LD Staff Writer
When looking for guidance on how to make a profitable blog, you might seem to find only an endless supply of snake oil. Two equally respected blogs, built solely on the subject of how to grow a sustainable blog, will contradict each other on almost every core point. Something not touched on nearly enough, however, is the idea that your blog is a business – your business.
Profitable Bloggers Are Just Entrepreneurs
Successful entrepreneurs are hard workers and active people. This means that they are actively looking for a problem to solve, rather than hoping to solve a problem that shows up in due time. A successful blog will be run by a similar person. Will you be profitable in your blog? How much will you make?
Let’s find out by talking about how you get there…
Blogs Are Ads
Bloggers across the internet post their earnings as a sort of badge of honor – and to show how much others can expect to make doing the same thing. The important takeaway here is that these bloggers are not making money from the blog itself. Blogs are simply the influencer media’s new normal advertising method of choice.
Do As Bloggers Do, Not As They Say
One worthy trick is to build a well-followed blog and then sell products to its readers. Best-in-the-business “how to make money from blogs” bloggers say to never use Adsense. However, the recurring theme in almost all top revenue blogs is – you probably already guessed it – Adsense.
The Other Methods of Monetization
Other top tier profitability strategies for blogs include using affiliate links and selling your own specific content. There are pros and cons to each approach, obviously, but both give you a better hold on what sort of content lives on your blog. Much like with other businesses – and real estate in general – there exists the market of flipping a blog… Start up a blog, build its readership, and sell that bad boy off to someone else to do all the monetizing work.
Dedication Pays Off
The whole purpose here is to talk about how much you specifically can expect to make from a blog… It’s a mess trying to suss out how any one blog will do financially. There are plenty of education blogs willing to sell you the magic recipe that worked for them. Take a close look at them, though, and you’ll see that there is a ton of mutual exclusivity in the narratives.
Circle back to running a brick and mortar store. If you started up a hobby shop in a local shared space tomorrow, there are some indicators on how you would do, but nothing concrete. You’d expect to make little to nothing, just like any other entrepreneurial venture, for a while.
In this sense, expect to pour yourself into the blog as much as you can. Plan to give the farm away for free. The more you plan to work hard and struggle with no end in sight, the more likely you are to run a profitable blog. It’s weird how that idea runs parallel to the process of opening up a brick and mortar store, isn’t it?
ProBlogger.com polled their readers about how much they make from their blogs per month. This is a readership aiming to make a profitable blog, and more than 60% reported earning less than $99.00 monthly from their blog and all its revenue streams. In fact, only around 13% of bloggers on that list pull in over $1000 monthly. Our journey with profitable blogs continues to mirror that of brick and mortar entrepreneurship…
The Real Answer, Finally
Monetized blogs are businesses. Full Stop. If you aren’t willing to put in the hours to run a business and make it successful, you are a hobby blogger. That’s just fine – if that’s what you want. The answer to the question, “How much will I make?” is simple: no more than you put into it.
Want to learn more?
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