How to Realistically Make Money Blogging

Do you ever wonder if you can even realistically make money blogging anymore?

I mean there are so many blogs to compete with. Every niche is bloated with rivals. Some people even think blogging is pretty much dead. It almost seems like a waste of time to even attempt to monetize a blog, doesn’t it?

Well, I’m here to tell you they’re all wrong. I’ve successfully monetized my blog and I’m working on doing the same on others I am maintaining as well. It’s not impossible. With the right approach, you can realistically make money blogging. It’s a journey, but it’s a journey worth taking.

That’s where most bloggers fail – they’re not being realistic about how you can make money blogging. And that’s where this guide comes in. I’ll show you how to realistically make money blogging so that you don’t have to pull your hair out trying to figure it out.

Can you Realistically Make Money Blogging Anymore?

Short answer: Yes!

Long answer…

You can if you play your cards right. That means you have to strategize. I’ll discuss becoming a strategist later in this article, but it really is important to think strategically about everything you do as a blogger. Strategy is your power, your key to unlocking the potential of your blog.

Strategy is how businesses and organizations make money.

So, why can’t a blogger use the same concept to make money, too? They can. You can. I do it all the time and I make a second income from blogging. It’s been one of the easiest ways for me to make money online in the nearly three decades I’ve been using the internet.

Some bloggers make a million dollars a month from blogging. Most of the top bloggers make around $125K to $600K a year. I know people making $100K a year. Heck, even making $50K a year on top of your work income is a nice treat.

However, starting out… Don’t expect to make that kind of money, especially overnight. You don’t realistically make money blogging overnight. It takes time. Those who try to tell you that you can do that are likely trying to take advantage of you.

It takes time, energy, effort, and experimentation, but if you do these things strategically, it isn’t as difficult as it might seem right now.

Like with any work, it’s work, and you’re going to work for it.

If you’re ready to start making money with your blog, keep reading this guide for more tips!

Absolutely Required to Make Money Blogging

There are some requirements to realistically make money blogging. If you do not meet these requirements, you will not make that much money.

Narrow Down Your Niche

The first thing you MUST do is choose a niche.

But it’s not as simple as just choosing a topic to write about and then start writing.

You need to choose a topic that you’re passionate about. Don’t choose something because it’s currently trending unless you know a lot about it. If you don’t know much about it, the competition will eat you alive. Choose a topic that you love.

After you choose your topic – try to narrow it down a bit.

This is what I’ve done. I could have chosen the broad generic niche of ‘outdoor recreation.’ I could have gone a level down to ‘hiking,’ but I knew both of them were too broad and competitive. I’d be against so many blogs. So, I narrowed it down even more and chose ‘hiking in Southern Illinois’ and realized the competition was very doable. In simpler terms, I chose a more specific topic within the broader niche of ‘outdoor recreation ‘.

If appropriate, narrow your niche down a few levels. By appropriate, I mean it needs to have an audience and profitability.

Suppose there isn’t a reasonable audience for the niche level. In that case, you need to go back up a level or two until there is a good amount of people following the topic. The same goes for profit. If there isn’t any way to make money with the niche, then it’s not going to do you any good.

Do your research before you make your final decision.

Define a Target Audience

You’ll never realistically make money blogging if you don’t know who you’re creating for.

You should never start a blog unless you’ve defined a target audience for its content.

Don’t make the mistake of choosing too broad an audience, either. A broad audience is too generic to market to. Marketing to everyone sounds great until you’re doing it and realize that you have no real direction.

Narrow down your audience like you would your niche.

Create an avatar or a persona of your perfect reader and customer. How old are they? What’s their gender? Where are they from? What are their pain points? How can you help them with their needs and wants? Answer all these questions plus more to get a full understanding of who you should target.

Once you know your target audience, you can create content specifically for them to start getting better results faster.

Become a Strategist

Strategy is your most important asset when it comes to realistically making money blogging.

Strategy is when you plan for something, and you have goals leading up to the main objectives.

You should strategize for everything related to your blog. You should have a marketing strategy, a social media strategy, a profit-earning strategy, and a content strategy.

A strategy lets you plan for something and follow a structured route to ensure that you can achieve your main goals and objectives.

Your main objective should also be realistic.

That means you should refrain from setting goals that are too difficult to achieve in a reasonable amount of time.

If your main goal is to make a million dollars a year with your blog, that’s fine. But you should have micro-goals in place to help you achieve that. For example, $1000 a month in six months, $100K a year in three years, etc. Big goals are fine as long as there are achievable goals in place to help you achieve the main goal; otherwise, you’ll burn yourself out.

No business is successful without a strategy, and wars aren’t won without a strategy. Blogs are also not successful without strategy.

How to Realistically Make Money Blogging

Before you realistically make money blogging, you need to cover a few basic needs in order to learn how to do it.

Reputable Content First

The first thing you should focus on is creating highly reputable content.

You’ll need proof that you know what you’re talking about. You’ll never make any real money without it. You can get that proof by publishing content that shows your expertise.

I always recommend focusing on creating high-quality, value-packed blog posts for the first year of blogging before considering profiting.

Doing so will help you create the proof you need. It also lets you decide if blogging is for you or not. You can find your consistency. You can also determine whether or not you need to pivot. Focusing on content for a year is extremely beneficial, in all honesty.

As I mentioned above, the content needs to be its best. Aim to make your content better than the competition. Aim to make each post better than your last. Edit them to near perfection, but don’t procrastinate and fail to publish. Just make sure your content addresses the pain point of your target audience. That’s pretty important.

Build your content up so that you can prove that you know what you’re talking about.

Create a Community of Followers

You should also focus on creating a community of followers if you want to realistically make money blogging.

This means you need to create an environment where you build loyal followers who act as ambassadors of brand and content.

You can achieve this by engaging with your audience as often as possible. Engage with them on your blog. Engage with them on social media. Engage with them anywhere you can engage with them.

Focus on relationship building. Make friends with individual followers. Friendship and trust build loyalty.

A loyal follower will easily convert into a customer versus someone who doesn’t know much about you.

Everything you make should be for your audience, too. Create for them, not for you.

Foster nurturing and engaging relationship building in order to set yourself up to realistically make money blogging.

Plan for Profit (and Loss)

Try to understand how you will profit as a blogger and how you will also lose money.

Too many beginners just assume that they’ll make nothing but profit and get rich overnight. The reality is that you won’t profit for a while when you start earning revenue with your blog.

Keep track of everything you spend on your blog from day one.

Then, when you start earning revenue, you can keep track of how it pays you back. It’ll take a while to get out of the red and start earning more than you’ve put in.

You’ll continue to have losses the more you have to pay for stuff, too.

It’s a good idea to keep track of all of that to understand how you earn.

As your blog gets more and more popular, it’ll require more resources. More resources mean that you’ll have to pay more money. It’s important to keep this in tune with your profit strategy so that you know how to work around it.

With earning a profit, there will always be a loss.

Methods of Blogging Profit Generators

There are many different ways to realistically make money blogging. It’s always a good idea to diversify your income and attempt multiple forms of earning.

Ads and Affiliates

Ads and affiliates make for a great way to make money blogging.

Suppose you use an Ad Network like Google AdSense or an affiliate network like Amazon. In that case, you’ll earn a commission based on clicks and sales. However, because you don’t have to do all the work, you earn only a small percentage.

Affiliate link sales can typically earn you more than something like AdSense as long as you have an audience that likes to buy things. You should figure that out during the target audience/avatar process.

Selling ads directly is a great way to earn the maximum amount of money, but it also means you have to do all the work, including finding those willing to purchase ads.

Ads and affiliates are some of the most common ways bloggers earn revenue online.

Physical Products

Some bloggers can sell physical products.

For example, on my local hiking blog, I sell t-shirts and hoodies with my logo on them. Someone with a 3D printer could create their own products and sell them using their blog.

With physical products, you’ll usually be responsible for shipping them. You should take those fees into account when adjusting your prices for profit.

Physical products aren’t for every blogger but some can earn a substantial amount of profit by selling them.

Digital Products

The most common type of product bloggers sell is digital products.

These can be anything as long as they’re retrieved digitally. Being digital also makes it often easier to create and sell the products.

Some ideas for digital products include templates, eBooks, applications, Software as a Service (SaaS), and similar items.

You just need to make sure you’re creating digital products that your target audience is actually looking for.

Services and Consulting

Another common product on blogs is services and consulting.

You can realistically make money blogging by selling services and consulting to your industry and nice.

What kind of service can you provide that addresses the pain points of your niche? Or maybe you can offer one-on-one advice on how to do things within your niche. Through services and consulting, you can make this a good product to sell.

Just don’t undersell.

You might feel like you need to have the lowest price possible in order to get clients. In reality, if you can provide the service or consulting that they expect of you, then they’ll most likely pay you good money to help them out.

Again, make sure you provide services or consulting that addresses the needs and wants of your target audience.

Paid Access

Another great product is paid access.

This can be done using several different methods.

You can offer a paid online community. You could offer a paid email newsletter. You could even offer a paid membership site to access premium articles.

Copyblogger Academy is a great example of a paid community. Members can discuss topics, get specific support, take courses, and participate in live events.

Trends.co is a great example of a paid newsletter.

Bicycling Magazine offers a premium subscription where members can get access to paid articles and other discounts.

If you offer the right kind of paid access that people are looking for, you’ll be able to sell it without much effort.

Tips and Donations

Another great way to realistically make money blogging is to ask for tips and donations.

If you want to keep your blog ad-free and non-commercial, you can ask for support instead. This is how Wikipedia does it. They don’t run ads. They just do donation drives throughout the year.

Your blog needs to have a lot of loyal followers for this to be possible.

The more followers you have who praise your content, the more likely you will get donations from them. This would also be good for bloggers in the Non-Profit realm, too.

In most cases, you would let the donor choose the amount. Most will be small donations, but some might also donate larger amounts.

Just make sure you make donating as easy as possible.

A blog for Them, Not You!

Realistically, making money blogging, getting traffic, or even building a reputable blog really depends on who you’re blogging for.

It’s not just as easy as choosing a target audience and writing, either.

You need to write for your readers. A lot of bloggers make the mistake of writing for themselves. Your blog post ideas shouldn’t come from your head. They should come from the feedback of those you’re targeting.

Quality content loaded with value addresses the pain points, needs, and wants of your niche.

If you’re not writing for them, don’t ever expect to profit to your full potential.

Final Thoughts About Realistically Making Money Blogging

This concludes my article about realistically making money blogging. With the tips above, you’ll be making money in no time. With some patience and strategy, you can increase that money to a profit in no time.

Please share this article with others if you enjoyed it. You can also support me by leaving me a one-time tip that will allow me to publish this article for free.

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About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers who follow this blog. Shawn also offers various services for extra help in content creation and blogging.