To make $1,000 dollars online blogging you will need 3 things.
- A Blog
- Traffic
- Monetization technique
The amount of money your blog brings in will be determined by how successful you are at creating your blog, building traffic, and turning visitors into income.
To reach an income of $1,000 online you will need to find a good balance between these three concepts. If any of these three concepts are not completed well the blog will likely fail.
How do Bloggers Make Money Online?
The most common methods that bloggers use to earn money are ads and affiliate marketing. There are of course other methods, but these two take the least amount of work to start.
Make Money With Ad Networks
A blogger with ads on their site will earn income with CPC or CPM. CPC stands for Cost Per Click. This form of advertisement will pay you based on the number of clicks to the ad. CPM stands for Cost Per Mille which is the money you make per thousand ad impressions.
A couple of ad networks to consider which have no traffic requirements and offer CPM include:
The money you make with these advertisers will vary dramatically. If we look at Google Adsense they pay out 69% of the profit they are paid. So if an advertiser pays them $10.00 for a thousand impressions then you will receive $6.90 for a thousand impressions.
The amount of money you can earn is based on the niche of your site. Some of the higher-paying niches include digital marketing, online banking, and health.
Using the Google Adsense Revenue Calculator the CPM for different categories are:
Business & Industrial $17.00 per thousand views
Food & Drink $14.00 per thousand views
Health $17.00 per thousand views
Games $4.00 per thousands views
Hobbies & Leisure $11.00 per thousand views
Finance $33.00 per thousand views
This of course is given with the disclosure by Google that the numbers displayed can change substantially dependent on a number of different factors. After going through the list I found an average CPM for Google Adsense to be $10.00-$20.00 with some outliers. (Source Google Adsense Calculator)
With ads varying drastically and not paying well for visitors many bloggers choose to utilize affiliate marketing to increase their monetization.
Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of advertising other people’s products or services and upon purchase receiving a commission.
When you sign up for an affiliate program you are given an affiliate link. You place this link on your website and when people click on the link it places a cookie on their browser which tells the affiliate site that you sent them.
The two most common and used affiliate programs are Amazon and Walmart. Both of these programs pay commissions from around 1%-4% for the majority of products.
These programs are good for beginners since they offer such a wide array of products. The downside to using these affiliate services is they also offer some of the lowest commissions.
Ryan Robinson has a massive list of different affiliate programs. To earn the most out of affiliate marketing it is crucial to know all the programs available within your niche.
Now that you have an understanding of how bloggers monetize the traffic let’s discuss how to build a blog and get traffic to it.
How to Build a Blog (Two Options)
The two options you have is to publish content for free on a platform you do not own. The second option is to purchase a domain and hosting from a company. I highly recommend the second option since you will own the platform and domain name.
Build a Blog With a Free Blogging Service
There are many services out there that will give you a free domain and hosting. Some of the most popular include Blogger, Medium, and Weebly.
These will give you a free place to blog. This will work great for getting your feet wet in terms of online publishing but are extremely restrictive. Many free sites will also show ads on your blog.
Build a Blog With Paid Hosting
If you are serious about starting an online business and want full control over your content and monetization methods purchasing a domain name and hosting is crucial.
The hosting I chose for this blog is Bluehost. I received a year of hosting and a free domain name for $65.00.
Here is a step-by-step video on how to create a WordPress Blog using Blue Host.
Some other good hosting options include Site Ground and Host Gator. There are many options to choose from. The reason I went with Blue Host was the balance between speed and price.
Once your blog is up and running it is time to think about traffic.
Building Traffic for Your Blog
The ways to get traffic to your blog can be broken down into 5 types.
- Organic Search (SEO)
- Organic Social
- Paid Traffic (Ads)
- Direct Traffic
- Referral Traffic
For new bloggers, the only traffic models that usually make sense financially are SEO and social marketing. These can both be done for free and when done right can generate enough traffic to earn a substantial income.
The basics of SEO start with a keyword. This is the term you would like to rank well for in Google and what a person would type in to reach your content. Place this keyword in your URL, meta title, title, meta description, H2 tag, and within the paragraph text.
The next step is to have links both internally and externally pointing toward the page with anchor text that reflects the search term.
Social marketing is the process of using social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, linked in, and others to share your content.
Both SEO and social marketing when done correctly can be effective means to drive traffic to your site.
Conclusion
In my past experience, it takes around 6 months before you begin to see your content become trusted by Google. This post lays out what you will need to reach $1000 dollars of the monthly income generated by your blog. It is a slow process, but with enough work it is possible.