Yes, blogging is big business.
Many so-called “mommy bloggers” are quite rich. Or at least, they make $200,000+ per year part time.
I work in Internet marketing for a living (also called digital marketing).
A few years ago I worked for an ecommerce company that sold essential oils, nutritional supplements and other health items. (So in other words, they only sold their products via their websites, not through conventional stores.)
They had a few bloggers that they had “affiliate” relationships with; i.e. they paid the bloggers a commission every time someone that the blogger referred to them bought something.
All of the bloggers were young to middle-aged women in their 20s to late 30s who were Midwestern moms. They talked about the things that they encountered in their daily lives, including what they fed their children, how they budgeted, their religion, etc. Naturally, they attracted a following of like-minded people.
THEY ALSO MADE BANK!
The year I stopped working at that company, we paid the top earning blogger over $200,000 in commissions.
She also was an affiliate for products at other companies.
If she made that much from just our company, how much do you think she made from all 5–6 companies that she was an affiliate for?
There was another blogger who was younger and less experienced at blogging. She started with no following, and built her blog from the ground up. During the time I worked there (about a year), she went from earning nothing to $4000 per month in commissions. Again, we weren’t the only company that she was an affiliate for.
So how can you do that on your own?
There’s 2 steps to making money with a blog:
- Get traffic to your blog
- Monetize the traffic
The main two ways to get traffic to your blog are through social media and search engines. If your website ranks well for various search terms in Google, you can get thousands or even hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site every month! (This is called SEO.)
Once you are getting steady visitors to your website, you want to get them on your email list. Every time that you publish a new blog post, you send out social media posts and an email to your list about it. Over time, this following can grow quite large, and quite lucrative.
Monetize Your Traffic
Here are the best ways to make money, in order of effectiveness:
- Sell your own products or services
- Sell other people’s products or services (as an affiliate or reseller)
- Sell advertising space
Selling advertising is easily the worst way to make money. You’re giving up space on your blog so that other people can sell their products and services. After they pay you, they’re still selling their products at a huge profit. So why not just reap those same rewards yourself?
Here’s some math to whet your appetite.
Your website gets:
- 100,000 visitors per month
- You have a product that 1% of them buys on a monthly basis
- Your profit on that product is $5 a pop
100,000 x .01 x $5 = $5000
Believe me, this is a very realistic scenario.
In the case of the ecommerce company that I used to work for, I created and operated the company blog. 4% of the visitors from the blog made purchases. (This is called the “conversion rate” btw.)
If a first time visitor made a purchase, on average they bought $70 worth of product.
So even if the blog only brings in 10,000 people per month, the company is still making $28,000 per month from it. (The blog brought in way more than 10,000 visitors per month.)
That’s why most companies have blogs.
I’m not saying that any of this is easy.
But people do it every day.