making money blogging

Notice this post isn’t titled “how to make money blogging” because I still feel very much a student and not a teacher. The amazing thing is that my hobby blog (as in I spend probably no more than 1-2 hours a week on it) IS earning money.

Here I’ll share with you exactly what streams of revenue I’m seeing, how they’ve grown, and what I want to do in 2020.

Partly because it’s not well-known by some of my readers how a blog makes money, and they may be interested in seeing it (maybe they want to start their own blog–anyone can!)

Partly as a means to track my income and growth over time. For a while there I was issuing monthly blogging reports like I see so many bloggers doing, but yearly seems a better fit for me at this time.

Partly because I’m proud of my blog. This is my little corner of the internet and I’ll admit I want to brag on it a bit. I hope I can grow it more, but even if I can’t, I’m so happy with what this “mom blog” has done.

So, lets jump into what ways I made money blogging. I am coming up on 2 full years, so I’ll include comparisons from 2018 to 2019 to show growth.

How do blogs even make money?

There are several ways. I’ve landed on 4 options for monetization so far in my blogging journey and hope to further diversify in 2020.

First let’s look at my first ever effort in blog monetization–affiliate marketing. I am currently only set up as an affiliate for Amazon and for Bluehost, although the latter has earned me nothing.

Often times when I recommend a product and link to it on Amazon, I can earn a commission if a purchase is made though the buyer pays no more. These roll in pennies at a time but they certainly add up.

In 2018 I earned $31.55 and in 2019 I earned $453.53. To be fair I didn’t start my blog until March 2018 but this is still a huge improvement and I hope as I grow my blog this stream continues to trend upward!

I began implementing ads to my site in March of 2019 so I waited right at one year to even attempt this. Basically it’s just the advertisements you see running on my page. It’s not ideal to have a blog look junky (so I hope it doesn’t!) but it is a great passive way to “keep the lights on” so to speak and pay for my basic blogging costs.

The only one I qualified for was Google Adsense and it truly pays pennies at a time but, as my traffic has grown, so has income. Although some of this won’t pay out til next month I want to list what was earned during 2019–$192.09

The above chart shows steady growth (it includes January 2020 which exceeded $30 for the first time).

I’m happy with AdSense, but I am so excited to have recently hit my 10,000 pageviews a month and have applied to a new ad network–Monumetric. Hopefully the reviews I’ve read about this ad network are true and I can see my earnings shoot upwards! I am in the process of getting it all set up now.

Blogs can make great money on sponsored posts. My blog is not one of those blogs….yet!

Soooooo in 2019 I earned $100 from one sponsored post. In 2018 I earned a free canvas…

Major goals for 2020 would be finding companies who want to partner together so I can write an occasional sponsored post that is on brand and also earns money for the my blog.

Ah, freelance writing. I go back and forth on this one. It’s hard to even say my blog earned money from freelance writing, because it has nothing to do with my blog. That is why I’ve chosen to leave this behind for the time being.

Freelance writing is simply writing for others, for pay. This was something I prioritized for a few months in 2019 and it did yield earnings–I made $788 from my freelance work. However, unlike some of the more passive income types I’ve gone into above–this was work.

Of course I don’t mind spending time and effort towards earning money, but it seems that I should focus that time and effort on my own blog instead. If I focus on content for others, mine suffers.

So…there you have it! Making money blogging is so possible even as a beginner.

All in all I made $31.55 and a free canvas print in my first year (well, first 8 months). It was not even enough to really break even.

Then in 2019 I earned $1341.53. That’s over 40 times what I made the first year!!

Obviously I don’t think I’ll be seeing 40 x $1341.53 in 2020 but I do think I can grow even without relying on selling content to other blogs.

If you have ever wondered about starting a blog, just. do. it. Seriously there is a really supportive community of bloggers out there.

And, up until very recently (as in this month when I chose to invest $99 on some training) I only spent money on web hosting which isn’t much. My affiliate link for Bluehost is here if you want to check it out!

I’ll be re-newing with them for year 3 here in just a few weeks so that proves I couldn’t be happier with their services.

Truthfully I am somewhat unsure about posting this, as I always am when it comes to blog income reporting, but my hope is that this was informative, inspiring, or maybe just interesting to at least some of my readers.

I want to thank you all so much for supporting my little mom blog these last two years!