It’s a question all aspiring bloggers would ask and a question that many would ask full-time bloggers. So let’s address this question once and for all. How much do bloggers make and can you do the same thing?
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Some stats about blogger income
According to a ProBlogger survey:
- 10% of bloggers surveyed make $0/month
- 28% of bloggers make less than $10/month
- 25% of bloggers make $10-$99/month
- 17% of bloggers make $100–499/month
- 7% of bloggers make $500-$999/month
- 9% of bloggers make $1000-$9999/month
- 4% of bloggers make more than $10k/month
This may be disappointing news as 87% of bloggers make less than $1000/month from their blog. Most blogs either don’t make much money at all or don’t make enough money per month. The reason behind this phenomenon can be attributed to:
- People quit too early (it takes 6–8 months for a new blog post to rank on Google)
- Not enough content (you should aim to have 600 articles on your blog before you can expect to make a full-time income, want to know why? Click here)
- Articles aren’t high-quality enough
- They write articles that no one is looking for
So before you give up on blogging altogether, you must understand that most bloggers don’t have 600 high-quality articles on their blog and hadn’t given it enough time before quitting.
Okay now let’s look at more stats:
- It’s pretty realistic to make $25k — 50k in your first year of blogging
- Making $0.01 — $0.25 per pageview from ads is realistic
- If you have 100,000 page views, you can expect to earn $1k — $25k per month
- Each person on your mailing list can earn you $1 — $5 per month
Some real-life data on blogging income
- Adam Enfroy makes $150 — $200k/month from his blog in the make money niche and software review niche. He made more than a million from his blog 2 years in. He started his blog in 2019.
- Makinsenseofcents make $1.5M per year from her blog in the millennial money niche. It took Michelle half a year to make her first $100 from her blog. After about a year of starting her blog, she had her first $1000 month blogging. A few months after that, she was making around $5000/month. She started her blog in 2011.
Ways to monetize your blog
Here are some of the ways you can monetize your blog
- Affiliate marketing
- Ads
- Guest posts
- Course
- Book
- Printables
- Consultation
Bloggers who rely on only ads for their only sources of blogging income make a lot less than bloggers who can monetize their brands even with fewer page views per month.
In fact, with 15,000 page views per month, a blogger in the software niche was able to make $10k per month from his 6-month-old blog! He was able to sell leads to companies who pay him a hefty sum for his contribution.
Is it too late to start blogging?
It definitely isn’t too late to start blogging. Blogging is always going to be an essential part of the web experience. Every day, millions of us look for answers on Google and the reason we get answers now is because of blogs. You’re here reading this to get your question answered. That alone should be a good sign that blogging isn’t dead.
Blogging has definitely become more competitive and saturated compared to 10 years ago but it’s still going to be around and there are still things you can do to establish yourself in a competitive niche and get a piece of the pie.
So no, it’s not too late to start blogging. You can start a blog today if you want to and achieve your first $1000 — 5000 month one year into blogging. That would be a reasonable expectation instead of a pipe dream.
Some will tell you that making a living blogging is a pipe dream because so few bloggers did it but the reality is that most bloggers don’t make a living blogging because they haven’t invested enough time and effort into their business.
If you want to succeed in blogging, you gotta treat it like a business. It could mean staying up late to finish a blog post or getting up extra early to do your content research. It could mean releasing your 500th article in the year while not seeing much traffic to your blog yet. You need to continue to learn more about this blogging business and continue to persist even when you’re in the valley of disappointment.
By the way, if you don’t know what the valley of disappointment is, I made a graph to show you.
The valley of disappointment is the period of time where your effort doesn’t match your result. You’re putting in all the effort but it’s not translating to the result you may expect for the amount of work you’ve invested. You have to pull yourself back up and push through that period of disappointment.
This is true for almost everyone else who started a brand. Many bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, Etsy sellers, etc all experienced a time in which not many people know about them or their brands. All the successful brands today have worked their asses off and persisted through that period of complete letdowns to get to where they are today.
So if you aren’t seeing good results in blogging yet, I hope you give it some time.
Final thought
Blogging can be a tough business but the reward is so worth it. There are many bloggers who make a comfortable 6 figure a year or even a 7 figure and work only 10 hours a week. They use the rest of the time to do anything they want anywhere they want. They aren’t tied down by a job since blogging can be done over the internet.
Blogging is the best business to start because it offers essentially unlimited returns at a low startup cost.
Pick a niche that you’re interested in that is also profitable (click here to see the most profitable blogging niches) and begin typing!
Wondering what exact steps you need to take to start a blog? Read this comprehensive guide for blogging beginners!
