Can you still make money blogging or not?

Wonder if it’s possible to still make money with a blog? Well, we can probably create some suspense here, but yes, you can make money blogging. It is much possible, even in 2019. That coming from someone who 3 years ago thought earning cash from a blog is a complete scam.

Here we want to talk about how we made our first $200 as a blogger, the 3 reasons you may never earn money blogging and of course how to fix it: the seven things you need to do in order to actually get paid for blogging (not freelance writing!).

“Here it is guys, our blog is not even a month old and we already made $200 with it.”

Aren’t you just sick of reading posts like this?

The 3 Reasons You Won’t Make Money Blogging

Let us get this straight: there are many ways you can get paid for blogging. You can use affiliate marketing, you can use ads, you can do sponsored posts, sell your own products, you can even write for different sites and get them to pay you (to us that’s more of a freelancing).

The things you need to succeed and to make any amount of money with a blog are:

geniune traffic to your blog
the right mindset
persistence

You need all three to make an income with a blog. When one of these is missing…well, you will not be reaching your full potential. And you might make a few bucks here and there, but not a good amount.

Reason #1: Not Getting Traffic

You need traffic to make money blogging. Why? Well, think of it this way, if you want to sell something, you will need someone else to buy it from you. You can’t sell it to yourself.

With blogging, you’re either selling your own products or helping sell other people’s products by using links and ads on your blog. Nobody directly pays you for writing your posts or keeping your blog up.

So no matter what anyone tells you, you do need blog traffic to make money as a blogger. You might not need a ton, but you need some. We'll talk later about how you can grow your traffic quicker.

Reason #2: Not Having The Right Mindset

If you, for whatever reason, don’t believe you can make money blogging, you will not make it. Whether it’s because you think this is a scam, you don’t deserve money or that making money doing something that “simple” is wrong…

There can be many limiting beliefs stopping you from even making an effort to monetize your blog that already has an audience. That was actually our case for 2 years (talk about it next).

Reason #3: Not Being Persistent

Blogging is rewarding. Within 6 months to a year, if you start right you can make a good income. Some bloggers even make a full-time income.

However, the 3rd reason you might not see any money coming your way from blogging is that you’re not persistent. Six months to a year might not seem too long when you look at it from the distance, but when you’re in it and need to work every day, it’s not that simple.

And when you’re not consistent, it’s unlikely to create a profitable blog.

When you’re consistent though, it’s almost guaranteed that things will go up. We see the biggest growth in our blog during the months when we keep showing up.

How we Made Our First $200 From A Blog

For us, the reason we didn’t make any money blogging for 2 years was more of a mental thing than a real struggle to figure out HOW to do it.

The thing was, we were so used to not making GOOD money for our work at our old job and to always work really, really, hard and to give a 1000% in everything we did, mostly without even asking for money.

“This is just how life works. That’s life for us. We can’t compare to these other people, we're not them.”

So you can analyze it as low self-esteem, perfectionist, excuses, bla bla, all that crap. But we feel like we didn’t have the habit and the mindset for getting paid outside our job.

Blogging for money sounded awesome. But also kinda like a scam. A part of us (and everyone around us) didn’t believe we could actually make money, like actual money, blogging.

We started a blog anyway and decided to focus on posting content before we try to ever earn anything OR grow an audience. For the first year and a half, we didn’t have any structure. We didn’t use ANY social media, we published our blog posts and that was it.

However, it still took one more year to decide we're ready to make money with this blog.

We read all those income reports and was just frozen (not Elsa, moi!). “That’s them, not us. It’s simple for them.”

In theory, we knew what we needed to do to get paid for blogging, but we didn’t try at all. We collected that information like a squirrel and just liked to keep that moment we make money somewhere in the future. Somewhere where we deserve to have that money. Where our work was good enough, where we were good enough.

So flash forward another year.

Our traffic was small – about 30.000 sessions per month. We saw other blogger’s income reports and they said that Mediavine accepts publishers when they reach 30.000 monthly unique visitors. We applied, they accepted us and then we turned on the ads.

We didn’t check on this anytime soon and just thought we'd probably make $50 or something. Or less. To our surprise, by the end of the month We had made over $200 only from ads and it felt so so unreal. Me making money online?

Life After Our First $200 Blogging

After we realized that this is REAL and you can make money blogging, even if it’s just $200 from ads, we decided we could invest in better hosting (we switched to Siteground for their free site transfer, awesome reviews & uptime) and in a scheduling tool to help us grow our traffic more.

This was a big step for us. Since then our traffic grew more, our income grew as well and we're constantly working on growing our blog traffic, creating content and finding new ways to make more money blogging.

We're telling you guys, if we, with all that procrastination and wrong mindset can do it – you can do it too! But you have to put in the work and stay consistent. Even if you just display ads, if you grow your traffic enough, you’ll be making money. People seriously make it seem more impossible than it is.

And to help you out a little bit, we want to mention 7 things you should be doing to make money from a blog sooner. These are the 7 things we would’ve done if we were starting a blog this year.

How it comes together

The 7 Things You Should Do

1.

Just start. Don’t be afraid to start, know you deserve it and it is possible to make money blogging – even for you! Work on your blog, stay consistent and have no doubt that this will work. If you’re new to blogging, we created a step by step blogging guide for beginners that outlines everything you need to focus on in the beginning. You can find that guide here.

2.

Invest a little bit to improve SEO. When it comes to spending money, we, again have issues. We only buy the things we actually need and overthink about everything.

Howeverrr. We realized after a while, when it comes to our blog, we need to spend some money. Not a lot, but you can’t build everything on a free platform if you want to also earn an income.

You need to invest in reliable hosting and WordPress theme because these two things are the foundation for your blog and you shouldn’t ignore that foundation. Especially if you want to make money faster.

Without a good hosting and a WordPress theme, you can write all the posts you want, but it will be hard, probably impossible to show up on the first page in Google search. The reasons for this are site speed and the technical component to SEO that keywords just can’t “outplay”

What changed everything for us in 2017 was migrating our site to Siteground (you can get hosting with them 60% off here) and buying Genesis (you can get it here) for our blog.

3.

4.

5.

Don’t obsess over followers and statistics. Blogging is a numbers game, but not really. We mentioned you need traffic, but you can make money with less traffic than us. If you’re in a niche where it’s simple to find good affiliate programs – apply and promote their products on your blog!

6.

Create a reliable content. We know it’s boring, but this is key for Google search and your future audience. Focus on creating USEFUL & ACTIONABLE content, not just ANY content. It’s not how much, it’s what kind of content. This will help your blog grow the most. Here’s a post that can help with this.

7.

Make money & diversify. There are so many options to make money with a blog, it’s kinda overwhelming. A reliable way to monetize your blog is to do a mix of them all, you can do better than just one income stream.

For example you can: