Did you know that you can make serious bank from blogging? For instance, Chiara Ferragni, a fashion blogger, earned more than $200,000 from her personal blog, making her one of the top bloggers in the world.
The best thing about blogging? Anyone can do it! Whether you are a mom with two children like Abby Lawson or someone who cares much about healthy food like Ella, blogging offers endless possibilities to share your story with the world.
In this article, we will discuss the best-paid bloggers. Who are the top bloggers? How much do they earn? More importantly, how to kick off your own blogging journey?
How Do Bloggers Make Money?
First off, starting a blog is not as hard as you think. Quite the opposite – it is easy. We’ll also teach you how to create one for free.
The real challenge is to get visitors and to monetize your blog. Not only you have to be very creative with your strategy, but you also need to be patient.
While some bloggers might reach success within two years like Sarah Titus, the majority of bloggers take years before their blogs start making money.
So, how do bloggers earn their money?
While there are many ways to get money from blogging, we picked the best four ways to monetize a blog.
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing tops our list because it is one of the best ways to earn passive income!
The concept is simple. An affiliate marketer will get money from promoting other brand’s products. You can make a direct deal with product owners or look for clients in affiliate networks like ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, and GiddyUp.
There are many success stories of bloggers who are affiliate marketers. One of them is Pat Flynn. He is the man behind Smart Passive Income blog and earns a lot of money from teaching people about affiliate marketing.
At first, it can be a bit hard for bloggers to earn a lot from affiliates alone. But, once they get on the right path, their income will skyrocket.
Some of the tips that most bloggers do in affiliate marketing are:
- Picking a niche — Successful affiliates set their target audiences and stick to them.
- Building trust — Top affiliates always know that audience comes first, revenue comes later.
- Getting better commission — Other than sticking to one platform, top affiliates actively search for platforms with better commission schemes.
2. Advertising
Just like your local newspapers that rent spaces to display ads, bloggers do the same with their websites. In fact, most bloggers rely on advertising as the main source of their income.
Is advertising promising enough to make money online, though? Yes. A big company like Google even gets 70% of its revenue from advertising.
But, it won’t happen overnight, especially for new bloggers. Be consistent with your post before hoping to earn anything.
Once you have sufficient traffic, don’t bombard your visitors with random ads. Pick some that are related to your niche, so it won’t annoy them.
There are a few ways to get money from ads:
- Pay Per Click
This is the most common one. With this type of advertising, the advertisers pay the blogger when someone clicks on their ads.
- Pay Per Action
The blogger will get money from the advertisers when someone clicks on an ad and make a purchase of the product.
- Direct Ads
The blogger offers space to rent for advertisers to display ads.
3. Sponsored Posts
Sponsored posts are any blog posts which promote or review certain products. The bloggers will then get money from the brand/product’s owner.
Top bloggers understand that most people think ads are annoying. So, they don’t push too many direct ads on their blogs. They keep it in balance by getting income from sponsored posts as well.
52% of marketers tend to use sponsored content to reach their audience.
John Chow, for instance, is one of the highest earning bloggers who writes sponsored posts on his blog. He even sets the price for every review he makes.
4. Selling Your Own Products
4. Selling Your Own ProductsEven if you start a blog just as a hobby, it could turn out to be a great way to make money.
Jinx is one of the best examples of this. They sell any products related to games and arts such as accessories, toys, action figures, clothes, and more.
You might think that a niche blog like Jinx has a very limited market. However, if you target and grow your audience properly, it is promising! You can also operate more than one niche blog and cater to different markets. The opportunity is still wide open.
6 Highest Paid Bloggers
It is getting common for bloggers to share their tips and tricks to get money online. Not only that, they often share income reports to give a snapshot of their online activities. That way we know who are the highest earning bloggers in the world.
Among many, we picked the top six highest-paid bloggers:
1. Yaro Starak
Yaro Stark is an internet entrepreneur, the man behind Entrepreneur Journey.
He gets money from teaching people how to make sales from their blogs. In other words, he sells his expertise on blog monetization.
Yaro Stark started a card game website called Magic: The Gathering and made $1,000/month. It took a while for him to settle his online business. Later on, in his career, he decided to write more about business which became his path of success. He started to earn a lot more from online courses, affiliate marketing, and advertising.
Today, most of his income comes from selling digital products like Inbox Done. As of now, Yaro earns more than $40,000/month from his line of business.
2. Abby Lawson
Together with her husband Donnie, Abby Lawson started a blog called Just a Girl and Her Blog back in 2013.
This blog turned her passion for homey lifestyle into a profitable family business.
Abby shares her creativity with Do It Yourself (DIY) projects, organization tweaks, and many decorating tips. You can find useful information about how to organize a drawer, how to arrange Christmas wreaths and many more.
Apart from that, Abby also shares her knowledge about blogging. Not only does she gives you tips on how to plan a viral blog post, but she also teaches you how to make money blogging.
Her latest reports mentioned that she got as much as $41,000 a month. Most of her income comes from product sales like books and courses, affiliate marketing, and sponsored posts.
3. Lindsay and Bjork
Setting her niche in food blogging, Lindsay Olstrom and Bjork (husband and wife) has managed to become one of the top food bloggers in the world.
She is the one behind Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro. These blogs are good examples of how to build a good connection with the audience, a way to build trust.
First off, Lindsay always ensures people that cooking is easy and fun. She also has a knack for making any homemade recipes look appetizing. Second, the idea of sharing experience in food blogging with Food Blogger Pro makes her stand out.
Lindsay and Bjork make more than $90,000 a month. Most of their income comes from advertising and sponsored content. But they also earn money from Amazon affiliates, in Pinch of Yum shop.
4. Alex Nerney and Lauren McManus
The next highest paid bloggers in our list are Alex Nerney and Lauren McManus who run Avocadu and CreateandGo.
Avocadu is a healthy lifestyle blog that covers anything from weight loss tips to healthy recipes. Meanwhile, CreateandGo is a blog about blogging that came after Avocadu success.
At first, this couple tried many ways of monetization from eBook selling to affiliate marketing, but all didn’t work out really well – they earned only $185 per 5 sales.
Now, they can make up to $150,000 a month from their blogs, which mostly comes from their own digital products.
See? That’s another reason for not giving up too early.
5. Chiara Ferragni
Chiara Ferragni is a top fashion blogger, the mastermind behind The Blonde Salad (personal blog) and Chiara Ferragni Collection (fashion blog), which are both very successful.
Started the Blonde Salad in 2009 to share her love for fashion, Ferragni never meant to be a renown fashion influencer like she is today.
Ferragni reported to expose her life a bit aggressively with six pots a day and got 80,000 likes on average for each post. This is what makes her a trendsetter.
Now, Ferragni has expanded her business owning four flagship stores and more than 300 fashion retail stores. She earned more than $20 million in 2016.
6. Tim Sykes
Online trading is Tim Sykes’ expertise.
Sykes boasts his experience for turning $12,415 into $4 million by trading penny stocks.
With his 20 years of experience in online trading, Sykes started to teach how to be online stock traders.
He claims to have more than 6,000 students up to this day. Not only that, Sykes moved further in his business by launching three websites about online trading: Profitably, Investimonials and Stock to Trade.
Now, he earns more than $10 million a year. Most of his income comes from his online trading courses: DVDs, Trading Chat Rooms.
How to Start a Blog and Make Money from It?
Assuming that you don’t have a blog yet, we’ll show you how to start a blog for free and monetize it.
1. Choosing a Niche
Picking out your niche is the first thing to do. It is so vital that all of your blog aspects will be related to your niche.
When choosing a niche you can start with thinking about these factors:
- Competition — While general niche like food and lifestyle could be a safe bet when starting a blog, the competition is fierce. The more specific your niche is, the better.
- Profitability — Don’t blindly spend your money on your blog’s growth. You also need to consider how you can generate money from your blog.
- Focus on Audience —You should do a lot of research to understand what most people need and come up with the solution to cater to them.
- Passion — As you’ll stick with your blog for a long time, it is recommended to choose a nice topic that you’re really interested in, thus creating content won’t feel burdensome.
After deciding your niche, you will need to pick a domain name. Make sure that your domain name correlates with your niche. After all, the best domain name is the one which can represent your brand at first glance!
2. Get Free Hosting
A domain name alone is not enough to get your blog live on the internet. You need web hosting.
Here at 000webhost, you can sign up for free. The steps are really simple:
- Create an account
- Verify your email
- Create a new website
As simple as that.
You will get a free sub-domain, 1GB disk space, 10GB bandwidth, a custom control panel, WordPress auto installer, and many more features.
While you can enjoy all of those features with zero cost, to get more functionality, you can upgrade to our premium plans at any time.
Once you finished entering details, you can set up your content management system (CMS). And that’s it.
3. Monetize Your Blog
Once your blog is ready, you can start to create great content and post it regularly. Keep in mind, great content alone won’t make people find your blog easily, you need to optimize it well. We have a good article on how to get more traffic for your blog.
If you have enough traffic, you may start to monetize your blog. Among many monetization methods, we recommend Google Adsense and Affiliate Marketing.
Conclusions
Blogging proves to be a great way to make money online.
Among many, the best ways to earn money from a blog are through:
- Affiliate marketing
- Advertising
- Sponsored posts
- Selling your own products
Here are the best six high paid bloggers in this article:
- Yaro Starak makes $40,000 a month from selling digital products
- Abby Lawson earns $41,000 a month from eBooks, affiliate marketing and sponsored posts
- Lindsay and Bjork earns $90,000 from affiliate products and advertising
- Alex Nerney and Lauren McManus make $150,000 from selling their own digital products
- Chiara Ferragni earns $20 million a year from her fashion business.
- Tim Sykes makes up to $1,000,000 a month from selling DVD course about online trading.
Now, you know how to start a blog and how much money you can get. What are you waiting for? Let’s be the next top blogger in the world and earn much money.
