How To Earn From Blog ?
There are a number of ways to make money with a blog. Which one is right for you depends on your content, your skills and possibly your network.
We present the most common business models for bloggers. To back this up with concrete examples, let’s imagine you are a food blogger (much of what you will read can also be easily applied to fitness trainers, health consultants or business coaches).
1. Place Automatically Generated Ads
The first business model to monetize a blog is to place ads. In particular, the placement of automatically generated ads, such as via Google AdSense, is only a small hurdle.
Actually, anyone can register with AdSense with their own URL, embed a code snippet on their own website and off you go. There is also a tool that will give you a pre-calculation of how much money you can expect to make from AdSense and your theme.
When it comes to “Eating & Drinking”, the annual turnover could be EUR 3,420 from 50,000 visitors per month. Sounds good at first: embed a snippet and earn almost 3,500 euros. But how quickly can 50,000 visitors per month actually be generated?
We looked at this using an example: According to Similarweb, the vegan food blog “Zucker&Jagdwurst” has a visitor volume of around 250,000 visitors per month.
The two bloggers have been active since April 2016, during which time they have written over 480 blog articles (mostly recipes) and, after 1,675 posts, have over 54,000 subscribers on Instagram.
This means that a volume of 50,000 monthly visitors is associated with a lot of work. Quite apart from that, most bloggers at this level of success don’t run ads through AdSense. Because the displays can hardly be controlled by and are visually not a feast for the eyes.
2. Include Links For Commissions
A higher quality way to monetize advertising is to include links to products. If these products are then bought by your users, you get a percentage of the sale. Depending on the advertising network and category, you earn different amounts.
There are large affiliate networks that you can sign up with and they will do all the tracking for you. Or you register directly with a specific provider, such as Amazon. The Amazon affiliate program gives you a stake of up to 12 percent.
But let’s take a closer look: For an influencer or blogger there is a maximum of 10 percent, depending on the category less. For a stand mixer where the purchase price is quite high, it is then only 5 percent.
If I now advertise a professional mixer on my blog that costs 229 euros, I can earn 11.45 euros per sale. With a can of jackfruit that costs 5.90 euros, you would earn 7 percent, i.e. the equivalent of 0.41 cents.
Assuming an average conversion rate of 3 percent (i.e. 3 out of 100 site visitors would click the link and of these 0.15 would buy this item), you would need almost 1,200 visitors to the site for one to buy an item. So to earn 100 euros would be 12.
As a food blogger, you also have the option of providing your recipes to a food delivery service. A commission is also paid for every shopping cart or food box that is filled with your recipes. Since the services are still in their infancy and the purchases are relatively low, the chances of earning are rather low.
3. Exclusive Advertising
A much more attractive type of advertising is exclusive advertising partnerships, where you specifically advertise a product or brand. The content is discussed in advance and there is usually a fixed fee.
It is important to the advertising partner that you fit into their communication concept and reach a target group for which the product is relevant. For example, a meat fanatic would be inappropriate for promoting a vegan spread (although one should never say never).
The remuneration for this varies, with influencer platforms the remuneration starts from 100 euros per order, but influencers with over 50,000 followers usually take over 500 euros per order.
So if you have some reach and quality, it’s a nice way to make money. But be careful: With ads and affiliate programs you have work once and then your link works on its own, so you could generate passive income – this does not work with these exclusive partnerships. Here you have to be and stay active.
4. Take Orders From Companies
An exclusive cooperation with companies is also possible in the form of a service, e.g. you should create a recipe for a new product, including image material. The good thing is that you don’t need a large reach for this, but that recipes and photos alone are convincing.
Several hundred euros can be possible per order, with most amounts being between 200 and 300 euros. And for that you have to actively invest a relatively large amount of time: buying ingredients, designing a recipe, test cooking, optimizing and last but not least: the photo shoot.
And all food bloggers know that this can take several hours, depending on the setting and post-processing.
5. Publish Your Own Books or Apps
A wonderful way to generate passive income is content that can be created once or repeatedly and then multiplied as desired. These can be your own books and apps that you offer for a fee.
Food bloggers in particular have the opportunity to publish a cookbook or a recipe app. You don’t have to hire a graphic designer or contact a publisher anymore.
So-called self-publishing providers make it possible: For example, Blurb offers free templates for designing a cookbook with its own software and then publishes the book through various sales channels – with its own ISBN. With ePubli, also a self-publisher, you can even calculate the exact prices and profit margins in advance.
But be careful: Cookbooks require a lot of color pages to be printed, which reduces profits, since the printing costs are significantly higher in relation to simple paperbacks. So even if you sell a book for 30 euros, you only have a few euros in margin.
You can therefore also think about the possibility of having your own recipe app developed – the margin is similarly high and you don’t have to lay out a cookbook.
The start-up eat app live UG offers a convenient solution for this: they create your own recipe app with your own logo, color scheme and recipes, including a quantity converter and shopping list function. According to field reports, this can generate four-digit annual income – if your community is already quite large, even more.
6. Sell Your Own Merchandise
You have a nice logo and your fans can’t get enough of you? Of course, you can also design and sell your own merchandise items such as t-shirts, mugs and sweaters.
You no longer have to order 100 t-shirts in advance, you can order them via Spreadshirt. So you get a commission with every sale – and it really takes little effort. Is that worth it? That depends entirely on your community, your unique position and your topic.
We can well imagine that a vegan food blogger can actually earn good money with motivating slogans. But if you are still quite unknown and your topic is more of a niche topic – or an everyday topic (both extremes are not perfect), then your chances are not that good.
7. Offer Advice, Coaching & Seminars
If you have managed to have a certain reach and look back on certain successes, then further possibilities open up for you: Let others share the knowledge you have gained and offer advice, coaching or a complete weekly seminar for other food bloggers.
This would also work wonderfully passively by recording online video coaching and making these videos available for purchase.
But beware: lately, more and more “experts” have been appearing on the Internet and trying to sell dubious coaching to the man or woman, so the reputation of the coaches has suffered somewhat.
Our advice: Only start your coaching when you can really prove that you have the expertise in this area and try to do high-quality advertising for it.
8. Sell Your Own Products
As you’ve probably noticed, the effort you have to invest in order to earn money with your work as a blogger continues to increase in this list. And so we are now at a very complex, but definitely worthwhile option: offering your own products. As a food blogger, you could bring out your own spice, canned soup or bread mix.
But here you have to look very closely at the legal requirements for food. Hence, our tip: Try to use your reach with a partner from the food industry and develop a product in cooperation.
This list shows impressively how diverse the possibilities are to earn money as a food blogger. But all points have one starting point in common: you are successful with your blog and have built a certain community – and that not only takes a lot of time, but you also have to observe various rules. You can find out more about blogging here.