How Do Bloggers Make Money? (Everything You Need To Know)

Are you curious about how to make money blogging? Or maybe you just want to make money online while working from home.

Earning money blogging is not easy, especially for new bloggers. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication, and it may be quite a while before you earn your first dollar. Many bloggers give up before then.

To make money with a blog, you need a profitable niche and traffic. Then, you need to come up with ways to generate revenue from that traffic.

That’s what this post is all about.

12 strategies bloggers use to make money

These are revenue strategies we’ll be covering in this post:

Affiliate marketing
Advertising
Sponsorships
Online courses
Books
Services
Additional traffic sources
Webinars
Merchandise
Products
Memberships
Donations

Let’s start from the top of this list and work our way down.

1. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a popular source of revenue for bloggers, influencers and media companies alike.

Bloggers use this revenue source to earn commissions for products they recommend.

When a blogger joins an affiliate program, they’re assigned a unique affiliate link that leads to a product page.

When they promote this link on their blog, and a user clicks through it and makes a purchase, they receive a percentage of what the user paid as a commission at no additional cost to the user.

Here are examples of how much two bloggers are making in affiliate revenue:

Pro Smart Entrepreneur | Business Niche – Earned $797.92 in affiliate revenue for April 2024. This represented 28.8% of the site’s total revenue, which was $2769.62.
Amy Fillinger | Travel Niche – Earned $854.90 in affiliate revenue in April 2024. This represented 34.55% of her total income for April 2024, which was $2,427.57.

2. Advertising

Advertising is one of the oldest revenue streams for media companies, beginning with newspapers and magazines that existed well before the first website went online.

The way ads work on a blog is simple. A blogger reserves ad space on their site and fills it with ads from ad networks and private companies.

The blogger earns revenue when site visitors view or click on these ads. The more site visitors a blogger receives, the more ad revenue they’ll earn.

Popular advertising networks include Mediavine, Raptive and Google Adsense.

With private advertising, bloggers can earn additional revenue by making exclusive advertising deals with individual companies rather than ad networks.

Ads do nothing to improve the user experience on your site, and they may even increase the amount of time it takes for your site to load, but you can’t deny their influence on a blogger’s income:

Midwest Foodie Blog | Food Niche – Earned $32,009 from Mediavine ads in March 2024. This represented 98.71% of this blogger’s revenue in March 2024, which was $32,427. The blogger received an RPM of $54.91 for sessions and $45.50 for pageviews.
Rich and Delish | Food Niche – Earned $11,284 from Raptive ads in January 2024. This represented 97.73% of this blogger’s revenue in January 2024, which was $11,546.

3. Sponsorships

Sponsored posts are special deals companies make with bloggers in exchange for being the only products mentioned in these posts.

When companies sponsor blog articles, it’s usually for product reviews or tutorials that feature sponsored products.

Some bloggers are even able to form long-term relationships with sponsors in which they’re able to earn monthly recurring revenue by including sponsored products in multiple posts.

Here’s how much bloggers are making from sponsorships:

Lifestyle with Leah | Lifestyle Niche – Leah earned $6,750 from sponsorships in March 2024. This represented 89.18% of her total revenue for March 2024, which was $7,569.03.
Bits by Bianca | Food Niche – 65% of Bianca’s revenue in 2023 was earned through paid partnerships with brands. Her total revenue for 2023 was $77,202, which means she earned around $50,181.30 from sponsorships that year.

4. Online courses

If you have a niche you can teach, you can generate revenue independently by selling online courses.

This prevents you from “keeping all your eggs in one basket,” meaning you diversify your income streams well enough to not rely on only one as some of the bloggers listed in the previous sections have done.

You can host online courses on your own website with a WordPress plugin like LearnDash or use dedicated online course platforms like Thinkific, Udemy, LearnWorlds, Teachable and Kajabi.

5. Books

Books are a fantastic way to generate revenue online, whether you self-publish your own ebooks or work with a publisher.

A book allows you to share your experiences and expertise in a long-form format that’s well structured and well organized.

If you don’t have a specific topic in mind, repurpose a few blog posts that all relate to a specific subject, and turn them into an ebook that’s easier to consume than browsing multiple blog posts.

You can even use an ebook as a way to expand on a topic you cover in an online course but don’t want to completely cover for timesake.

6. Services

Many bloggers earn money right off the bat by selling their services.

Consulting services are popular among bloggers. You can earn quite a bit of revenue and cement your authority on a topic by guiding a few readers-turned-clients through processes in your niche.

There may even be niche-specific services you can offer readers.

For example, a food blogger may be able to craft personalized meal plans for readers for a fee.

7. Additional traffic sources

Not only do traffic sources like social media and podcasting bring more website traffic, they also increase your potential to earn more revenue.

YouTube videos are especially useful for making money from blog content you’ve repurposed into video content.

You can also earn money from TikTok and even a livestreaming platform like Twitch (it’s not just for video games!).

These platforms give you additional ways to promote affiliate links and sponsored products. This will increase your value to potential sponsors over time, allowing you to secure better sponsorship deals.

You may even be able to earn revenue through strategies like email marketing and guest posting, though the latter is most often offered for free in exchange for a backlink.

8. Webinars

Like online courses, webinars are a tool you can use to teach your audience a specific topic or concept.

Unlike online courses, which are often only available on demand, webinars are live events that are fun, engaging and interactive for your target audience.

You generate revenue from webinars by selling webinar tickets or using them to launch a product, such as an online course.

9. Merchandise

If your blog has a community, you can create merchandise for your audience to buy and wear to represent your brand.

It’s a great way to sell physical products without having to start a whole separate side business.

This is due to an ecommerce strategy known as print on demand.

You work with a print-on-demand company to create designs for t-shirts, hoodies, hats, coffee mugs, water bottles and more.

These items are only printed when a customer places an order. The cost of the item comes out of your customer’s total, which means you earn your revenue through profit margins.

If you already have your own store running on a platform like Shopify, you can integrate Gelato which will allow you to sell POD merch easily.

Alternatively, you could use Sellfy to create a store. They offer a native POD merch facility with a solid selection of products.

10. Products

There are plenty of other products you can sell as well, including products you’ve designed and manufactured yourself.

It’ll be quite expensive to research and develop your own product, but the payoff may be worth it, especially if your product fulfills a need or want in your niche that other products aren’t offering.

You can even sell digital products, including PDF documents, licensed images and videos, web design assets like icons, graphic design templates, and more.

11. Memberships

This is another great income stream for blogs that have communities.

A monthly membership fee allows you to offer perks to your audience, such as an ad-free experience (yes, adblockers exist, but some readers feel guilty about using them for sites they like), premium content, exclusive discounts and access to a forum.

Memberships are easy to set up if you use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress. There are a bunch of excellent membership plugins you can use.

But they may be a little more complicated if you have a custom-built site.

12. Donations

If your site has valuable content, your readers may want to thank you in some sort of way. A tip jar allows them to do just that.

You may find it odd to accept donations as a professional blogger, but they allow your audience to give thanks in a one-off exchange that allows them to keep their adblocker on guilt free and not go through with purchasing your products.

You never know what little bit of extra revenue you might earn here and there by inserting a Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee link into every blog post.

Final thoughts

Bloggers have a lot of viable monetization channels available to them.

Some strategies are quicker to implement whilst others can take more time. But they all require an audience to sell to. So, that’s what the priority must be if you want to start a blog that earns money.

If you’ve already started a blog and you’re not monetizing yet; affiliate marketing, advertising, and sponsorships should be fairly straightforward to get going with.

If you haven’t started a blog yet, I’d recommend creating an online course around a topic you’re passionate about, then focus your blog around the promotion of that course.

You can add things like affiliate marketing and advertising as supplemental income sources later.

But the quickest to get started with right now is offering services – any skill you learn as a blogger can be monetized.

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Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. If you click on certain links we may make a commission.

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