How Much Money Do Bloggers Make? Let’s Hear the Truth.

No really.

How much money do bloggers make?

It depends on who is asking. I wish I were joking.

Bloggers can make anywhere from $0 to $500,000 (not a typo) a month depending on their niche, revenue streams, and how well they develop their brand.

I know that seems like a ridiculously broad range for bloggers but it’s the truth. Unfortunately, ​most bloggers aren’t able to make more than $1,000 a month but it isn’t because they lack the skills to do so.

It has nothing to do with luck. It simply comes down to a couple of different factors.

First things first, you need to know how bloggers make money.

How Bloggers Make Money

This is probably the biggest misconception about blogging.

The reality is that people who make good money with their blogs aren’t bloggers.

They are entrepreneurs. They are Creators.

That might sound silly to make that distinction but you’ll understand why I do it in a little bit.

There are a ton of different ways to make money with a blog but let’s just cover the big ones.

Ads

This seems to be the Holy Grail for a lot of people who get into blogging. However, ads have their limits. You aren’t going to make $200,000 a month with ads.

Why?

Because most ad networks pay you based on a metric referred to as RPM. That is revenue per 1,000 impressions.

This means if your RPM is $10 then you’re going to make $10 for every 1,000 pageviews that you receive.

I’ll do the math for you. That means if you want to make $200,000 a month with an average RPM of $10 you would need to get 200 MILLION PAGEVIEWS A MONTH.

That’s not a typo.

Even if your RPM reaches $20 or $30 you’re still looking at a traffic level that individual bloggers can’t touch because you need a ton of content, great social media activity, and some solid domination on Google.

That’s okay though because what makes blogging great is that you can combine multiple revenue streams.

Please note: Not every blog should have ads on it. In some niches, you are wasting space having ads up unless you’re getting a huge amount of traffic. For example, on our blog Obsidian Tavern, it doesn’t make sense to have ads because of the target audience.

Affiliate Marketing

Another great way to make money blogging is with affiliate marketing.

What is that?

Basically, you become a salesperson for other companies.

You find a product that you think your audience will like and then you promote it to your audience. If someone from your audience purchases the product then you get a cut.

As you can imagine, companies love to have affiliate marketers promote their stuff. It is free marketing to them.

If you have a blog or plan on starting one there really is no reason not to have an affiliate marketing strategy in place.

Information Products

My absolute favorite way to make money online and it’s the whole basis behind the The Odd Noodle Playbook.

Information Products are great because:

• You control the money
• You control the product
• You control the user experience

All of these things are what businesses want. There is no ceiling to how much you can make with your products because you get to set all of the variables.

Of course, there are a lot more hurdles to overcome when you’re trying to get someone to buy from you but that’s why the reward is so great. That’s why the goal of The 12-Hour eBook Method is to create something as quickly as possible to get it out the door.

You shouldn’t spend weeks or months working on an offer only to discover it isn’t something people want.

Imagine being able to create an offer over the weekend and get it out and on your blog so that people can buy it.

With ads you have to wait until you make money.

With affiliate marketing, you have to wait until you get paid.

With your own book, you can make money the second you get it up on your blog.

Other Means

There are other ways to make money with a blog:

1. webinars
2. conferences
3. services
4. membership site
5. podcasts
6. sponsored posts

And more.

However, the 3 that I talked about above are the main ones so those are the ones I wanted to make you aware of.

That still doesn’t answer how much money bloggers make.

How Much Money Do Bloggers Make?

Professional bloggers (like me) treat blogging like a business (because it is). We are not bloggers. We are entrepreneurs.

Blogging just happens to be one aspect of marketing that we do.

This is no different than a store owner.

If you asked a general question like how much do store owners make, the answers would vary and the same applies to bloggers.

It really depends on what you’re blogging about and how good you are at it.

When I say “how good you are at it” I don’t necessarily mean how good of a writer you are because at a certain level, most bloggers write the same.

Some have a bit more fun with their writing but that isn’t going to be what makes or breaks a blogger.

So what does it take to make $100 a month?

Making $100 a Month with Blogging

What does it take to make $100 blogging?

Surprisingly, not very much. Considering there are a number of ways to make money blogging it really comes down to picking one or two to get your first $100.

Usually, people see their first $100 come from either affiliate marketing or ads. In my case, I only put ads up on a blog if it makes sense and I have at least 30,000 pageviews. When you put ads up too early you can risk slowing your site down before Google falls in love with it.

Plus, the low-entry ad networks don’t pay well enough to make it worth my time to make my site’s experience worse.

With 50,000 page views, I can apply to join MediaVine. If I get the blog up to 100,000 pageviews, I can apply to join AdThrive. Both are great ad networks that cater to bloggers.

If the blog was in one of those networks then to get to $100 you would need about 10,000 pageviews in a month.

With Pinterest, this used to happen pretty easily but that isn’t the case anymore so you see most bloggers lean heavily on SEO.

If you’re going the affiliate marketing route then it really depends on what products you’re advertising. 

Either way, you can get to $100 in a short amount of time as a blogger. Most people don’t but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.

Once you get to $100 a month you aren’t going to be satisfied. You want more.

Making $1,000 a Month as a Blogger

Reaching 4 digits a month usually means you have a healthy amount of traffic and an audience that’s ready to spend some money.

You can get to $1,000 just by using ads but this usually requires around 70,000 – 100,000 pageviews. 

But there is a way to reach that amount of money with much less traffic and it involves creating a digital product. My favorite type of digital product to create is a book.

Yep. Nothing fancy.

Just a good ol’ book.

This is why in The Odd Noodle Playbook we emphasize understanding what kind of book you can create early on because that allows you to monetize your blog quickly.

Here are some numbers to make it easier to understand.

Let’s say you create a book and sell it for $20. That means you need 50 people a month to buy it. If you can get 10,000 people to your blog that means you need 0.5% of those people to buy the book.

That should happen a lot sooner than getting 100,000 pageviews and making money with ads.

$10,000 a Month

At this level, you’re doing what you did at $1,000 but just on a larger scale. You’re either selling higher-priced products or much more of the lower-priced ones.

You also can have a good thing going with affiliate marketing. There are a number of bloggers that reach this number simply by pimping out a web hosting company.

Doing $10,000 a month solely with ads means you’re going for 700,000+ pageviews which is a tall order.

Often, the people who do $10,000 a month stop viewing their business as a blog and more like an actual business.

This is the level that Odd Noodle students strive for. They are building businesses. Do the businesses involve having a blog?

Yes, but the blog isn’t the focus.

Because you’re beyond just running a blog, you’ve built a brand that brand doesn’t have limits. In fact, you can even take it to $100,000+ a month.

$100,000+ a Month

You might be thinking that there is no way that bloggers make this much a month but there are some out there that do.

Usually, at this level, you are selling your own high-end products. You aren’t making this much with a $19 ebook alone, but courses that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

This means you’ve created a brand that truly resonates with people and you have a Tribe that absolutely loves how you help them solve problems.

How Much Do I Make?

I have blogs that fall into the following categories:

• $0 a month
• $100+ a month
• $1,000+ a month
• $10,000+ a month

I don’t have any $100,000+ a month consistent businesses yet for a number of reasons.

I say “consistent” because I have broken the $100,000 mark a couple of times. In fact, I did it in 7 days before.

I know I’ll get there but at the moment I’m focusing on creating resources that help people like yourself build wonderful things for the world.

There Really Is No Ceiling

I consider blogging to be a gateway business. It’s really a business at the beginning, but if the idea of calling it a business scares you then stick with blog for now.

A business’s goal should always be to find ways to best serve its audience. As long as you have an audience that continues to grow there is never going to be a limit to how much you can make.

To make it easier to understand, you can’t really think about the blog as a business. The blogger’s brand is the actual business and the blog serves as the marketing for that brand.

The same goes for any social media activity they do or podcasts that they run.

An audience purchases things because they trust the brand and the blog is an extension of that.

The mistake that new bloggers make when they see the income report from another blogger is that they often assume that success can translate over to their niche.

Of course, you don’t need to enter that niche to make money, but if you see a blogger making $70,000 a month from selling blogging courses you can’t assume that level of success will transfer over to your zucchini blog.

So when I say there is no ceiling what exactly does that mean? It means that because your blog is part of your brand you can expand your brand to whatever you want.

Your zucchini blog might build up an audience that leads you to writing zucchini books and hosting a zucchini conference.

Next thing you know, kids are wearing your zucchini shirts.

Blogging doesn’t pin you to one revenue stream. There are many options and where you stop is up to you.

Currently, I have the following revenue streams:

• Ads
• Affiliate Marketing
• Books
• Courses
• Membership Sites

Not too bad but I can expand that further and I plan to in the future.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to make money blogging with digital products then check out the Playbook below.