- Can you make money blogging?
- What are the various ways to make money from blogging?
- How much can I earn?
- Can I talk about my life and make money?
- What should I blog about to make money?
If you are asking any of the above questions, well you have come to the right place. In this mega guide to make money from blogging, you will learn all the aspects that will help you get started.
These methods are based on my 14 years of professional blogging experience. I have also shared screenshots of payments of a few income streams to give you a wider perspective.
If this is your first time here at ShoutMeLoud, I recommend you to read our about page to know what I do (Opens in a new tab).
A few years back, blogging was just another hobby that some people did in addition to working full-time jobs. Today, blogging still functions in that way, but a lot has changed.
In 2024, blogging has become a profitable online profession, and people at large start a blog to get into this noble profession.
In this eBook, I have shared all the blogging tips, tricks, and techniques that I implement every time I start a new blog of my own.
Before we learn the various ways to make money from blogging, let’s see the potential:
How much money can you make from blogging?
Just like any profession (Doctor, Lawyer, financial advising), there are different levels of bloggers who are earning anywhere from $1000-$2 million a year. I make close to a million dollars a year with the help of blogging.
How much money you can make depends solely on a few factors such as:
- Which niche you are picking?
- How much time you are dedicating to learning and implementing?
- How much traffic do you drive to your blog?
- What digital marketing techniques do you implement?
There are various other factors like consistency, your network, personal motivation, and goals that also contribute a lot.
However, niche and your digital marketing skills alone can help you move really fast in the field of blogging.
You can browse other articles on ShoutMeLoud to learn more about mindset and motivation, but in this guide, we will purely focus on making money from the blog.
Just to make things easier for you, I have answered many frequently asked questions related to blogging at the end of this guide.
What are the ways bloggers make money (Various Income streams)
There are various methods that you can use to monetize your blog. Depending upon your level of blogging and the kind of blog, you could pick the method that matches your style. Do check the end of this article to get the answers to many important questions asked by bloggers like you.
- Ad Networks like AdSense, Ezoic
- Direct Advertisements
- Affiliate marketing
- Native Advertising
- Paid reviews/Sponsored posts
- Sell Digital products (eBooks, Blueprints)
- Launch an Online Course
- Offer Online consulting
- Offer Services based on your skills
Apart from the traditional forms of advertising, you can work on other monetization tricks. Instead of just adding ads, work on adding value for your advertiser.
Here is a detailed webinar on how to make money blogging in 2022-2024. This masterclass will help you learn about the various stages of blog monetization:
It’s better to have 1 high paying ad than 4 low paying ads.
1. Ad networks: (Beginners)
There are ad networks that are the simplest and most widely used method for monetizing a blog.
The two Ad networks which are most popular are:
- Google AdSense (Offered by Google)
- Ezoic
- Monetag
You need to have a blog to get approval on these ad networks. They show ads automatically based on the context of your article and also based on user interest. Most of the new blogs use these methods to monetize as it gives recurring income. Since the ads shown are of high quality, they don’t affect the user experience.
If your blog is having less than 300 views/day, then there are other ad networks that are listed here that you can use. However, your goal should be to get AdSense or Setupad approval as soon as you could.
The below screenshot is from my AdSense account to give you a clear picture of earnings:
If you are using contextual advertisements and are not making enough that way, you should try moving to direct advertisements or affiliate advertisements.
2. Affiliate Marketing: (Most profitable method): Intermediate + Advanced
Affiliate advertisements are one of the best ways to make money since a single sale will make you a lot more money than a single click on a contextual ad.
This book contains all the secrets of affiliate marketing that no one wants you to know. It could enable you to make up to $1000/month in passive income with the help of affiliate marketing
It’s something most bloggers are using these days and one of the most profitable avenues to make money from a blog.
If you are new to it, read my beginner’s guide on what is affiliate marketing or join ShoutUniversity affiliate marketing course.
In below screenshot you could see affiliate income from one of the programs:
That is more than a million dollars, and I have not spent even a single penny on paid ads.
I have already covered affiliate marketing in depth:
- What Is Affiliate Marketing?
- How To Start affiliate marketing business
- How To Select The Right Affiliate Program
And of course, ShoutMeLoud’s affiliate marketing eBook.
Here are some of the popular Affiliate marketing marketplace that you could join:
Another great thing about Affiliate marketing is, that you can use this technique on any blogging platform such as BlogSpot, Wix, Squarespace, Medium, or even LinkedIn. However, I prefer self-hosted WordPress, as it gives better advantages over other blogging platforms.
All you need to do is, share your unique affiliate link of the product you are recommending, and when someone makes a purchase, you will end up earning a huge commission on the sale amount.
Affiliate marketing is the way, how a lot of bloggers are making millions of dollars every year from their blogs.
If you are wondering how much money you can make from affiliate marketing, below is my first 5-year earning report on affiliate earnings:
3. Sell your own eBooks: (Intermediate)
If you notice, the business model of top bloggers has to do with selling their own products such as an eBook.
All you need to do is pick a topic, compile an eBook on that topic, and put it on sale on your blog or on Amazon. Once you are used to this process, you can earn a decent amount of money by selling eBooks online.
Moreover, having your own product to sell is the best thing that you can do to generate passive income.
You can compile your articles into a well-structured book and sell it on your blog or on other platforms such as kdp.Amazon.com to earn money. This will also give you the credibility of becoming an author.
I have created three such books and have been selling them on various platforms. Here at ShoutMeLoud, I use EDD WordPress plugin to sell books and you can see an example listing here.
One of my most popular books “Affiliate marketing Book” is also being sold on Amazon and this is adding recurring income.
You can use a freelancing network like Fiverr to get someone to design a book cover.
You can also consider selling physical products on your blog using WooCommerce.
Here are 3 guides that you can refer to learn more about launching your book:
- 13 Useful Software’s Help You to Create Your First E-book
- The 7 Most Popular Platforms To Self-Publish Your Ebook & Make Money
4. Native Advertising
Native advertising has been one of the forefronts of making money from blogging. Especially, news and jobs kind of blogs can make a really high income with Native advertising.
There are a few native advertising solutions that are worth your time and effort of implementation.
5. Launch online course (Membership site): Advanced
- Can you convert your textbook into a video format?
- Can you add the checklist, downloadable templates?
- Can you create a 1-2 hour video course?
If your answer is yes, then this method is definitely for you. Thanks to technology, now launching an online course are easy for anyone and if you are giving the unique course, your chances of reaching $ 1 million goals are really high.
To sell your online course. Here is a screenshot of ShoutUniversity, where you can learn WordPress, Affiliate marketing, and AdSense by just watching videos.
You can use platforms like:
- LearnDash (WordPress)
- New Kajabi
- Teachable
To create and sell your online course.
6. Direct Advertisements (Intermediate)
There’s no question that AdSense is the best advertisement program for bloggers, but it has some limitations. The biggest limitation is the amount you get paid per click.
If you manage to grab direct advertisements, replace those AdSense units with direct ads instead.
The best way to get started with direct advertisement is by trying different networks and adding a page on your blog called “Media-kit or Advertise with us” to get new deals. Here is an example of the ShoutMeLoud advertisement page.
You can also use a plugin like WPAdvancedAds to manage the ads.
The best way to do it is, create a professional email address like [email protected] using Google apps.
(Optional) Then use HubSpot free CRM to set up the process. The below workflow is what I use here at ShoutMeLoud to handle such inquiries.
You can set this up on Hubspot free CRM and this will improve your workflow in a great way.
Here are a few articles to check out:
7. Sponsored Reviews (All level)
Paid reviews are a great way to boost your monthly income. You can quickly make $10 or more from a small review post. I personally make a minimum of $1200 from every review at ShoutMeLoud.
When doing paid reviews, there are a few things that you need to take care of:
Here are a few websites to find paid reviews/sponsored content opportunities:
- Famebit (For YouTube channels)
- Izea Pay per post
- Tomoson
- Revcontent
8. Run campaign for brands: (Intermediate and advanced)
This one is perfect for any type of blog with an established audience base. You could help brands reach the target audience by running the campaign for them. For this, you will be doing a brand collaboration, running webinars, and even paid Ads, or making videos.
You will see an increased number of blogs doing it with various brands. Keep an eye on this type as it’s already becoming one of the hottest ways to monetize a blog.
9. Services
Based on your skills, you can offer various services. Depending on what are you good at, you can offer content writing, logo creation, SEO, and so on.
In the past, I used to offer WordPress, SEO, and hosting related services. Offering services not only help you to make money but also gives you more use cases that help you hone your skills. I have had a time when I was earning more than $2000/month only by offering services.
In fact, launching your own services is pretty easy. All you need to do is create a page on your blog and list the services that you are offering. Make sure to place the link of that page in your blog navbar and prominent space for maximum visibility.
Make it easier for your audience to contact you and inquire more about your services. As you deal with your first 2-3 clients, you will have ample ideas to improve the sales process of your services. In fact, you will be able to automate some of the things like payment and follow-up.
Can you blog about your life and make money from blogging?
This is another growing form of blogging where a lot of people talk about their day to day life and create a community around it. You may have seen a lot of them on YouTube as a Video blogger and you can do the same on the blog or even on YouTube.
Some of the popular topic for this kind of blogging is:
- Lifestyle
- Fashion
- Travel
- Motivation
- Entertainment
The key here is to keep it entertaining, add value and create a community around your brand. Depending on your style and consistency, you could mint a lot of money with this strategy.
A lot of beginners also ask, should I focus on blogging or vBlogging?
Well, it’s a good idea to have a mix of both. Producing video content (Recording, editing, and publishing) is time and money intensive, whereas creating text content takes lesser time. Having a good blend of both techniques will help you to grow faster and start significant earning sooner.
Gone are the days when we bloggers were only dependent on AdSense to make money from blogging. Now we have many more ad networks and monetization methods available which we can have increased the income potential from a blog to a great extent.
If you have been using these traditional methods of making money from your blog, it’s time to revise your blogging business plan. Make some new tweaks, change the design, and optimize the marketing aspects of your blog.
FAQ’s about How to Make Money Blogging
I’m living proof of someone who can make a handsome living with blogging. A lot depends on how consistent and persistent you are. In my case, I was working almost 14 hours every day for 4 years to reach this stage where I’m earning more than $40K/month from blogging.
As the online space has matured, now there are more opportunities to make money via blogging. The only thing is, you need to be consistent for almost a year before you start making decent money to quit your job or to plan your life on blogging income.
In case you don’t want to blog about your life and wondering about the best topic from the blog monetization perspective, here are 4 factors that you should consider.
Passion: Things that you are already passionate about or have an interest in. This thing doesn’t have to be something you are learning at an academy or at your job, but it could be as simple as something that your friends, family, and others call you to take your opinion. For example, Cars, Food, Finance, Travel. Take a pen and paper, and label it as “Passion list”. Now, list down every topic that you think you have an interest in and you could blog about.
Traffic and trend: You would want to ensure that there are decent traffic and interest in the topic that you have discovered by creating your passion list. Trends will give you an idea if this topic is growing or dying. Trends.google.com is a free tool that let you gauge the traffic trend of any topic.
Monetization: The 3rd factor that will help you to find profitable blogging idea is an option for monetization. You need to see how you plan to monetize your blog. Is it going to be Ad network such as AdSense or is it going to be Affiliate marketing? To give you a perspective, “Whatsapp” as a topic is growing really fast and you may be passionate about it, but monetization sucks. Even with high traffic, making money is negligible.
Competition: This is the last but not the least factor. If you are getting into a competitive niche, you will find it hard to stand out and also outrank existing big players. I don’t mean to demotivate you but if you have a choice between 2-3 topics, pick the one with medium or low competition. If you end up picking a broader niche, for example, fashion, in a competitive niche, it would just take a few extra months to ace it. So, you need to keep this in mind when looking at the competition.
I suggest you browse more articles of ShoutMeLoud to get a clear understanding of picking up a niche.
Your advertisers could be sitting at a different part of the world and there are 5 popular ways by which you can receive payment from all over the world. These are also popular ways by which these companies pay.
PayPal
Payoneer
Wise
Wire transfer (Your bank)
CoinBase (Crypto payment)
Once you start making money, it’s a good idea to have an account on all the above websites which let you receive payments. They are all free to join and easy to use. You can also use these above services to pay freelancers or virtual assistants in the future.
There are a lot of ways you can make money from blogging, but I would recommend not overwhelming yourself and instead implementing them one by one.
All the above ideas work great, and you should find out what works best for your specific blogging niche.
Here are a few more articles that will help you to make money from your blog:
What strategy do you use to earn money from your blog? Let me know in the comments below.
Like this article? Don’t forget to share it!
Harsh really nice article for beginners. Thanks a lot.
As you said, one can start to provide different services related to wordpress like theme customisation, blog consultancy, self hosting, SEO etc. How much a beginner needs to dive into the devlopment part of wordpress to get the expertise of helping others to set up their blogs ? Does it require complete mastery of CSS and PHP etc ? (Sorry if im addressing your business secret).
Good Evening Harsh Sir, I’m from nepal i want to earn in affiliate marketing, adsense etc. Is it possible to do it from nepal? If yes, then how should i get started? I’m beginner for these things, please could you give me some tips or suggest me what i have to do in beginning.
Yes nabin you can join amazon affiliate program
how to make money with blogger ?
Hey Juliao,
Yes, you can make money with blogger. You can use google Adsense, affiliate marketing, amazon ads etc. to monetize your blog. The only thing you need is good traffic.
These are really amazing ways to monetize a blog. I hadn’t bought a custom domain yet but I am thinking to buy a self hosted blog so that I can earn money out of my blog. Thanks a lot for writing this article!
Great post. I have always wanted to get into blogging. Unfortunately I always found it to complicated. I have been considering an alternative like squarespace. I do see its a great way to replace a job income.
Hi, Harsh, Thanks for this great article to make money from blog and how to monetize it. Actually I have no luck with viglink and networks similar to it. I am happy with Adsense and Amazon affiliate program works great for me.
thanx for share the idea of income from blog besides the adsense. now i will try this method one by one
thanx for sharing this post 🙂
@Umar
Do come back after months, and share your learning & experiences.
Shoutmeloud is best community to learn everything before starting new blog , i am also learning from SML i start blog and using adsense to monetize , also i have tried affiliate marketing but didn’t get success .
i need proper guidance to improve my blog to get revenue from it
anyway thanks Harsh Sir for Giving the Best and Genuine Content to the readers …
Hey harsh,
i have been reading your articles, but i found this particularly interesting.
I am a newbie blogger, ready to try out every possible option for earning through my blog.
It seems to me that offering services on your blog, writing ebooks and affiliate marketing is the best option.
The only problem here is that i don’t knowhow to create an ebook. Could you help me pls?
In my opinion affiliate marketing works best (at least it works best for me) – it has some conveniences like, you can simply start making money by referring other people’s products. You don’t have to create a product of your own and you don’t have to wait until you create one!
And imagine this – how cool is it to get a commission when someone buys someone else’s product? Of course I am not saying that it is easy to do this. Affiliate marketing does take work and you have to build trust in the blogosphere for people to buy your recommendations.
Adsense is a good side source! Thanks again!
Harsh,
Even i added my blog in Giveaway.ly two months back, it is not still approved, in pending state.
Usually how long it will take to get the approval? Or Is it linked with getting the sponsor?
This is a great list and a brilliant way of making money online with your blog i really liked this post as it is understandable and very informative, Thanks for an awesome post and good luck for future.
Is Giveaway.ly helpful for a person managing a non-tech blog. Will Giveaway.ly possibly arrange a sponsor for my blog ?
Love to see Rs500 Indian rupees instead of Dollars……. By the way good list to start up making money…
i am also working on blog .my idea was that to earn quick money from blog but i was confused that how ? after read this blog i am able to get earn money
Hi,
I was wondering about hosting affiliates and I have been an avid reader of your blog for a long time now. I have seen you advertise Hostgator a lot in your blog before and now I have seen that you have changed it to Blue Host. I was just wandering why the change.
Did Hostgator screwed you over like what some affiliates say in their blogs and have experience? Pls. inform us your avid readers so that we may be warned and informed. Thank you.
Harsh you are simply marvelous. However, I’ve tried a little at affiliate marketing but was unsuccessful. Had better luck with other things like Webanswers.com and blog-advertising though.
Affiliate marketing is the best way to earn money easily with your blog but it needs more audience for your blog once you have it you can make a good amount of money. Paid reviews are also very useful.
I would add that creating a product might be something to consider if you don’t have the readership to support adsense and affiliate marketing, yet. Ebooks seem to be a popular route and can help to set you apart from some of the other blogs out there.
Thanks for the tips harsh. I think affiliate marketing is really a good way to earn more eespecially when u have a blog read by a good amount of people.
That’s right Amal.. I will rather say, for any kind of online income you need to have an audience for your blog. Bigger the audience is better your earning will be.