How do bloggers make money?: Top 5 ways bloggers make money blogging

In one of my blogging tutorials, I was asked two days ago, “How do bloggers make money”. It seems many people still do not understand how blogging actually works and how bloggers make money blogging.

This question came from an aspiring blogger who is willing to go into blogging full-time and make a living from blogging.

After answering the question, I decided to write a more elaborate blog post about it to explain further as I promised in the class.

Here we are, I will break it down in more detail so you can understand all the possible ways Bloggers make money.

So let’s get started.

How do bloggers make money?

Bloggers make money in several ways. It’s entirely up to the blogger to use multiple income streams to optimize their blogging earnings or focus on very few or one.

The amount of money you make as a blogger mostly depends on the amount of traffic you get as some of the blog monetization also depends on your traffic amount.

The more traffic you get, the more money you will be able to make. This is why it’s crucial for your blog to start getting reasonable amount traffic before moving to monetize it.

So here is how to make money blogging

How to make money blogging

As a blogger, you can make money by displaying ads on your blog. This is still by far one of the most popular blog monetization styles apart from affiliate marketing, selling digital products, writing sponsored blog posts, selling physical products and many more.

Let’s explore these ways in detail

#1. CPA Marketing

Most bloggers believe having display ads on their blogs is the ultimate way of making money with their blogs. Little did they know that CPA marketing makes bloggers more money compared to simply displaying ads on their blogs.

With CPA marketing, you register as a publisher on our AdsTargets network, get approved and create CPA ads, input the code in your blog and get CPA ads to show on your blog.

How to make money with CPA Ads

CPA ads are more like affiliate marketing. The only difference is that, with CPA ads, the process is simplified.

You do not need to visit multiple affiliate programs to get registered, or get accepted before planning how to individually promote the affiliate products.

With CPA marketing, you get multiple CPA offers that pay you each time a CPA offer is completed. A form of automatically promoting several affiliate offers at once.

All you need to do is simply choose the affiliate offers you want to promote and the platform manages the rest based on an automated setting.

Your commission or money is calculated based on how many people completed an action through your CPA display on your website and paid through your bank account or other payment gateways likee Paypal.

#2. Reviews

Another way bloggers make money is through product reviews. This depends on the amount of traffic and how popular you are within your niche or market.

Basically, the blogger is paid to do a product review in form of writing about a particular product, service or brand on their blog.

These reviews range from $100 to over $5,000 depending on the size of your audience. For example, Neil Patel takes over $10,000 for a review which is very high but not a high price to pay for getting a review from Neil Patel one of the most popular digital marketers and blogger.

As a beginner, you can charge any from $100 to $700 per review. If you contact 20 brands a day, you will be able to get at least 3 that will accept to pay you for a review.

Try not to overdo it as it make your blog look more like a review blog except your blog is a review blog.

#3. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is an underrated method of blog monetization. Over 50% of bloggers have not tried affiliate marketing all because of misinformation.

Many people believe affiliate marketing no longer pays for or is simply less effective compared to what it used to be. This is not true and very misleading information.

Bloggers who still engage in affiliate marketing for example Amazon affiliates make money more than the traditional displaying of ads on blogs. It is crucial to understand what products or services your audience might be interested in buying and find the right affiliate products or services to promote.

For example. If your niche is digital marketing and you are specifically writing about “Blogging” it is likely your target audience may be mostly bloggers.

This means they may be willing to easily buy blogging tools, web hosting services or ebooks that might enhance their blogging career. These are the things you should focus on promoting more than any non-niche-related products.

Promoting the wrong affiliates is what leads to many bloggers or affiliate marketers not making money with affiliate marketing. The key to successful affiliate marketing is promoting the right products to get your audience to buy.

#4. Selling digital products

Another way bloggers make money is by selling digital products such as ebooks and online courses to their audience. It a great way of making money even before you start getting loads of traffic.

Here is an example of how this works. Bloggers pay freelancers to write ebooks on what they are passionate about or believe their audience might need. It’s either you can do it yourself or get a freelancer to write an ebook for you.

The selling part is simple as well. You can upload your ebook to your book with a payment gateway so they can be able to pay.

Another way to sell ebooks on your blog is to create a capture page where they can be able to sign up either to download a free gift or to subscribe to an email newsletter list.

Through the funnel process, you will send them various emails periodically to get them to buy your ebooks or courses.

Another way to sell ebooks online to make money is on Amazon. Amazon was built for selling books and still makes books a priority. It’s even easier to sell ebooks on Amazon since there are millions of customers on Amazon looking for books every day and night.

The trick is to optimize your listing on Amazon so you will be able to appear on relevant search queries when people search for keywords that are related to your listing.

#5. Advertising

Obviously displaying Ads to make money is still the most popular method of monetizing blogs known by many bloggers. However, it’s not the most profitable way anymore.

This is the reason why this did not come to the top of my list of how bloggers make money. Nevertheless, displaying ads to make money is the easiest and fastest way to start making bloggers.

Bloggers still make a lot of money displaying ads. Don’t get me wrong when I said it’s not the most profitable. If you optimize your ads for the highest bidders you will definitely make a lot of money displaying ads.

One thing you must know is that your earnings depend on the quality of your traffic and obviously how much traffic you get coming to your blog.

The niche matters as well, blogging for specific topics for example finance will definitely make you a lot of money if the traffic is for example from the U.S. The GEOs of your traffic matter too here.

The key to making money with ads is blogging on keywords that are relevant to your niche, and audience and have low competition but have very high traffic volume.

The more traffic you have, the more you will be able to make especially if your traffic is from organic search engines.

Conclusion

Though there are many other ways bloggers make money, I choose to cover the more relevant and probably the most profitable regardless of your niche.

It’s important to understand that having multiple income streams through blogging is good but when you have too many, you find it difficult to optimize the ones that are already making you money.

Find the most important blogging income streams and concentrate on them, optimize them to the fullest and you will become very successful blogging.

Finally, if someone asks you how do bloggers make money, you will have a clear answer.