Blogger Salaries: How Much Does a Blogger Make in 2024?

Caught up by influencers, youtubers or streamers, bloggers tend to be invisible today. Yet, blogging is one of the pillars of online content creation that still works so well! 💸

In 2022, the average blogger earns $45,000 per year in the United States. But, as you can imagine, there are huge disparities between creators.

Thus, some bloggers make a very good living and have created a real business(even an empire !). For others, blogging has been too much of an investment in time, for too little return.

As in other content creation professions, a vast mystery surrounds the issue of their remuneration. 🤔

To help you see more clearly, we will talk to you in more detail about the world of blogging and monetization . Through this guide, you’ll discover how to become a blogger and why most of these creators don’t make money(and how to remedy this, of course).

What is a blogger?

As you can imagine, a blogger has a blog. His job is to produce web content for his users. However, not every blog owner can call themselves a professional blogger.(Yes, you weren’t a real blogger when you had a SkyBlog 😱)

According to us, a blogger is a professional who lives thanks to his website. He has a community and influence in addition to generating enough income to live from his blog.

How to become a blogger?

Contrary to the profession of journalist for example, there are no studies or diplomas necessary for the profession of blogger. In reality, the moment someone has a website and an audience, they are perceived as a blogger.

Obviously, not everyone can consider themselves a blogger. Simply because blogging is a profession in its own right and therefore, having a personal blog like in the Skyblog era is not enough to be a professional blogger.

To become a blogger and make a living from your web content, you will have to create a quality site with relevant content, but not only. In reality, there are many qualities needed to be a good blogger. ✅

The qualities required to be a blogger

There are many bloggers, but not all of them manage to make a living from their creation. Successful bloggers have a lot of characteristics that set them apart from others.

A blogger must have many qualities, here are the main ones:

To begin with, a blogger must absolutely have a beautiful pen. You must be able to write a complete article with reliable information, without being too boring. Without this, you risk creating content that is not very relevant and that will not please either Google or your visitors.

In addition, you will also need to master WordPress or another CMS. Thanks to a content management software, you will be able to create a website design, fast, ergonomic, etc. Or you may need to know how to code, if you want to design your blog by hand.

Finally, you’ll needSEO skills. Without SEO skills, a blogger is likely to burn out on producing content that doesn’t show up on Google.(And that’s exactly what we don’t want you to do.)

This is, in our opinion, the number one skill to succeed in blogging. 🥇

As a bonus, skills in copywriting and storytelling can be interesting. This will allow you to captivate your readers or create a loyal community, respectively.

In short, you can ‘t just become a blogger. However, there is no university curriculum that trains you to be a blogger. It is therefore quite possible to train on the internet to be a successful blogger.

Can we estimate the income of a blog?

We’ll stop you right there, unless you have access to a site’s data, it’s impossible to accurately determine its revenue. On the other hand, it is quite possible toestimate the level of income of a website.

However, you will find that a blog can generate money in many different ways and therefore, this makes the calculation more difficult.

How is a blogger paid?

This may surprise you, but a blog does not make money. What will generate revenue is the monetization that a blogger will bring to it. Indeed, if a webmaster does not place ads, does not make affiliation or other, nobody will pay him to animate his blog.

Even worse, some blogs are losing money. 🙀(But certainly not the members of the Makers)

And yes, it is not because a site is monetized that it is necessarily profitable. If we take the example of online media, they lose money every year… While they advertise, sell premium newsletters and receive grants of the state.

For the example of the media, they publish several articles a day and organize events. In addition, they have to pay many journalists to go to the field. Thus, advertising and newsletters do not cover all these costs.

In the example of a “classic” blog, the only costs are the hosting and the domain name. Thus, even if your site does not make a single cent, its maintenance cost will only be about 80 euros per year.

Well, let’s go back to a slightly happier example, where a blogger makes money. As said above, he is not paid by anyone to be a blogger. What will allow him to earn money is monetization. Thus, a webmaster can generate income through affiliation, advertising, sale of infoproducts and others.

The technique to know the salary of a blogger

There are many monetization techniques and therefore, it is going to be very difficult to estimate the revenue generated by a website. However, it is possible to evaluate the level of income of a site using advertising and affiliation. That’s good, because these are the two most used monetization techniques!

Estimating affiliate blog revenue

Here, we will take the example of a niche site using the Amazon affiliation .

Let’s imagine that a website talks about vacuum cleaners. The blog has 2000 visitors per month and the average price of a robot vacuum cleaner is 200 euros. As the site is referenced with SEO, it manages to generate qualified traffic qualified traffic, which allows to get an average conversion rate of 3%.

The commission rate for this type of product is 3%. Thus, for each 200 euros vacuum cleaner sold, the blogger will earn 6 euros in commission.

👉 To evaluate its income level, we will calculate the number of visitors(2000) x 3% conversion x 6€ commission. We get 360€. This means that every month, this site generates about 360€ in commissions via Amazon. Obviously, this is an estimate, as it is impossible to know the true conversion rate and click-through rate on affiliate links.

You will have understood that the bigger and more generalized a site is, the more difficult it will be to estimate its revenues generated through affiliation.

To estimate the revenue of a site using another affiliate program, the process is the same. You will need to find the commission amount of the program in question, then multiply it by the number of visitors and a fictitious conversion rate. (Generally, the conversion rate will be lower than on Amazon)

Estimate advertising revenues

Maybe you should know that. On Google, each keyword has a different cost per click. This cost per click is the amount an advertiser must pay to appear first on this query.

For example, on the keyword “SEO Training“, the cost per click will be $4.13. In other words, if you want to appear on this query in the “Ads” section, you will have to pay at least $4.13 for each click on your link.

Obviously, this is an estimate, to know the real amount, you will have to make a Google Adwords campaign. The cost per click can vary from a few cents on generic queries to tens of dollars on highly competitive keywords(insurance, crypto, trading, etc.).

Now that you understand the principle of cost per click, you should know that some tools like Semrush or Ahrefs estimate the value of a site’s traffic. This is done by listing the different keywords of a site and their cost per click.

Let’s take a concrete example. 📝

We will analyze the site presse-citron.net on Semrush. In the keywords section, the tool indicates that the traffic value of this site is $3.6 million.

However, the cost of traffic represents the lifetime value of the keywords. To determine a monthly income, you will have to take between 5 and 10% of this amount. Thus, we can estimate that with advertising, this site generates between 180,000 and 360,000€ of income per month.

If a blog sells infoproducts, one could also make a calculation(conversion rate x number of visitors x price of the product) to estimate its turnover. However, we don’t know its expenses and therefore, it is impossible to estimate its net profit. 💰

Some blogs earn more than others

As you may have guessed, not all bloggers earn the same. In addition, they are not salaried and therefore do not have a fixed salary. However, we can observe huge disparities in income depending on the bloggers and especially their theme.

In fact, there is no limit or maximum salary for bloggers. Some can even expect to earn up to $1 million a year. This is actually the case for some blogs in the United States like smartpassiveincome.com, with an average revenue of $180,970 per month in 2017.

But then, what explains this disparity in bloggers’ income ?

There are many reasons for this difference in income, but only two will have a big impact.

👉 On one hand, the audience of a site is going to play a huge role. As you can imagine, a blog with 10,000 visitors per month can expect to earn much less than a site with 1,000,000 monthly visitors. However, some sites that get millions of hits don’t make money, as you saw with the media example.

👉 On the other hand, The theme of a blog is also a crucial element. For example, you create a blog about polar bears in the Arctic. The blog will surely be very interesting, but no matter how many visits you get, it will be difficult to monetize a site on this theme (Even if in reality, you can monetize almost everything, it will just be less easy)

Now, imagine that you start a blog on the topic of cryptocurrencies. If you have a little bit of traffic, partnership requests will rain down and the cost per click of ads, we don’t even talk about it! That’s 10 to 15 times more than a “generalist” ad!

In this example, we come back to the ratio of visits to monetization. Here, a site, even one with far fewer visits on crypto, will make far more money than a popular blog with a snail breeding theme. 🐌

So there are much more lucrative themes if you want to earn big money with blogging. Themes such as finance, seduction,real estate, construction, etc. come to mind.

If we go back to the study conducted by the Ryrob website, we can clearly see the disparity in income according to the niches:

• For a travel site: $63,173 per year ✈️
• For a food site: $41,058 per year 🍔
• For a beauty site: $43,800 per year 💄
• For a fashion site: $37,534 per year 👗

Please note that these figures are estimates. It is not because you launch a site in one of these themes that you will necessarily generate this salary.

How to earn more with a blog?

Now that you know that a blog doesn’t make much money if it’s not monetized, we’re going to show you the different ways to make money on the internet with it. There are many monetization techniques that can be used to increase a site’s revenue.

However, no matter what methods you use, you will absolutely need traffic. You can imagine that without visitors, it is impossible to earn money. That’s why referencing has a primordial place in the profitability of a website.

Just below, we’ll explain some ways to monetize a blog as well as some examples of sites that make money. If you also want to create this type of site, everything is explained in our free ebook that will teach you how to generate your first income online. 🧑‍💻

The different ways to make money with a blog

There are many ways to monetize a website. We are going to present you the ones that adapt best to a blog. If you want to know in detail how to monetize your blog, don’t hesitate to read our guide article on the subject.

Below, we’ll show you the easiest techniques to monetize a blog without getting into trouble.

Affiliation

The affiliate marketing allows you to promote products or services in exchange for a commission. In itself, you recommend a product to your users and if they buy it, you get an income. This, without any additional cost for your visitors.

You can literally affiliate with anything.

Want to recommend the latest video game to be released? You can affiliate with Amazon, Micromania, Fnac, etc.

Do you have a site on compatibility? You can recommend software, accountants, training, etc.

Do you talk about cooking on your platforms(Instagram, blog, TikTok, etc.)? You can do affiliation for food processors, utensils and others.

Today, nearly 8 out of 10 brands have an affiliate program. No matter what your niche is, you can use affiliation as a lever to generate income.

For bloggers, affiliation is a source of income not to be neglected. Some even live entirely off of it.

The process is very simple. All you have to do is find products to recommend. Next, you will need to place an affiliate link on your site. If someone clicks on your affiliate link and buys a product, you earn a commission. It’s not much more complicated than that! 😎

Affiliate marketing is the best monetization technique in our opinion. Indeed, affiliate marketing is easy to set up, profitable and accessible in all niches. It is in a way the best ratio of income to time spent. It pays more than advertising and is much less burdensome than selling training.

Advertisements

This is the simplest and most used monetization technique.

Here, an advertiser will place several advertisements on your website at defined locations(banners, pop-ups, widgets, paragraphs, etc.).

There are many advertising agencies today that will automatically place ads on your site. These include Google Adsense, Mediavine, Ezoic, and others.

All you have to do is register with one of these advertising agencies, define the places where the ads can be placed and off you go. The advertising agency takes care of placing the ads itself, and then pays you the revenue generated every month.

This is clearly passive income! 🍹

But as you can imagine, if it’s easy to set up and passive, it can’t pay much. It’s true, advertising doesn’t bring in much for a site with few visitors. On the other hand, if you manage to reach 100,000 monthly visitors, you can already make a salary from advertising alone!

Sale of training and coaching

This method is clearly the most lucrative. 🤑

In this case, you will create an online course and sell it to the users of your blog. Knowing that today you can do training on almost any subject, it should be easy to find an idea. In addition, you don’t have to take a training course lasting several dozen hours. It is largely possible to create a small 2-hour course.

For example, imagine you have a blog about dogs. You will be able to sell a training on “How to train my dog in 14 days?“. Knowing that once you create the training, you’ll be able to sell it over and over again. 🐕

The problem is that this technique is much more complicated to implement and requires more work. Indeed, you will have to create(write, shoot, edit, etc.) a training, then update it, manage the payment as well as the customer service and others. Thus, this technique does not fall into the category of passive income on the internet . The same goes for coaching.

The main advantage is that the margins are very high. Once created, a course costs almost nothing, but can be sold endlessly. You can easily expect margins of 70-80%!(Much better than Amazon affiliation, right?)

Examples of blogs that make money ( France and USA )

Now you know how a blogger makes a living and how to estimate the income of a blog. But, all this is rather theoretical. So we’re going to show you some examples of blogs that have revealed their income so you can get an idea.

Pro Blogger

Blogueur Pro is one of the most famous French blogs. Simply because it is hosted by Olivier Roland, the most famous French blogger.

On this blog, Olivier Roland gives advice on how to make a living from your blog. He talks about his experience gained through the creation of his different blogs(Books to Change Lives and Zen Habits).

If you look closely at this blog, you will see that it is not monetized with affiliation or advertising.

In fact, Olivier Roland only sells his “Blogger Pro“ training. Through this course, he helps beginners to find a blog idea and monetize it, mainly by selling training and coaching.

Unfortunately, we do not have exact figures for the revenues of this site. On the other hand, it is for sure a blog that has been making money for a long time, and that will continue to be profitable in the years to come.

Also, we can see that it does not rely only on SEO to attract traffic. He has a YouTube channel and a list of thousands of emails, which he collected by offering a free virtual book. Thus, even if his website disappeared, he still has a way to communicate with his users.

Smartpassiveincome

Smartpassiveincome is a blog created by Pat Flynn. On this site, you can find many tips to generate additional income and achieve financial freedom. In the USA, it is one of the most profitable blogs. In fact, the blogger claimed in 2017 to generate over $180,000 in average monthly sales.

Well, even if Pat Flynn started small, his blog is now a web empire. What we also notice is that he has several sources of income on his blog. Thanks to its transparency, one can know the income of each of its monetization strategies.

The blog is monetized through affiliation, advertising and training sales. Here are smartpassiveincome for the period of December 2017($167,553):

• Affiliation: $106,554
• Advertising: $4,288(Note that there are very few ads on Pat Flynn’s blog)
• Infoproduct sales: $56,710

The main expenses are writing, software subscriptions and hiring assistants. For the month of December 2017, he spent $39,647. Thus, its net profit for this month is $127,906!

Not bad for a simple blogger, right? 😯

But you’ll see that there’s more!

Epic Gardening

After showing you a blog that generates significant income, we’re going to talk about a blogger who decided to create a real brand.

Kevin Espiritu started his blog in 2013, on the topic of gardening. 👨🏻‍🌾

Some time later, he started to get traffic and monetized his site through advertising.

Then he raised the bar a bit by creating several ebooks that he sells on Amazon. He also quickly launched his online store where he sells gardening accessories. On the side, he has developed a YouTube channel(+1.7 million subscribers), an Instagram and TikTok account as well as a community on Facebook and Discord.

Today, the site has several sources of revenue, including affiliates, advertising, infoproduct sales and e-commerce. With the different monetization strategies, it generates over $4 million per year(2021).

Well, this is really a textbook case where the guy has pushed very far. However, what we recommend is to see your blog as a business and to have a long term vision. You may not be able to generate that much money, but with a long-term vision, that’s how far you can take a simple blog.

This is one of the most inspiring models of someone who pushes site editing to its fullest potential. 🚀

Conclusion – You have to see your blog as a business!

As you’ve seen, some blogs don’t make money while others create millionaires. The main difference between these blogs is the vision of the owner.

Let’s be clear, if you create a blog to tell your life story or talk about something not very interesting, you won ‘t gain anything(You can try being an influencer on Instagram, maybe that can work). On the other hand, if you create a blog in a theme that brings money and think about the monetization part, it’s a sure thing.

But first, you have to see your blog as a business 👔

If you think it’s just a way to tell your life story or talk about a particular topic for free, your business will fail. In fact, before you even create the blog, you should already know how it will be monetized, what you can sell, etc.

Otherwise, you won’t be profitable. You may invest a lot of money for a site that has traffic, but doesn’t make much money.

And between us, what do you prefer? Bragging about the number of visitors to your site to your friends or seeing your bank account fill up every month?

To take your blog to the next level and consider it a real online business, here are our tips ⬇️

Work on different sources of traffic acquisition

In a business, you must have several ways to attract your customers. Imagine if all your clients came from LinkedIn canvassing and tomorrow the platform banned this kind of practice. How do you go about bringing money into the company?

In blogging, it’s the same. If all your traffic is coming from one acquisition source, it can be very risky. We recommend building a site using natural referencing techniques. It is by far the most stable, but also the most passive acquisition pillar.

However, we also recommend diversifying your acquisition channels so as not to depend on a single source of traffic. Therefore, we invite you to collect emails, create a community, be active on social networks, etc.

Here, the goal is really to perpetuate your business by being sure to always have a way to attract traffic to your site.

Diversify monetization methods

You surely know this sentence: “Youshould not put all your eggs in the same basket“. For blogging, it’s exactly the same thing.

If your blog only makes money with Amazon affiliate marketing and the American giant decides to lower its commission rates or worse to exclude you from the program, the next few months will be difficult.

Don’t worry, it’s not common. But it can still happen! 🧨

To reduce this risk and sleep better at night, it is better to have several sources of income on the same site. Be careful, you don’t want to ramble and have too many different monetization methods on your site either.

What we recommend is to have 3 different sources of income. Here again, it is important to know that the bigger a blog is, the easier it will be to diversify the monetization techniques.

But, if your blog has a few tens of thousands of visitors per month, you can already reach several sources of income. For example, you can do affiliate marketing, set up advertising, offer a small ebook for 10 € and sell sponsored articles as a bonus.

That way, even if Uncle Jeff Bezos decides to take away your Amazon membership, you’ll still make money!

With all of these tips set up on your blog, you can really sleep easy. 🌸

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Now you know more about the blogging business and how to create a profitable blog.

If you want to know more about creating affiliate sites through SEO, we offer you an ebook that explains this process in detail.

In this e-book, you will learn how to find a profitable niche with little competition. Then, you will discover how to create a site and reference it so that it is visible on Google. Finally, we will show you how to find affiliate programs that pay well in order to monetize your site.

If you want to start and earn your first euros on the internet, you know what you have to do!