Advertised Free Webinars will sell you dreams of earning a six figure income while staying at home as a blogger, as a coach, as a butterfly… as something. And here’s some real talk about this life.
Work from Home as a Blogger! For just 100 hours a week, you can earn up to $45 a month! But only if you’re a good writer, and you apply yourself….
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The Best Way to Make Money from Blogging Is a PayCheck
Most people I know who made something of themselves being a stay at home mom and blogger did so by not using their blog to make money, but using their blog as a tool to transition between careers. Many of the women I watched go from fuzzy worm into beautiful butterfly were stuck at home due to motherhood, and they were bored, so they started blogging. And in blogging, they found a new passion, positioned themselves as an expert in that passion, took some classes and did some workshops, and gained resume-friendly experience in that passion via the internet, the network of bloggers, and all the things that come with blogging.
For instance, one woman I know, she started blogging out of sheer boredom, and maybe some therapy as a way to release pent up frustrations motherhood brought to her table, and she found a thing with it. Her blog reached well over a million fans, incredibly loyal fans who would lick a turd if she asked them to, all looking for a mom to bitch and complain about motherhood. When her blog hit it big, she was harassed by corporations, smaller bloggers, and random guys who might have been Russian Bots, and she turned down offer after offer. Finally, we all talked her into accepting a few things, so she got a book deal, and she had a job writing tweets for a major corporation, and she was on CNN and a few radio shows. But she didn’t like that stuff. She dropped it all to pursue life as a behavior specialist. Mental health was her thing, and her blog had nothing to do with mental health, but it gave her brain the break it needed from life to figure out what she really wants. But her resume now has “Published author” on it, and CNN interview, and writer.
Her results aren’t quite typical (the million people fan base), but they are typical in the sense of finding things to sprinkle on a resume.
Many bloggers I know started out as a blogger, they joined all the Facebook groups they could find on blogging, and they networked. In their circle of friends, they met better opportunities such as working full time for Salon Magazine, being a social media coordinator, working in television, etc. Most are published or featured somewhere in a book or on some major news network, and those things led to new opportunities.
So in my experience, the best way to work from home is to aim to get back out. The blogger’s dream isn’t in sales revenue, but in getting a better pay check and a job that is more in line with your passion as opposed to that thing you do so that way you can have electricity.
Nobody wants to work from home forever anyway.
For real, it’s depressing being online all the time and not around real humans, and it requires something a regular job doesn’t… I’m regurgitating my morning beverage when I say these words… Self. Discipline. Ohhhhhh it’s awful. It’s like cleaning the house: every day you have to bring yourself to DO a task that you would normally enjoy doing on a whim, but since you planned it (or worse, thanks to procrastination, it now just NEEDS to get done), now it’s a task, and you have no real reason to do it besides your own will. You impress NO ONE with it. There is no glory. No benefit beyond a gamble. You could be wasting your time and your life, but you’ll never know until you do it.
But Blogging is a Great Passive Income
But blogging also, in my experience supplies a nice passive income, meaning a secondary rainy day fund. Though many turn that into a full pay check… Many also don’t.
The bloggers I’ve seen make a decent revenue stream from blogging do the following:
- They invest a bit of money
- They diversify their income
For the most part, they spend almost as much as they make. You want to be careful listening to bloggers who make $50,000 a month blogging without knowing how much they spend a month to make that, because they probably grossed 50 grand but netted 10.
Secondly, they diversify their income. Of the ways to make money that I list below, most bloggers utilize 3 to 5 of these.
Common Ways Bloggers Make Money Blogging
According to Blogging Basics 101, you can make money:
- Google AdSense
- Sell your own Ads
- Affiliate Marketing
- Sell Digital Products
- Content Marketing for a Business
- Sell Memberships
- Build Credibility to Land a Better Job
Here’s my take on some of this….
Ads
In my experience and observations, Ads require a high page view volume in order to really get anything worth your time, like you need at least half a million people checking out your site monthly, like you get a penny each time someone clicks those ads, so you need a lot of clicks. Most individual bloggers don’t get THAT high traffic. Collaborative sites with multiple writers are usually what gets that, and that’s after years of building a reputation. Most of them also spit out lots of articles in a short period of time (30 to 100 articles a week).
Now most the more coveted ad networks require a 100,000 a month page views (or close to it) to get started with them, for a reason. But you don’t need quite a million to make money. The thing is results aren’t always equal. A bloggers with 500,000 monthly page views might make 3 grand a month on average with advertising while a blogger with 200,000 monthly page views makes 7 grand a month on average with advertising. I’ve seen this. I’m not sure what makes one better than the other, but I do know that there are more variables to it than traffic alone.
I’ve read articles about people building many free websites, like they will spend a week and build a site where they write 70 articles for that site in that niche, rich in SEO, and then they put up the Google AdSense and move on to another site doing the same thing in another niche. I don’t know if that works well or not for them in reality, but it’s not a bad idea. I can see how in a year or so, you could earn something.
If you want to learn more about ad networks, please check out my Resources.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing and digital products are what I’ve seen most people make a passive income doing.
Most people who do affiliate marketing tap in on many products. It’s common for them to affiliate with 5 companies offering the same service as they do list posts on the best places for that service. For instance, 5 best internet hosting providers, well, that probably works out well if you are an affiliate for all 5 internet hosting companies you mention.
The trick with affiliate marketing is to sell products that are in line with your niche, and are things your readers are going to want or need.
The downside of affiliate marketing is that you are locked into the company’s rules. And they can change it without your knowledge or blessing at any given time. Amazon is a great example of this. People sign up to be an affiliate, and then they make more rules, and more rules, and now there are classes on it, you can’t use their pictures, you have to use their links the way they put it, not on sites like that it has to be a site you own, and we prefer a no-follow or something like that, and don’t do this, do that, and these instead, I know you probably have 50 affiliate posts written, yeah we’re going to need you to go through all those and redo your coding, and we will still cancel your affiliate at random due to a technical glitch, and you don’t get sales when that happens even if you sent people to us (thanks for the free money), and oh, we just decided to drop the affiliate percentage….
Direct Sales / MLM
Direct Sales is another boat. Beauty bloggers could sell beauty products through places like Avon, Mary Kay, Limelight, Younique, Posh… They have diet, exercise, health foods, chemical free cleaning products, all types of things through a company already formed where you are the salesperson of their product. I don’t see this done much, like most people who do these sales don’t often blog about actual things related to it, and people who blog about it rarely sell stuff to go with it. But if my friends selling makeup would do tutorial videos, they would probably reel me in much more effectively than just adding me to their Facebook group where they post about their sales and parties.
Sell Your Own Stuff
There are many places and avenues to sell stuff. You can sell hand-made items on Etsy, graphic design items on Creative Market, t-shirts and coffee mugs that you design on Cafepress or Zazzle, books you write on Amazon, Ebooks on Kindle, services on Fiverr, courses on Udemy or your own courses, apps on wherever…
Then the blog is just the content marketing strategy for your home business selling some other product.
Memberships
I don’t know how well people do with this when it comes to “subscribe to my blog for a fee.” I just know a lot of articles suggest this (wow face) and I get a lot of Linked In Messages of people selling this. But I don’t think that’s the future of the internet because there’s so much free info already out there. New York Times and Wall Street Journal still do memberships / paid subscriptions, but most people at this point expect your article to be free unless you print it on paper.
The most successful membership sites I’ve seen sell an app or service. For instance, I pay for monthly subscriptions for email services, job boards, online courses, graphic design elements, In-Links, etc.
The most common membership sites I’ve seen who aren’t huge corporations are bloggers who sell a community, networking, one-on-one interaction, and opportunities. I’ve seen some kind of Middle Aged Mom Blogger Membership to connect with other bloggers in that niche and get access to exclusive publishing opportunities plus fun writing challenges. A graphic designer who teaches online courses offers a membership to access weekly videos and challenges and a special FB group for members only so that we can all work together and simplify our to-do list.
But you can get creative with this. Stock photos is a great membership idea, and a lot of people are doing subscription boxes, some are virtual subscription boxes (get a new printable every month emailed directly to you).
Freelancing
This is where I’ve earned most of my money online. My blog had very little to do with this, but it gave me the network that brings me here. I tried sites like Freelancer (I’ve been meaning to try Upworks someday), but my main thing is I look for freelance job opportunities. Sometimes it’s a friend in my network of bloggers I have just because I blog, and sometimes a friend in that network will post opportunities in Facebook for companies and what not, and sometimes it’s an actual job listing. As a writer, I also can just submit to places who pay for articles.
The best places to find these opportunities are joining Facebook groups of professional bloggers, some are labeled writing opportunities, and signing up for email lists at places like Writer’s Digest. Usually, it helps to land the client if you heard of them through someone they know as opposed to a cold application on Freelancer.
Everyone has their own equation for money makingness, but I feel like a regular pay check is more stable than a business, but you can easily become your own boss. Either way, the main point of blogging is that it allows you to become an expert in any field (or present yourself as such), and it guides you into finding oodles of opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to find.
Please also feel free to check out my Resources because I have tons of info and directories of ways to make money online. I mean I list out all the places to do online courses, freelance job boards, places to print your own tarot cards, a ton of Direct Sales places, etc.
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