How Much Money Do Bloggers Make?
March 27, 2009 by Jason
I recently ran across a link to this post from a couple months ago at Saving To Invest (I missed it the first time around). The post discusses how much bloggers make, and attempts to put some numbers to it by applying a few assumed formulas to known traffic numbers. My guess is that a few are pretty close (Frugal Dad numbers aren’t too far off for November 2008), but others may be grossly over-inflated.
The post does reinforce a couple things I have learned being in and around blogging for the last couple years. Some small sites do a great job of monetizing and make more money than sites with significantly higher traffic. This could be because the smaller site is better optimized to attract search engine traffic, or because it focuses on a tighter niche, which allows advertisers to target their specific audience.
Some topics convert beter than others, too, so no matter how many visitors a blog about organic gardening gets, it just may not convert to much money earned for the blogger (my apologies to anyone blogging about organic gardening).
If you are blogging for a side hustle it is important to consider which topics monetize well, and which topics you are passionate about. When selecting a topic it is probably a good idea to list all the things you are really passionate about, and then research which ones have the most potential to earn money through affiliates, Adsense, etc. Pick the highest ranking topic that interests you the most, and start writing.
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How is it possible to get a high CTR? Any tips?
@Adam: CTR is a tricky thing to improve, and just to be clear, sharing CTR information is a violation of Google Adsense TOS, so anything other sites report about someone’s CTR is merely speculative, or generic. Still, it is possible to raise your conversions through a variety of methods. Here are just a couple of the more popular ways:
+ Use larger ad blocks. Large, rectangular blocks (like the 336×280) tend to convert more than smaller blocks
+ Match your URL colors in Adsense to the URL color on your site. In other words, make the ads blend in with your content
+ Move ad blocks higher up on the page. Obviously, ads above the fold will do better than ads below the fold.
+ Finally, most clicks come from search engine traffic, not direct referrals or the casual subscriber. Work to improve search engine optimization and drive more search traffic to your site.
Hope this helps – I’ll try to put together a longer post detailing more of the tactics.
Those numbers are way off for Get Rich Slowly, at least. He doesn’t convert his traffic very well. At that income level, he would have bought that Mini Cooper a year ago and paid off his house instead of getting another 30-year mortgage and only having $1000 saved for the car.
My guess is that J.D. makes somewhere around $80K-$100K/year gross–probably the lower end of that. You do a lot better job of converting over on Frugal Dad.
-Erica
@Erica: That’s one of the ones I had in mind when I said some figures were probably “grossly over inflated.” I sure would love to have his traffic for a month, though!
Thanks for the link and I like the comments. I agree there is a dis-economies of scale as the visitor number’s grow. When I wrote the post I was using my Sep – Dec 2008 data and applying my estimates to the other sites based on traffic I saw. Over that time period I averaged around 40,000 visitiors a month and my CTR was probably around 3%, and doing quite well on affiliate sales. However in Feb and Mar my traffic sky rocketed thanks to some popular economic stimulus posts. For Feb and Mar (to date) I have had about 200,000 and 150,000 visitiors. My CTR has gone to about 2.5%, but what I noticed the biggest drop in was eCPM (down about 30%). So while the additional traffic increase ovreall revenue a lot, the rate of increase was not as much.
So in summary, I would agree that high traffic sites would have lower CTRs and eCPM so you cannot project revenue estimates from lower traffiked sites. However, affiliate sales a big factor.
@ Erica – While I agree GRS does not make as much as I may have esitmated, I still think he makes much more than $100K thanks to affiliate sales he does (book reviews etc). I do agree though, how you convert your traffic can make a huge difference.
@Andy: Thanks for putting the info together. Wondering if you have plans to update/expand the list with more current data?