How Much Do Bloggers Make? Helpful Examples + How to Earn $100k a Month!

So, how much do bloggers make from their blogs?

Maybe you've heard stories of bloggers making a full-time living.  Or perhaps you just have a passion for writing and sharing your expertise on a particular topic and you are curious if you can actually make a profitable blog.

I should add that I've been a full time blogger and online business owner since 2011, so I have some expertise in this area.

The truth is that a professional blogger in a profitable niche can make a lot of money in a year. But how much does the average blogger make?

Not very much.

So, the real answer is that there isn't really an average blogger salary. A blogger can make anywhere from a few dollars a month to over $100,000 a month (and it's one of the best ways to make 5k per month).  Yep, $100k/month.  I personally know bloggers making more than $1 million a year from their blogs!

But remember, this is not the norm.  The bloggers that are able to strategically think about their blog as a business and stick with it for the long term are the ones that have the potential to make significant money.

How Much Do Bloggers Make?: Freelance Writers vs Blog Owners

To clarify, when I answer the question, “How much do bloggers make?”, we are answering that question from the perspective of a blog owner.

However, you technically can get a job as a “blogger.”  Other blogs can hire you as a ghostwriter or staff writer for their blog.

How do I know this?  Well, I've hired lots of bloggers in the past and this is currently the going market rate for US based, Native English speakers.  If you are a writer outside the US or have English as a second language, your rates may be a little lower.

However, on the high end, some bloggers are making over $0.08 to $0.10 a word for high quality content.  So, if you are tasked with writing a 2,000 word blog post you can likely expect to be paid anywhere from $100 to $200 for that single post.

If you are looking to get a paid position as a blogger, I would recommend checking:

• Problogger Job Boards
• Upwork.com

Or if you would like to learn how to maximize your earnings as a freelance writer, I highly recommend you check out this course by Holly Johnson (one the highest-paid bloggers I know).

You obviously won't start making money from day one, but if you stick with it over the long term, you have the potential to earn money even when you're not working. (Depending on the monetization strategies you're using, you can make money from affiliate sales and ad clicks while you're sleeping).

When you own a blog with multiple income streams, you own a business. If you want to make money, and I mean like a lot of money, by blogging, you need to be doing it for your own website. If you're just looking for a side hustle to supplement your day job, then consider guest posting or writing for other blogs.

How Many Bloggers Exist?

According to Statista, there are currently nearly 32 million bloggers.  Wow!

According to other statistics, there are actually closer to 600 million blogs that exist.  I assume this larger number takes into account old blogs that are no longer active or include sites like Tumblr or Medium that allow bloggers to write on their blogging platforms.

Either way, there are a plethora of bloggers.

So, how do you stand out with so many existing bloggers?  I will dive into some of the more detailed specifics later on.  However, to stand out as a blogger you need to:

• Stick with it for the long haul (it takes time to generate income, don't give up in the first few months)
• Build a real audience
• Pick a lucrative niche to make money blogging
• Have a blog business plan
• Make sure you do extensive keyword research and search engine optimization
• Test and find the best way to make money from your blog depending on your needs and your audience

Examples of Bloggers Making Money

Fortunately, many bloggers publish income reports, so we know exactly how much money they make. Some of these reports show that bloggers make only a few hundred dollars per month, while others are making hundreds of thousands per month.

SmartPassiveIncome.com – $100k+ per month

One well-known blogger that used to share his blog income is Pat Flynn.  He stopped sharing income reports a couple of years ago, but at the time he was making over $100,000 a month.

I believe below is the last income report that he shared:

As you can see, his net earnings were just over $125,000 per month.

Most of this came from online courses as well as affiliate marketing. You'll see Pat also earns from sponsored posts and he does sell products (books). All of these strategies are great monetization techniques you can implement on your own blogs.

Pat no longer shares his income each month. But based on my recent interview with him, it's clear that his blogging income has continued to grow and he's expanded his business operations.

RyRob.com – $36k+ per month

RyRob.com is another blog that is making a healthy six figures a year.  In his most recent income report, he shared that he was making a little over $36,000 a month.

You can see from the sample of where he makes his money from his blog below that the majority of his revenue is passive income:

You can see that he makes a significant portion of his income is affiliate revenue. Affiliate programs like Siteground and Dreamhost can be quite lucrative if you have the right kind of traffic coming to your blog.

PinchofYum.com – Over $50,000 a month

One of the most popular categories for bloggers is food blogging.  Starting a food blog can be a great way to start a little side business that can grow into something much larger.

Bjork and Lindsay Ostrom have been running Pinch of Yum for many years and the dedication has really paid off.  One of the last income reports that they published showed that they were generating revenue of over $50,000 a month.

You'll notice they earn a lot from sponsored posts and ad clicks. They also generate income through affiliate marketing.

While they have stopped publishing monthly income reports, it's clear that the site continues to grow.

They have since launched a Food Blogger Pro course, released a few of their own WordPress plugins for food bloggers, and I'm sure grown the income from sponsored content on the site.

If you aspire to be a food blogger too I highly recommend you take a look at Bjork and Lindsay's blog for some inspiration on how to become a successful blogger.

CreateAndGo.com – $101,000+ per month

As you can see from their income report here, Alex and Lauren are crushing it with their blog!  They recently pulled in $101,499!

Check out this month by month income from 2020:

If you want to learn from Alex and Lauren about how to create a successful blog, you can check out their full training course right here.

LivingTheDreamRTW.com – $7,661 a month

Jeremy is a full time travel blogger from Pittsburgh.  He's been travel blogging for over 12 years.

Jeremy recently shared that his travel blog made nearly $8,000 last month.

Check out his income report for the past few years:

I think Jeremy's blog gives a little bit more realistic picture than some of the previous income reports.  Sure, a blog CAN make $100,000 a month, but as you can see, for a long time, Jeremy was making less than $2,000 a month.

Building a blog to $7,600 a month is a lot of work and you can see that he wasn't earning steady income. It does fluctuate from month to month.  So, nothing is guaranteed.

Your target audience, monthly visitors, monetization techniques and even your blog niche can all play a role in how much you can make blogging.

SimplifyingCollege.com – $2,000 a Month

Simplifying College is a resource for all things college and dorm related content, as told by a recent college grad. Dale is just getting started making money blogging with this particular site.

Dale shares that her income last month was just over $2,200, her best month so far!  In previous months, she was making closer to $1,000-$1,500.  She likely got a lift due to the holiday buying season.

I like that she breaks out the sources of her income:

December 2020 Blog Income:

• Amazon: $1,278.77
• Mediavine: $942.12
• Skimlinks: $6.79

Total: $2,227.68

So, the bulk of her income comes from the Amazon affiliates program. You'll notice a lot of these blogs are making money through affiliate marketing.

She also brings in a decent amount from display ads (Mediavine).  Plus a little bit through other affiliate links (see our Skimlinks review).

OwnTheYard.com – $3,500 a month

I created a public niche site a couple of years ago and that site is now making me roughly $3,500 a month.  Sometimes it makes more, sometimes less.  You can read about how I built this niche site (or “niche blog” if you want) as part of Niche Site Project 4 here.

I hired a freelance writer to create nearly 100% of the content for OwnTheYard.com, so it was all outsourced.  My primary monetization strategy for this WordPress blog is Ezoic display ads and Amazon Associates for affiliate income.

Check out the income over the life of this niche site:

You can learn more about how I build niche sites here.

Or if you are looking for an online course that teaches you how to build niche sites and grow the blog traffic, I recommend checking out Jon Dykstra's Fat Stacks Bundle here.

Jon Dykstra – Over $55,000 a Month from Niche Blogs

Jon Dykstra owns several sites and combined they recently made him over $55,000 in a single month!  I recently interviewed Jon, and you can see how he makes a full time living blogging right here.

Jon's primary monetization methods are display ads.  Sure, he makes some money through affiliate marketing, but primarily he uses AdThrive or other display ad networks.  As you can see from his ad revenue screenshot below, his blog monetization strategy is working out well!

Jon is a very successful blogger that also shares all of his strategies.  You can gain access to all of his course material for starting and growing niche blogs right here.

How Do Bloggers Make Money?

A blogger has several different ways that they can make money from their blog.  If you're one of a thousand new bloggers looking to monetize your blog, display ads are one of the most common monetization methods. In fact, even experienced bloggers will tell you that they still use display ads to make up a significant chunk of their income.

A blogger will make money when a visitor visits a page that has an advertisement.  Many times the blogger will get paid even if the visitor doesn't click the ad or buy anything, it truly is a display ad.

Below is a list of the most common ways that bloggers make money:

• Display ads (Adthrive, Mediavine, Ezoic)
• Affiliate marketing (Amazon, etc.)
• Online courses or software
• Selling products or services (both physical products and digital products)
• Sponsored post (blog posts written for brands)
• Podcast sponsorships (if the blogger adds podcasts as a marketing tool)

These few categories really cover the majority of the ways that bloggers are monetizing their sites.

If you want some more examples of blogs that are making good money you can check out these 17 Types of Blogs That Make Money and read How to Make a Living Blogging for more tips on how to earn as a full time blogger and what you can expect.

Ad Rates and RPMs

Ad rates are typically based on the number of times that your display ads are viewed.  So, the more visitors you get to your site, the more money you will make.

So, how much can you make per visitor?  Well, the numbers are pretty small per single visitor.  As a result, the ad industry has adopted something called RPM, which stands for Revenue Per Mil.

Mil = 1000

So, RPM is the amount of money you make per 1000 page views.  So, if you get 1000 visitors to your blog and they each view 1 ad, that's 1000 ad views.

If you are able to build your audience to 10,000 visitors a month, you could definitely be making $250 a day or more just from display ads!

So, how much money can you make? Take a look at How Much Does Google AdSense Pay Per Page View to estimate what to expect.

Affiliate Marketing

Another common way that bloggers make money from their blogs is through affiliate marketing.  Perhaps the most common affiliate program is the Amazon Associates program. A blogger will get paid if a visitor clicks one of their Amazon affiliate links and then buys the affiliate products.

For example, here is a recent screenshot of the Amazon Associates earnings for a food and craft blog that I own.

With affiliate marketing you recommend products to your readers and then make money if they buy them. It's pretty simple and once you've made the recommendation then it's passive income.

You need to choose an affiliate platform that works for you depending on your blog niche (though Amazon will work for most). Choose a couple of affiliate products or pick some affiliate links to promote and get them up on your blog!

Building Traffic to Your Blog

So, while blogging may start out as just a hobby where you just want to write or connect with other people that have similar interests, you have to consider the business side of things if you want to end up making some money.

If you want to know, “How much do bloggers make?”, the answer is nothing…without traffic.

The only way to make money as full time bloggers is to cultivate high traffic. Bloggers who make six figure sums can only do so because they have put in the hard work to put out great content on a specific topic on a regular basis.

It doesn't matter what sophisticated monetization strategies you've cooked up if no one is visiting your blog. If you want to make money blogging, you need to take the time to build an audience.

So, what are the different types of ways for bloggers to get traffic?

• Google search
• Pinterest
• Other Social Media
• Referral traffic
• Email list
• YouTube

How Blogs Get Organic Traffic from Google

One of the best ways, and my personal favorite way, of generating traffic to blogs is through organic traffic from Google and other search engines.  If you are unaware, Google will “rank” your website when someone is searching for something related to what you have written.

Ranking in Google is a somewhat complicated process, but I've written an entire beginner's complete guide on how to rank in Google.

The process of getting free organic traffic from Google can be broken down into a few high level strategies.

Keyword Research

The first step, is research. You need to write on subjects that people are actually searching in Google for. In other words, you need to target keywords. Successful bloggers tend to do keyword research before they write an article.

On the other hand, I have done keyword research and found that close to 1,000 people every month are searching for the term, “Niche Websites”.  As a result, I've written an in-depth article on how to build niche websites here.

I now rank at the top of Google for this search term and as a result, I get free traffic every single day to that article.

So, keyword research is critical to your success. I recommend that you check out my in-depth guide to keyword research here.

Quality Content

In addition to keyword research, you need to write your articles in a way that Google can find and WANT to rank them.  At a high level, this includes using either your target keyphrase or other related keywords in your article.

But I wouldn't overthink it.  Just pick what your core topic is and try to cover that topic thoroughly.  By doing this, you will usually naturally cover all the latent semantic keywords that Google might be looking for.

However, if you want to go in more depth, you can use tools like MarketMuse and Surfer SEO to help make sure you are covering your topic well.

The other key way to ensure that you rank well in Google is to do competitor analysis.  Look at the first page of Google and see how long their articles are, try to determine what subtopics they cover in their article and how well its written.

If you can write a more in-depth article that answers the search query better, this is exactly what Google is looking for.

The key when it comes to content is creating original content and putting out new content regularly to build momentum.

Link to Your Site

The final step to ranking in Google is links.  When other blogs or websites mention your site with a hyperlink, Google views this as a “vote” for your site.  The more links your site gets from quality blogs, the more likely your blog will rank higher in the search engines.

Not only do mentions on other blogs send over free traffic from visitors to their blogs, but it also counts as a link and vote in the eyes of Google.

Finally, many bloggers should not forget that you can actually build internal links to other pages on your site. These internal links actually help Google rank your site better as well.

For example, the hyperlink at the end of this sentence is an internal link that you can click and read my ultimate guide to building internal links.

Learn more about all of these techniques in our complete on how blogs work.

Keyword Research and Link Building Tools

When you start to move from planning to start a blog to actually building a revenue stream from your blog, you will want to invest in tools to help you do better keyword research and other tools to optimize your site.

Now there are literally thousands of different tools that you could invest in.  However, you will likely only need 2 or 3 to get started.  Below is a list of a few tools that professional bloggers will commonly invest in:

• Iridium Hosting – You will need hosting to actually make your blog live on the internet
• Long Tail Pro for keyword research
• Ahrefs for keyword research and link building analysis
• Generate Press – WordPress Theme
• Link Whisper – Internal Link Building tool

Building Traffic and an Audience Through Social Media

Social media marketing can be a huge source of traffic (and eventually earnings) for many bloggers.

The most common social media sources for bloggers are:

• Pinterest
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• YouTube (if you consider that social media)

Honestly, there are dozens of other places that a blogger can get social media traffic from.

Most bloggers nowadays choose Pinterest as an excellent source of traffic.  You can post an image pin that links back to a related article on your blog that will drive free traffic to your site.

The above screenshot is from one of my blogs that gets close to 3,000 visitors a day just from Pinterest.  As you can see, Pinterest can be a GREAT way to get traffic to your blog, which can turn into earnings.

The key to Pinterest is consistency (Pin every day) and quality content.  Here's a short guide on how to make money with Pinterest.

Facebook can also be a great source of traffic if you spend the time to build up a Facebook group and Facebook page.  A Facebook group tends to get more engagement, so it could be a good idea to focus there.

But there definitely are people that have been able to leverage this platform to their advantage.

What are the Most Profitable Blogging Niches?

You can start a blog in really any niche that you want.  But just like picking the right keyword for an article, making sure you are in the best blogging niche that has the potential to make money is important as well.

Some of the most popular blogging niches are:

• Food blogger
• Travel blogger
• Craft Blogger
• Mommy Blogger
• Business blogger
• Personal finance blogger
• Fashion Blogger
• Health and Fitness Blogger
• Christian Blogger

Now the list could go on and on as there are thousands of different niches that you could potentially go into.  Here's a short guide on how to choose a blogging niche.

Blogging Income Risks

As with any business, there are definitely risks associated with blogging.  Nothing is guaranteed in the online world.

While I've seen some sites take off and grow extremely quickly, I've also seen the other side of the coin where sites lose lots of traffic in a short period of time.

The same type of “algorithm updates” can happen on social media as well.  So, Pinterest has also been known to change how they show Pins and rank Pins on their site.  As a result, some bloggers will see a significant decrease in how many clicks they are getting from Pinterest to their blogs.

But again, on the flip side, some of the updates can help other bloggers (they might start getting more traffic after an update like this).

The same can be said for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or any other social media platform.  They can both give and takeaway.

So, the keys to mitigating some of these risks are:

• Build a real audience as much as possible on your own blog.  Keep people coming back to your site directly to hear from you.
• Leverage other platforms like Google, Pinterest, and Facebook, but never let 100% of your business be reliant on them.
• Build an email list so that you always have control over your audience.
• Truly provide value to your readers and they will follow you no matter where you are.

How to Increase the Earnings of Your Blog

Overall, hopefully, you are no longer wondering, “How much do bloggers make?”

How much money a blogger can make really does vary quite a bit.  In the early days, it won't be very much money.

However, if you are willing to put in the time and effort, I've shared several examples of bloggers making anywhere from a couple thousand dollars a month to well over $100,000 a month.

If you want to start a blog that can end up making money at the higher end of the spectrum, there are a few areas that you should focus on.

Here's how to grow your audience and increase the earnings of your blog:

• Be consistent with blogging.  Pick a schedule and stick with it.
• Write about topics that can bring in traffic and money.  Do your keyword research.  Don't just write about random topics and hope people will come (learn how people can find your blog).
• Stick with it for at least a year.  You will need to put in a year of effort before you start to gain much traction.
• Try to be helpful to your audience.  Go out of your way on social media or in your posts to truly connect.
• Get involved with other bloggers!
• Adopt an attitude of constant improvement. Consistently word on becoming a better blogger. Learn more about SEO and social media strategies.  Get better every day.

Overall, hopefully you found this article helpful. I also hope that in the process of learning how much bloggers make, you've also picked up a few ideas that will help you start your own blogs!

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