Your Blog Will Not Make You Money And That’s Okay.
Shocking, but true. You will not make money off your blog.
Despite all of those blogs telling you it takes 6 easy steps to make $13,000 per month, I’m here to say you won’t, at least for a while. If you have done your research you’ll know one of the ways to make money from a blog is through advertising. You put ad space on your site and profit. There are numerous blogs written on the subject and a few real life success stories, inspiring us bloggers to start a blog and enter the good life. Write for 5-6 hours a week and profit off of the thousands of pageviews a day generating riches beyond your wildest dreams. I have have to tell you that dream is definitely a dream.
Harsh reality, most of blogs die after 6 months. Why would so many blogs not make it? Because it’s hard. It takes time. It makes you zero money.
See, advertising only pays based on impressions, and it doesn’t pay well. Depending on your industry, you’re looking at $10 - $50 per 1000 views. When I started my blog I wrote roughly 2 blogs a week from mid-March to December, generating nearly 3,000 pageviews in my first “year”. If I ran ads I would have returned an annual revenue of $50. That is just revenue, it does not consider the costs associated with having a website.
But that’s an example of a small blog. You may be able to do better. So let’s work backwards.
You want to replace your current income of $100,000 a year, a nice round number for us to work with. In your space your rate is $25 per 1000 views. By the way, this metric is called RPM which means Revenue per Mille. Great, now you can divide $100,000 desired revenue by your RPM of $25 giving you 4,000. Now multiply that by 1000 as our metric is in thousands, which gives you the pageviews you need to achieve in a year.
4,000,000. Yep. 4 million pageviews.
In order to make money, you have to generate an astounding amount of traffic. It doesn’t just happen either. Here are a few barriers I found.
Barriers to Making Advertising Money
Search Traffic: Google will not recognize and display your site in Google searches for 3 - 6 months. They do this on purpose. So many blogs fail that your site has to be big enough, with enough pages and backlinks, otherwise they assume your site is dormant and therefore doesn’t exist. If people can’t find your site, then you won’t generate traffic, no matter how much you promote it.
Social Media Presence: This isn’t a barrier, more of a necessity. Until your site is recognized by Google the only way people will find you is through personal connections. One of the easiest ways is online via social media. If you are like me, you started off with a very small social presence. I’m talking a handful of friends and family. Just like pageviews, it takes time to generate a social media following and followers don’t mean clickers. You need lots of eyes on your posts to get a small portion of those people to click through to your site, which means you now need to know how to make videos because the socials love short video content.
I don’t even run ads on my site. Based on my current traffic I could start putting ads on my site and likely would generate enough revenue from them this year to pay for my website, and maybe even a little extra. But ads sacrifice two things.
Your Experience: Ads get in the way, make noise, and are there to annoy you. If you have been on a food blog recently you’ll know what I’m talking about. You have to scroll through two pages of ads before you get to the recipe. Advertisers pay bloggers to steal your attention, trying to get you to buy a product they want to sell you. I would rather you come here and enjoy your time reading and learning. The last thing I want to do is frustrate you with ads and pop-up windows.
My Control: By enabling ads I am relinquishing sections of my site to be controlled by advertisers. As you can see, I use a black theme. This is intentional. It makes my pictures pop to draw you in to what is most important to me, my work. By giving advertisers space on my site I am saying to you that their work is worth viewing over mine, and I don’t believe it.
Maybe, sometime in the future when thousands of people are visiting my site each day and the income I could generate from ads is so great that it enables me to become a full-time woodworker and writer, then I will reconsider my opinion.
But for now, I would rather have you enjoy your experience and support me in other ways, such as;
Subscribe to my monthly newsletter, it’s free!
Watch my YouTube videos and subscribe there, also completely free.
Follow me on social media, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. Free to you!
Purchase a product from my store.
Three of those options are completely free to you. Reading this blog is free as well. I also don’t make money off of those three ways to support me, yet. Eventually I will be able to monetize this blog, YouTube, and my social media.
How You Can Make Money Off Your Blog
The first way is to sell products directly. Straightforward. I make stuff and people can purchase it through my website.
The second is a following, hence those three free options. While I don’t make money today, eventually I will generate a big enough following that companies will want to sponsor me. In return for that sponsorship, I will represent their products, generating them sales revenue. The only way that happens is if I can prove I have a large, engaged following on my various platforms, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and my website.
YouTube also generates ad money. There are ads on all YouTube videos, controlled by YouTube (Google really, or Alphabet I guess) and a YouTuber with enough subscribers, over 1,000, can receive a portion of the advertising revenue directly from YouTube. YouTube does not generate it’s own content, people do. YouTube maintains the platform and sells advertising, video makers create and upload videos to bring people to the platform. It’s a symbiotic relationship, we can’t survive without the platform and they can’t survive without the content, so they split the advertising revenue with us.
That’s all my experience, so far, as a blogger and content creator and is not a comprehensive list. For example, you can sell services. If you are an artist who designs logos, sell that and blog about how you do it. If you are a financial adviser, write about it and sell your services. Another popular way is to write and sell books.
There are tons of ways to monetize your blog, so I do not mean to dissuade you from starting. In fact, I recommend you do. But don’t start because you want to make money, that isn’t a goal worth pursuing. Instead, focus on your purpose. I’ve written about my purpose before, but I’ll state it simply here.
I write this blog to inspire creators to create. Through these blogs, through videos, and through conversations. I am here as a resource to provide tools and insights to you so you can pursue your dreams as I am. So find your purpose and work toward accomplishing it. Don’t worry about the money, it will follow.
If you have a question, leave me a comment below or reach out directly on my contact page and I’d love to connect.