How to Maximize Your Blog’s Revenue Potential from Day One

Starting a new blog can be very exciting, yet there are plenty of challenges up ahead. The biggest goal for many bloggers is to earn money from their blogs, but this isn’t as easy as it seems. Pumping out content and hoping you’ll generate cash from ads won’t lead to optimal blog monetization. Instead, you need clear strategies to try and get as much money from your blog as possible. 

There are more than 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites in the world, with 80% of bloggers reporting that their blog content drives results. So, the potential is there to make money. The trick is generating blog income as quickly as possible so your blog can grow bigger and better. The more money you make, the more successful your blog tends to become – which has a snowball effect and leads to more income generation! 

In this article, we’ll guide you through the best ways to start monetizing a blog from day one. While we’ll look at a variety of options, including:

• Advertising revenue.
• Sponsored posts.
• Affiliate marketing.
• Selling products.
• Offering services.
• Accepting donations.

Better yet, we’ll also go through some steps you can take when starting your blog to ensure you’re set up for success. So, let’s dive in and explore how you can get started with monetizing your blog right away.

How much money do bloggers make?

According to Indeed, the average blogger earns around $2,908 per month or $41,073 per year. However, keep in mind those stats are self-submitted by bloggers, and only 23 salaries have been reported. Some bloggers earn much more than this, while others earn considerably less, and new bloggers just starting out will most frequently fall into this latter category.

Realistically, blogger earnings can vary depending on all sorts of factors, and as a result, it is impossible to predict what earnings your blog will generate without considering those factors in detail.

Key factors influencing bloggers’ earnings

The main factors influencing how much income you can generate from a blog include: 

• The blog’s niche.
• Target audience.
• Traffic.
• Monetization methods.
• Blogger dedication.
• Marketing.

The blog’s niche refers to the category your blog fits into, which goes hand in hand with both the target audience and traffic. Very niche blogs may find it difficult to earn as much as those tackling popular topics like the news or finance. As you’ll be catering to a much smaller target audience, you may see significantly less web traffic, which will lead to less money gained from Google Adsense and other display advertising. 

Your traffic figures directly influence how much money you make from your blog. When a blog has lots of traffic, it naturally makes more money from display ads as there’s a higher chance of people clicking the adverts. Likewise, blogs with higher traffic are attractive to sponsors, meaning you’ll stand to secure deals that are worth more than smaller blogs will get. 

Monetization methods also influence bloggers’ earnings as the more methods you use, the more cash you can generate. Solely relying on Google Adsense revenue is unwise – if you open yourself up to affiliate marketing, selling products/services, or gaining sponsorships, you will have more revenue streams to call upon. In fact, there are numerous ways to monetize your website without Adsense. Diversifying your monetization strategies not only reduces reliance on a single revenue stream but can also maximize your earning potential based on your blog’s unique audience and content.

Lastly, the dedication of the blogger is incredibly important. If you put a lot of effort into creating valuable content and pumping out blog posts every day, you have a better chance of drawing more traffic and dominating your niche. Similarly, bloggers who make an effort to market and promote their content will see more success as they bring more eyes to their pages. 

Average earnings for different blogging niches

To give you more of an overview of how much money you can make blogging, here are some average earnings for different niches. 

Please keep in mind that these figures take lots of different blogs into account and may not provide a good look at how much YOU might make. 

• Travel blogs: Average around $87,923 per year in the US 
• Food blogs: Average around $40,000+ per year in the US
• Lifestyle blogs: Average around $62,388 per year in the US
• Personal finance blogs: Average anywhere between $5,000 to $139,000 per month in the US

Examples of successful bloggers and their earnings

Next up, let’s look at some of the most successful blogs in the world and their earnings. Again, keep in mind that the figures quoted aren’t going to be 100% accurate, as earnings will fluctuate based on all of the factors mentioned earlier. 

Blog Niche	Blog Title	Estimated Earnings
News	The Drudge Report	Between $15-20 million a year
Finance	Making Sense of Cents	Over $100,000 per month
Food	Pinch of Yum	Between $60,000 to $90,000 per month
Lifestyle	Cup of Jo	Between $1-$2 million a year
Tech	Smart Passive Income	Around $100,000 to $200,000 per month
DIY & Crafts	A Beautiful Mess	$2-$5 million a year

1. News – The Drudge Report

The Drudge Report is a news aggregator website that pools headlines and news stories from different sources all into one place. These include mainstream media, other blogs, and social media. 

It primarily generates income through advertising, and while exact figures are hard to find, some experts estimate it earns anywhere between $15-$20 million per year. This is thanks to the massive audience and reader base providing a constant stream of traffic. 

2. Finance – Making Sense of Cents

Making Sense of Cents is a personal finance blog by Michelle Schroeder-Gardner where she provides tips about saving money, generating passive income, and budgeting. 

It’s one of the few blogs out there where the owner actively shares her income earnings. In fact, she publishes income reports, with the latest one stating she earned over $100,000 a month. Primarily, she gets money through affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, and selling online courses. 

3. Food – Pinch of Yum

Pinch of Yum is a food blog run by Lindsay and Bjork Ostrom. They write about food and offer cooking tips and recipes. Thanks to a large audience, they have generated a lot of revenue via advertising, sponsored content, and a Food Blogger Pro membership program. 

These diverse revenue streams have allowed the couple to make between $60,000 and $90,000 per month! 

4. Lifestyle – Cup of Jo

Joanna Goddard is the mastermind behind Cup of Jo, one of the leading lifestyle blogs on the internet. She covers everything from beauty trends to parenting and has amassed a significant following. 

Most of her money is made through sponsored content and brand partnerships. Precise figures are hard to find as she doesn’t disclose her earnings, but estimates suggest it’s between $1-2 million per year. 

5. Tech – Smart Passive Income

Next, we have Smart Passive Income by Pat Flynn. This is a blog based on providing advice on generating passive income and starting small businesses. It’s mainly monetized through affiliate marketing, podcast sponsorships, and a variety of paid online courses. 

Pat does share income reports, with the latest stating he makes between $100,000 to $200,000 every month. 

6. DIY & Crafts – A Beautiful Mess

The last blog on our list is run by sisters Elsie Larson and Emma Chapman, called A Beautiful Mess. It’s a DIY blog that shares cool projects, tips, home decor ideas, crafts, and much more. 

While the duo doesn’t publicly state their earnings, it’s known that the blog generates a lot of traffic and makes money through brand collaborations, sponsored posts, and merchandise/products. The most recent estimates based on traffic figures and monetization methods suggest they make $2–5 million a year. 

How to start a blog you can monetize

Now that you understand the revenue potential of running a successful blog, it’s time to dive into how to go about it. In this section, we’ll take a look at some simple steps to help you start your own blog that you can monetize. Let’s get started.

Choose a profitable niche identifying your target audience’s pain points and needs

Begin by choosing a profitable niche for your blog. Typically, this means picking a topic with a sizeable target audience, as this will make it easier to generate traffic.

Think about what people are looking for online – and what they might spend money on. One good example of a niche where people will invest a lot of money is high-ticket or executive coaching, as it will, in theory, lead to a high income. A big advantage of this approach is that it helps you to diversify the revenue streams from your blog, as you can sell coaching sessions and e-learning materials as separate digital products.

Setting up your blog: Domain, hosting, and WordPress

Next, you need to actually set up your blog. Choose a memorable and unique domain name that accurately reflects your blogging niche and audience. It should be something that’s easy to remember and is relevant to your content. 

From here, you need to select a reliable web hosting provider to ensure your blog is always online. This is more important than most people think, as you will miss out on income if your host server goes down. 

Finally, you’ll need to select a CMS (content management system) for creating, storing, and displaying your blog content. If you’re unsure about which CMS to use, we recommend WordPress – it’s entirely free and open source, meaning it is easy to customize and extend your website with the help of third-party plugins and extensions to fit your unique needs. It’s also extremely easy to use, making it a great option for bloggers who are just starting out.

WordPress is also more than just a blogging platform – one big advantage of the platform is that it supports a range of options for monetizing your blog content. Aside from generating revenue through advertising, sponsorship, and affiliate marketing, WordPress also offers the opportunity to expand your blog into eCommerce through integration with the popular WooCommerce platform.

This means that if you have your own products that are relevant to your blog content, you can both advertise and sell them on the same platform. For this reason, a content marketing strategy can be especially potent for eCommerce store owners, as you can convert your blog traffic into conversions without visitors ever needing to leave your site.

Designing your blog using a customizable WordPress theme

After WordPress is installed, you need to look at the design of your blog. WordPress comes with a range of different themes that you can use to get started – it’s best to choose one with plenty of room for customization, as this will help you to create a design that reflects your blog’s personality and resonates with your target audience.

When designing your website theme, keep monetization in mind. For example, ensure that you leave ample space to display ads prominently without them being too intrusive. To make things easier, you can choose a WordPress theme that is optimized for Google Adsense, as these themes will have built-in space for displaying ad banners in all the right places. 

Optimizing for user experience and search engines

Creating a blog that provides a great user experience is essential for two reasons. Firstly, it means people will actually enjoy your site and be inclined to stick around. Secondly, user experience is one of the factors that Google takes into account when determining where to rank your blog in search engine results.

As a result, if you’re looking to optimize your blog content for search engine rankings, you’ll want to take the time to improve the user experience (UX) on your site. Some things to consider include:

• Ensuring your site is easy to read, with clear headings to signpost your blog content.
• Making navigation as simple as possible through the use of intuitive menus and an optimized search experience.
• Creating a more engaging experience for your site visitors through the use of different media, including images and video content.
• Optimizing your site loading speed to create a seamless experience.
• Ensuring your site is responsive across multiple devices – WordPress can help you here, as it offers options to optimize your site for mobile devices as well as desktops. 

When thinking about how you can optimize the user experience on your blog, try to approach it from the perspective of a user. Think about what you hate about some websites and how they could make the experience better for visitors, then apply those findings on your own site. 

Developing traffic-boosting strategies: SEO-friendly content and leveraging social media

Following on from above, UX isn’t the only thing that influences your search engine performance. If you want to rank highly and be more visible to your target audience, you must follow essential SEO (search engine optimization) best practices to make your content more appealing to search engines. 

This will mainly revolve around the following on-page and off-page optimization techniques: 

Keyword research

Carry out thorough keyword research to determine which keywords you should target in your blog posts. Keyword research tools are a good starting point here. You’ll want to consider factors like:

• Search volume: how many people are searching for the keyword.
• Keyword difficulty: how hard it is to rank on the front page of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for the keyword.
• Search intent: what people are looking for when they search for the keyword.

Take the time to consider which keywords you want to target, those that your blog content can realistically rank for, and how you can best go about satisfying the needs of searchers for your target keywords. This is an important process as if you target the wrong keywords, you could be jeopardizing your blog’s chance of bringing in higher volumes of traffic! 

Write for your audience

Don’t fall into the habit of stuffing keywords into your content just to get them in there. Instead, write for your audience by focusing on what they want to see. Think about why they might find your blog post and provide answers to their questions. This links back to satisfying users’ search intent, as we covered above.

If you are aiming for your blog content to rank highly in Google search results, focus on Google’s E-E-A-T criteria – aim to create content that provides a good experience and demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Creating content that meets these four key values will go a long way to helping your blog to climb the search engine rankings, whilst also providing a better experience for your site visitors.

Use good headings and subheadings

Breaking your content up with headings and subheadings makes it easier to digest. It also allows you to implement keywords in the headings, which in turn can help with SEO. Try to make each heading descriptive, as this helps search engines figure out what your page is about, which will help your posts rank well for relevant searches. 

Optimize meta tags

Meta tags are small pieces of code located in the headers of your web pages. Effectively, they describe what the page is about. Be sure to utilize target keywords here for a greater effect.

Focus on link building

Alongside on-page optimization, you should also aim to improve your content’s visibility with link building. While there is no proven strategy for generating backlinks, you can improve your chances by including linkable elements, including infographics, videos, case studies, and more. Posting guest posts on other sites and linking back to your content is another great way to build backlinks.

While you are focusing on building links from external sources, don’t forget the importance of internal linking. Ensure that you always link to existing articles or pages in your blog posts, and add links to new content in your older posts to help search engines index and rank it faster.

Leverage social media

While optimizing your content for search engine results is an important means of boosting your blog’s visibility and traffic, it is only one strategy. Ensure that you also focus on other sources of traffic, including social media, in order to bring more visitors to your blog. Sharing posts on social media when they are published and using hashtags to help your posts reach your target audience are just two easy ways you can help encourage more visitors to click on your content.

Strategies for monetizing your blog from day one

At this point, your blog is set up and ready to go, which leads to our next question – how do you make money blogging? In this section, we’ll cover some of the key blog monetization strategies that you can use to maximize revenue from your WordPress blog. Best of all, these strategies are suitable for anyone, from beginners to seasoned professionals. Let’s get started!

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a simple way of getting paid to advertise products/services for other companies. You register for an affiliate program and receive a unique link. When people click your link, you get paid if they complete a specific action. In most cases, you get paid when people buy or sign-up for something. 

Bloggers can get an Amazon Affiliates account right away, letting them recommend products to their audience in return for up to 10% commission. Just make sure you choose your products/services wisely – recommend things you know your audience will be interested in, so it blends naturally into your content. For example, you could present the recommended product/service as a solution to a common pain point that you know your readers will have experienced.

Naturally, affiliate marketing works best when you have a large amount of traffic, as this results in more people clicking through your affiliate links. This is where WP RSS Aggregator comes in handy, as it enables you to create your own curation website where you can collect, organize, and share content from around the web.

This helps you to build a large content library much faster, which will, in turn, help to draw more traffic to your site. More traffic means more potential clicks on your affiliate links, which means greater revenue potential.

As your blog grows and you develop a reputation for content creation in your particular niche, you might even be able to secure links for affiliate products that are more relevant to your target audience, helping to further increase your affiliate revenue.

Sponsored posts

Sponsored posts are a great way to generate reliable revenue from your blog content, provided you can secure the right sponsors. Identify suitable brands that might be interested in sponsoring your posts, then look at gaps in your niche and offer to create sponsored content around topics that aren’t discussed that much. If your target brands see value in this content, they will pay you to produce it for them and host it on your blog – it’s really that simple. 

As with affiliate marketing, sponsored posts become a more reliable source of revenue the larger and more popular your site becomes. After all, the more page views you get, the more valuable it becomes for brands to be featured on your blog, meaning you’ll be able to secure more lucrative sponsorship deals.

Display advertising

Advert revenue is one of the most straightforward ways to start making money from your blog. You’ll typically be paid per impression, meaning site visitors need to click on the adverts before you generate revenue from them.

On high-traffic sites, this is a great way to earn passive income, as the more people that view your blog posts, the higher the likelihood that visitors will click on one of the displayed adverts. That being said, the prevalence of ad blockers means that not all site visitors will even see your adverts, let alone click on them, making this a less reliable way of monetizing your blog.

Selling products or services

If you think back to the table showing the most successful blogs from different niches, there’s a common theme with the highest earners. They all sell products for people to buy. If you have an existing product or service relevant to your blog content, you’re already one step ahead. If not, consider creating one. 

An easy option is to develop a course or an eBook for people to buy. It should tackle the pain points of your target audience – think about why they’re on your site and how you can provide more value that extends beyond blog posts. 

For example, if you run a food blog, create an eBook with loads of exclusive recipes that people can buy for a small fee. Or, if you run a marketing blog, you could offer digital marketing consultations, tutorials, or webinars on topics that you know will resonate with your audience.

Accepting subscriptions and donations

If your main product is your blog content, you could use a platform like Patreon to allow readers to support your blog through donations or subscriptions. The advantage of this strategy is that you can provide the majority of your content free of charge but encourage readers to donate in return for exclusive content or supplementary products.

An alternative approach is to add a donation button to your blog for any readers who want to offer extra support. If your blog is powered by WordPress, for example, you can use the Donations via PayPal plugin. This won’t be a reliable or consistent source of revenue but can be a good option to enable your loyal readers to give something back if they are feeling generous.

Tips for maximizing blog earnings

You now know how to monetize your blog, but what can you do to boost your earnings as high as possible? Here are some suggestions to get you started: 

Curate and aggregate content

First, a disclaimer: It is extremely difficult to create 100% original blog content that both ranks and appeals to your audience. This doesn’t mean that you can’t display great content on your blog and start making money from day one, though – all you need is a tool like WP RSS Aggregator to help you quickly build a library of content. 

How does it work? Simply put, WP RSS Aggregator enables you to curate and display content from other sources. This fills your blog with high-quality content that already ranks well, which will, in turn, help to bring traffic your way. Don’t worry – you won’t be passing this content off as your own; you’ll simply be using it to support your original content. The aim is that your curated content draws in an audience, and then your original posts keep visitors coming back for more. 

Alternatively, you could make the site entirely dependent on other content and use a plugin that enables autoblogging to save time. For example, you could create a news aggregator site like Drudge Report and generate the majority of your income via display ads. WP RSS Aggregator even makes it possible to earn affiliate income from a curated content site – check out our complete guide on generating affiliate income via the ThirstyAffiliates plugin to learn how.

Sharing value and promoting effectively

You will maximize blog earnings by diverting more readers to your pages every single day. One of the most effective strategies to achieve this is to promote effectively via social media. 

Create a social media strategy that allows you to share posts all the time. Choose the platforms your target audience engages with the most and share consistently whenever you publish a post, but also a day or so later as a reminder to your audience that your posts are there.

Don’t neglect hashtags here – hashtags are like keywords that make your social media posts easier for others to find. You’ll increase visibility if you throw in some key hashtags whenever sharing your posts. Do some research to discover which hashtags are widely used in your niche. 

Importantly, don’t just share links to posts on social media; engage with your audience too. Start conversations with people and talk to your followers so they feel part of something. When audiences feel more connected to a blog, they’re more likely to keep going back again and again. Generating new traffic is always important, but you need a steady stream of regular readers to keep things ticking over. 

Away from social media, you should also promote your blog by collaborating with others. Write guest posts on other people’s sites so you take advantage of their traffic and drive audiences to you through backlinks. Being on credible sites also builds your reputation and makes people trust your opinion. 

Finally, you could consider paid advertising. Yes, it costs money, but this is a fantastic way to get your blog out there on social media, search engines, and other websites. It could be a worthy investment as the money spent on ads will be regained when your blog starts making money. 

We strongly advise you to implement all of the strategies in this section to monetize your blog from the very beginning. As we’ve seen over the course of this article, many of these strategies have the potential to snowball the larger and more popular your site becomes. By generating revenue from day one, you’ll have more resources to pump into growing your site, which will, in turn, help you to earn more income from your blog.

Maximize your blog’s revenue with WP RSS Aggregator

There are huge benefits to monetizing your blog from day one, and as we’ve seen, the income potential can be very high. While it will take hard work to grow your readership and bring a steady stream of traffic to your site, if you follow our step-by-step guide, you’ll be in great stead to start earning money from your blog from day one.

WP RSS Aggregator is a fantastic tool to help you monetize your site from the moment it goes live. Use it to import and display curated content from various sources, helping you get high-value posts on your site right away. This is a great way to supplement your existing content, bring in higher volumes of traffic, and start earning affiliate income. 

Whether you’re just launching your website or looking to maximize your blog’s revenue potential, get started with WP RSS Aggregator to maximize your earnings from the word go!