a Word document and thengo to Save As. Where you see the format box, where it willsay Word Document or whatever format you’re using, you click here and look in the dropdown to PDF format. This will save it as a shareable documentthat can’t be changed and that you can offer as your download. There are quite a few ways to sell your downloadableprintable on a blog. You can do it through a course platform likeTeachable if you’ve also got courses. You could set up your own payment button withPayPal or connect it to a Shopify account. Each of these can be set up within five minutesand your readers will be able to buy with the click of a button. One of the most frequently used blog incomesources that we haven’t talked about on the channel is sponsored posts. This is where someone pays you to create anarticle about their product, about a related topic or just to include a link to their websitein an existing post. These are deceptively simple so I want tohighlight how to use the source correctly. Done right, these sponsored posts can be athousand a month even on a small blog. Done incorrectly though and they can destroyyour blog traffic and alienate your visitors. A sponsored post can be a review of the productor a more indirect approach, talking about a common problem and then how the productmakes for a good solution. Sponsored posts include at least one linkback to the sponsor’s website where the reader can make a purchase or other targetedaction.

 This kind of marketing is just much more effectivefor advertisers compared to display advertising. Display adds might get a click-through-rateof 0.2% which means just one person clicks on an ad for every 500 people that see it. Sponsored posts can see click through ratesas high as 2% to 5% depending on the product’s fit with the audience and the quality of thepost. Of course, advertisers pay much more for sponsoredposts and it is generally a flat-fee versus the per-click model on display advertising. While an advertiser may offer to pay $1 perclick on display advertising, rates for sponsored posts can reach $500 per post or more. There are two things you need to rememberabout using sponsored posts on your blog. First is only publish sponsored posts forcompanies or products you’ve tried and can recommend to visitors. It’s the same thing we’ve seen with affiliatemarketing. You don’t want to turn off your readersto make a few hundred dollars. You also want to set a schedule for sponsoredposts, only publishing maybe one per week or even less. Some of these posts can look like any otherarticle but others will come out looking like a commercial. You don’t want to bury your blog with lotsof these sponsored posts so limit how many you publish.

 As a new blogger, you’ll get emails almostimmediately asking to sponsor a post on your blog but it’ll be for ridiculously low rateslike $25 or $50 for a post. You’ll never make any money at these ratesand most will be spammy sponsors you don’t want on your site anyway. Check out other blogs in your topic to seewhere they’re linking to and what might be sponsored posts from legit companies. You can reach out to these and I’d recommendgoing no lower than $100 minimum for a sponsored post. Sponsored posts are a good source of incomebut they’re one-off, you have to keep reaching out to new sponsors and resigning old sponsors. The best sources for blog income are recurringstreams and there’s no better than running a membership site. A membership site is just like a blog exceptpeople will pay you monthly for access to the content, forums and exclusive downloads. With so much free online, I know this onesounds hard to believe but I have friends that make thousands a month by charging foraccess to their website. In fact, I make just under a thousand a monthon a small self-publishing site that costs $49 for membership. The trick here isn’t that your informationis any better than what’s already available. You’ve obviously got to provide some qualityinformation through articles, checklists and tutorials but I’ve yet to see a membershipsite that had information that was truly unavailable anywhere else. 

No, the value in a membership site is thepersonalized support and the idea of making it a social platform. People will join your site if they feel likeit’s a customized experience for their needs and they’ll stay for months or even yearsif they feel a connection with the other members. So let’s look first at how you set up amembership site and some ways to get members, then I’ll show you how to make it specialso people will want to sign up. Setting up your site is actually the easypart. You’ll have your main blog or website, andthis is something we talked about in that build-a-blog series, but then you’ll geta plugin like MemberPress or MemberMouse that will add membership site features. So your blog will still be available to thepublic but then you’ll have a password-protected part that will only be available to members. Within your members’ area, you’ll havea forum where everyone can talk and exchange information. You can post premium articles for people toread and downloadable content like handouts or checklists. 

Another great addition is a weekly or bi-weeklymastermind call where everyone meets virtually on Google Hangouts to exchange ideas. Through your free blog is where you’ll geta lot of your members because people visiting your site will be able to see that there’sa restricted area. You can create a page advertising your membershipsite that you send these people when they click on one of the restricted areas of yourmember site. Another way to get members is through an affiliateprogram, so the other side of the affiliate marketing strategies we’ve been talkingabout. Here you would sign up other bloggers or influencersto promote your membership site and they’d get a commission for every new member theysend. You set this up easy through any of the membersite plugins and you only pay when you get a new paying member to your website. Like we talked about, getting people to joinyour membership site and stay is a matter of making it feel customized and social. This means creating as much interaction aspossible in the member areas. So you’ve got the forum where members canask and answer questions. Another great idea is to have a mentor programwhere you and some of the senior members can guide new people. You can offer mentor members a discount forincentive on this. You can also add videos to your member areato give that face-to-face feel. It’s all to the point of making this a personaland social experience for members that will keep them coming back. Most membership sites I’ve seen charge between$15 to $99 a month. For example, I charge $49 on my membershipsite but I’ve seen a few that get as much as $300 a month. The more expensive sites tend to have higherturnover, so people come and go more frequently, but then again you only need a couple of monthsat $99 to make more than you did all year at $15 a month. One option is to have different pricing levelsor start with a lower monthly fee but then offer add-ons like the bi-weekly mastermindcall. This is a great way to bring in members ata lower price but still make more money with the add-ons. The great part about this member site modelis that the income is recurring. 

You’ll have some turnover of members butyou’ll get into that groove where you’re picking up new members every month to makeup for the ones that leave. That means consistent income every singlemonth that can easily be in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Look for those links and the free checkliststo get started making money on courses and affiliate marketing in the video descriptionbelow. These are two of the best income streams forbloggers and I’ve put together step-by-step guides on being successful. We’re here Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridayswith the best videos on beating debt, making more money and making your money work foryou. If you’ve got a question about money