You may have wondered before, “how exactly do blogs make money?”
In this article, we’ll cover a few different ways that blogs can make money.
How Blogs Make Money
People blog for lots of reasons, and one of the big reasons is to make money online. Making money through blogging is appealing because it allows for passive income (when you can stop working and still make money). So many people try to make money blogging that there are over 600 million blogs in the world.
To help show you exactly how blogs make money, we’ve compiled the following list of the most common ways that blogging makes money:
We’ll go through each of these and explain how blogs use these tools to make money
Advertisements
This is usually the most obvious to most people, as nearly every time you visit a blog, you’ll get bombarded with ads. Blogs make money when visitors click on the ads while they’re reading.
Most blogs don’t have to find advertisers willing to show their ads on the blog. Instead, they will use a platform like Google AdSense, which is an advertising platform that works like a broker between the publishers (blogs) and the advertisers (businesses).
Here’s how this works:
- A blog signs up with an advertising network to show ads on their site
- The blog installs a code on their blog that allows the ads to show up
- Advertisers pay the network to show ads on the network’s sites
- The advertiser’s ads show up on the blog
- The network pays the blog for the ads that were placed on the site
Usually, at the end of this everyone is happy. The business is happy because they can show ads to people, and the blog is happy because they have a way to make money. The advertising network keeps some of the money the advertisers paid them so they’re happy to broker between everyone providing an easy one-stop service for both advertisers and bloggers.
The more traffic (visitors) the blog gets, the more money the blog makes through advertising.
Affiliate links
Affiliate marketing is the next most common way that blogs make money. You may have noticed that many blogs that you visit will have links to Amazon or other sites where you can make a purchase. These links are often affiliate links, which are links specific to the blog, and allow the blog to make money when people click on the link and make a purchase.
We’ll use Amazon affiliate links as an example. Here’s how this works:
- A blog signs up with Amazon as an affiliate
- Amazon gives the blog special links that they can put on their site
- The blog then writes a post about a product, and includes the affiliate link
- Blog readers click on the link, which takes them to Amazon, and they make a purchase
- Amazon recognizes that that purchase came from the blog and pays them a commission (a percent of the sale)
Depending on the affiliate program’s commissions and the price of the product, the money a blog makes can range from pennies to thousands of dollars per sale.
Just like with advertising, the more visitors that come to the blog, the more affiliate sales they’ll get and the more money the blog will make.
eCommerce
Ecommerce is familiar to most of us, though you won’t find it on every blog. Depending on the industry and the subject of the blog, a blog can choose to sell products on its site. So instead of including an affiliate link to a different site where a visitor can make a purchase, the blog can allow the visitor to purchase the product right there without leaving the blog.
eCommerce is useful because a blog gets the entire sale instead of a percentage of the sale like they would with affiliate marketing.
eCommerce is much more complicated because the blog now has to set up their site to allow eCommerce functionality, find products to sell on the site, manage purchasing, shipping, returns, and customer service.
eCommerce is a powerful way for a blog to make money, but it won’t work for every blog, and it is much more complicated than advertising and affiliate marketing.
Info Products
Info products are similar to eCommerce (some would say they are eCommerce, just without the physical product. We’re separating these for the sake of this article to keep things simple).
Info products are a product where the key to the product is the information contained inside of it.
A few examples of info products are:
- Online classes
- Webinars
- eBooks
- Podcasts
- Audiobooks
Info products are interesting because depending on how they deliver the information, info products don’t cost the blogger anything but their knowledge and time. With traditional eCommerce, you buy or make a product (which costs money), then sell it to someone. So for every $100 in sales, you may only be making $10 in profit.
With some info products, it doesn’t cost you anything to give someone access to the knowledge contained in your product. You make the product once, then a million people can buy it and you never have to make it again.
Info products are perfect for bloggers who have a deep level of expertise in a subject and their knowledge is valuable enough to others that they are willing to pay for it.
Info products require bloggers to add purchasing and delivery functionality to their blog, and the blogger needs to take the time to create a valuable info product that the visitors to their blog will be interested in buying.
This doesn’t work well for information that is easily found or can be learned elsewhere for free. If there are 10,000 videos on YouTube already with the same information a blogger is trying to sell in an info product, it is unlikely that the info product will make many sales, as most people will just turn to the free YouTube videos instead of buying the info product.
In the end, info products can be a great way for a blog to make money, and just like the other ways of making money, it all depends on how many people visit the blog and take the required actions.
Business growth
Many established companies, small businesses, and startups create blogs to help grow their businesses. They each have their own reasons for not using the previous ways that blogs can use to make money, and so they don’t use advertisements, affiliate links, eCommerce, and info products.
Why do these businesses even have a blog then?
They aren’t blogging so their blog makes money. Rather, they blog as a way to help with their other business goals.
We’ll use a dentist as an example of this.
A dentist office isn’t interested in making money through affiliates, eCommerce, ads, and info products. They could do these and maybe make some money, but a dentist really wants to get people to come to the office to get dental work done. A blog can help the dentist find new patients and build trust in the community. The dentist’s blog doesn’t make money directly, but it helps the dentist get more patients and keep patients longer.
We think that this last way that blogs make money is the hardest to measure and know if blogging efforts are worth it. Advertising, eCommerce, info products, and affiliate links all are very easy to track how much money the blog is making.
It also could be the most powerful of all of the options, as blogs can help companies grow enormously and make more money than advertising and the other options ever could, so bloggers can’t ignore it.
There are many ways that a blog can make money, and we hope that this article has been useful in explaining how blogs make money.
Maybe we’ve even helped you find a way to make more money with your current blog, or inspired you to start one. If so, good luck! We’re cheering for you!
