If you ever wondered if Bloggers are making their blogs to make Word More Beautiful Place. It is not true at all! They are making blogs solely because of their greed or necessity, depends. They are making blogs to earn income.
Bloggers are answering questions of the people around the world looking for an answer on the Internet. From questions: how to tie a shoe, through what to wear for a wedding to how a rocket engine works. They make money on the most valuable commodity – information.
Since bloggers provide information for free they have to find creative ways to get paid. In the 20th century and before people were using books to gather information. The book creators were getting paid when the book was sold to the public. Since the information posted on the internet is free and everybody can have easily access – the blogger needs to find a way to get paid for his effort. There are several ways the bloggers monetize the information they have provided:
- advertisements
- affiliate commissions
- eBook sales
- online training
- coaching services
Advertisements
When you open majority of blogs most likely you will see it jam-packed with advertisements (like this blog for example). This is how the majority of blog owners make money. Pop up windows with advertisements are common. It is not a pleasant experience for the user who is searching for information to look through the blog with millions of advertisements.
But sometimes you as a person who is looking for quality information you need to sacrifice and look through these ads. But if ads are too annoying or spammy you will leave immediately. Now, on the other hand, You as a Blog Owner you need to find a golden balance between quality information and number and placement of those ads. Usually, advertisers will pay CPM – Impressions (how often your ad is shown) or/and CPC (Cost-per-click).
CPM (Cost-per-thousand impressions)
Impression, simply put is putting an ad in front of a viewer to see. The advertisers will pay between $0.01 – $15 on average for 1,000 impressions. So let’s say you have 100,000 visitors to your site per month than 100,000 / 1,000 = 100 and now multiply this per CPM rate of let’s say $10 then your estimated income is 100 x $10 = $1,000 a month.
CPC (Cost-per-click)
The advertiser pays you the blogger a rate vary between $1-$70. This is what you will receive from advertiser after a person visiting your blog will click on their ad. So let’s say that 2% of your 100,000 visitors will click on the ad then 100,000 x 2% = 2,000 and your ad CPC rate is let’s say $10 then your income is 2,000 x $10 = $20,000. you can check the current cost of the ads at Google Ads.
Affiliate Commissions
You can earn money from your blog through Affiliate Commission. Let’s say that the store wants to sell a certain product and promise you a commission when you send them a buyer who will purchase a product. Then the sales take place and you earn your commission. That is how the Affiliate Commission works.
The store will give you a special link to their products with your ID encrypted within, and then when a visitor from your site will click the link to buy the store will know that the buyer came to their site from your website and will pay you your commission. The commissions will vary between 0% – 10% depends on the category of the product.
One thing to keep in mind is also the expiration of the link. Usually, if the person wants to buy a product will think about it too hard (more than 24 hours) you are screwed – you will no longer get your commission for referring to this store this particular client. There is a way to protect yourself from abandoned commissions – do not link to too expensive products like for example cars where the potential client will think for a week before he makes a purchase because once he knows the product he will go directly to the store you showed him.
So let’s say that your website is referring 200 clients a month to Amazon to buy $50 sports shoes at 7% commission rate and everybody buys a pair of shoes. Your earnings would be $50 x 7%= $3.50 x 200 clients = $700. I have learned that the best products for affiliate commissions are products up to $400 where they are affordable enough for people to buy them instantly. There are many ad services you can choose from.
And of course who is the biggest – Google. But they do not pay too much to bloggers for their services unfortunately. That is why I am being affiliate with other company.
eBook Sales
You can create an eBook of 5,000 words or more where you share your knowledge or skills. Then you can sell PDF directly on your blog for people to download. It should not be too expensive. I found out that the price should not exceed $20.
People, if they trust you after reading your blog content will spend a few dollars to learn from the knowledge you want to share with them. Let’s say that on your blog you sell 50 eBooks per month at the cost of $15. Your income would be 50 x $15 = $750.
Online Training
You might want to offer to your blog visitor an online training in the field of your expertise. One of the sites everybody knows is www.lynda.com. You package a video or audio course and make it available for people to download for a price.
The online courses are not cheap because they require a little more effort than just writing the content of your blog. So they are priced differently than eBooks. The price of a course could vary between $100 and $30,000 or more depends on the course provider. Let’s say you will sell 15 Online Training courses per month and you price them at $150. Your total income would be 15 x $150 = $2,250.
Not bad 🙂
Coaching Services
You can do individual
The pricing is based on the amount of effort you put in and you can price it how you want. So let’s say that you agree that you will send every day a 15 min. video message to your client for two weeks and you price it at $200. Now let’s say you have 10 clients like that – your income would be $200 x 10 =$2,000.
