Ever dreamt of making a living through blogging but feel overwhelmed by the journey ahead?
You’re not alone. Many aspiring bloggers share the ambition of turning their passion into a full-time job, yet the path to achieving this goal often seems daunting.
The Dream of Full-Time Blogging
Last night I was chatting with a blogger who was feeling completely overwhelmed with their goal of making a living from blogging.
I asked them how much they wanted to make from blogging.
They responded that they wanted to be a full time blogger.
I pushed them for a figure – what does ‘full time’ mean for you?
They thought for a moment and said that they could live off $30,000 USD a year (note: they wouldn’t have minded earning more but would be able to quit their current job at this kind of rate).
$30,000 a year sounds like a lot to make from a blog – especially when you’re starting out and are yet to make a dollar. To this blogger it seemed so overwhelming that she had almost convinced herself that it was not possible.
Transforming Overwhelm into Action
If you’re in a similar boat, feeling like you’ve hit a wall in your blogging journey, here are three pivotal steps to help you navigate through:
1. Don’t Give Up Your Day Job…. Yet
Earning $30,000 a year from blogging is achievable, but it demands patience and realism. Overnight success is rare in the blogging world. Maintaining your current job while gradually building your blog ensures financial stability and allows you to invest in your blog without immediate pressure for returns.
2. Set Clear, Specific Goals
Saying that you want to be full time as a blogger is a great goal – but it’s not really specific enough. This is why I wanted the blogger I was chatting with to name a figure. For her full time was $30,000 – for others it could be more or less – the amount is not the point, the point is that you need something more concrete to work towards so that you’re able to measure where you’re at.
For me when I decided I want to go full time as a blogger I decided that I wanted to aim for $50,000 (Aussie Dollars) in a year as the bench mark (at that time $50,000 was around 36,000 USD). That’s around what I would have been earning in my current main job if I had been doing that full time (I was actually working a number of part time jobs at the time as well as studying part time).
Knowing what I was aiming for helped me in a number of ways when it came to getting to that goal.
3. Break Down Your Goals into Something More Achievable
$30,000 USD still sounds big when you’re a new blogger – and in some ways it is. However there are different ways of thinking about that figure. Lets break it down in the way that I used to look at my target.
- $30,000 a year = $576.92 per week
- $30,000 a year = $82.19 a day
- $30,000 a year = $3.42 an hour
We could break it down on a monthly or on a minute by minute basis if we wanted to (in fact I did do it by minute from time to time for fun) – but the exercise is really about helping you to see that perhaps your big goal is a little more achievable if you are to break it down. Making $82.19 somehow seems a little bit easier to me than making $30,000 (or is that just me?). Viewing your goal through these smaller lenses can make it appear more attainable and manageable.
OK – the other way that I used to break down my goal that I found really helpful to me was to do it based upon what I need to achieve to meet that target. For me I would usually look at the daily figure – in this case $82.19.
What do I need to do to make $82.19 a day ($30,000 a year)?
Well there’s a number of ways that much. Lets look at a few:
- CPC Ads – lets say we’re running mainly AdSense on our blog and that the average click is paying 5 cents. That equates to 1643 clicks on AdSense ads (note: AdSense also runs CPM ads so it’s not quite as simple as saying you need 1643 clicks… but to keep this simple lets just go with that).
- CPM Ads – lets say that we’re running CPM ads on our blog and we’re being paid $2 CPM per ad unit and we had 3 ads on each page (which is effectively $6 CPM per page). This would mean we’d need 13,000 page impressions.
- Monthly Sponsorships – one way to sell ads directly to advertisers is to sell ads on a month by month basis as a sponsorship. To make $30k in a year you need to sell $2500 a month in ads. You might have 6 ad spots on your blog so this is 6 advertisers at $416.66 per advertiser per month.
- Low Commission Affiliate Products – Lets say we were promoting affiliate products from a site like Amazon and your commissions were on average about 40 cents per sale. To earn $82.19 you’d need to sell 205 products.
- High Commission Affiliate Products – In this case you might be promoting ebooks and earning $8 a copy (that’s what you’d earn selling my 31DBBB ebook per commission). The math is simple on this one – you’d had to sell around 10 e-books a day.
- Really Big Commission Affiliate Products – of course e-books are not the biggest product out there to promote – there are products like training courses where you can earn hundreds per sale. Lets take one that might pay out $300 for a yearly membership on a bigger product. In this case you need to sell 8 of these per month.
- Selling Your Own E-book – got your own product, perhaps an e-book, to sell from your blog? At $19.95 a sale you need to sell just over 4 of these a day. You can do the sums on cheaper or more expensive products.
Of course there are many many other ways to make money from blogs. Subscriptions, donations, paid reviews, selling yourself as a consultant….. etc. You can do the sums for yourself on your own model.
I know that some of the above figures still sound out of reach for bloggers – 1643 clicks on your AdSense ads sounds massive to a new blogger…. and it is – but do keep in mind that you can combine some of the above (in fact I’d recommend you diversify your income).
You might run 2 ad networks on your site, promote Amazon affiliates, sell your own e-book and promote someone’s membership course.
Reflecting on Income Streams
When I first aimed for a full-time blogging income, I diversified my revenue through a mix of AdSense, Chitika, direct ad sales, Amazon affiliate sales, and other commissions. It took over two years of dedicated blogging to reach my goal of $50,000 AUD annually and for me at that time my income mix looked a like this (going from memory here):
- AdSense: $35
- Chitika: $20
- Private Ad Sales: $20
- Amazon: $15
- Other Affiliate Commissions: $10
Note: I didn’t achieve this milestone until I’d been blogging for over 2 years (I blogged for the first year without trying to make money).
Embracing the Journey
This didn’t happen over night (let me emphasize this – blogging for money is neither quick nor is it easy money) but I really found that breaking things down into more bite sized pieces helped me to stay motivated but also helped me to identify what I needed to work on in order to reach my goals (and for me to quite my day job). Remember, persistence and a strategic approach are key.
Again – don’t quit your day job yet (in fact you may not want to quit it even when you reach your goal – it can be good to have a back up plan) but do work hard at being specific about your blogging goals and attempt to break it down in a way that helps you move towards them.
Remember: Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. By setting clear goals, breaking them down into achievable targets, and diversifying your income sources, you can build a blog that not only fulfills your passion but also provides a sustainable income. Stay committed, stay focused, and let every small success propel you closer to your dream of full-time blogging.
i wish i can earn extra 50K,work it now
I like your article, because I have seen headings on many blogs like “make a big money by blogging” but when I read them internally I didn’t found deep information about the procedures that how one can make money.
But your article is some different because you discussed the procedures and tricks like ebook, affiliate programs, advertising so it’s become easier for visitors to understand where to start.
Wonderful information with all figures and statistics. I can say it would help the pro-bloggers like me….
Thank you pretty much….
This article gives very good incentive to keep pressing forward. Start out slow and build on it a little at a time. Thank you for this article.
you encouraged me to try chitika!! guess i will do that this week
Make $30,000 a year??
tis is great but it is real?
i have a bit of blogger experience but dont think that is possible to do that
Excellent post! And Excellent Blog. Your posts are truly inspirational. Alright i will make a try! but for a smaller catch say 3000 USD/year. Bless me you humble ProBlogger! :)
At the first thought It seemed to be impossible to earn over 30k/y just by blogging, however, when I thought it through a bit I might have changed my mind. If you take blogging as your full-time job, not to mention that most of us who work from home basically spend more then regular 8 working hours on the net, it could be possible to make quite a bit of money.
Anyway, what matters the most, at least to me, is the freedom to work from your own home without any boss or annoying colleagues hanging over your head… you make your own hours and it’s never boring!
Great article.
For anything in life you must have a definite goal to achieve in order to get there.
I would just add: choose a topic that you love.
Being a full time blogger is 100% true, your sould and mind become bloggers. If you want to live from this dedicate your time to what you really love doing and it will be easier.
I am into women coaching and one fact that I am facing is to combine what I love VS. what it gives you more money.
What I really love is coaching women (in Spanish) what I do at http://www.lacoachdelasmujeres.com but posting articles about what women in sydney need at http://www.sydney4women.com.au is giving me more money.
I think I just need to find a balance to achieve those goals you have accurately pointed out before.
Thanks as always.
Karina Guerra
I’ve made 1.400$ this month. I’m on my way to 30k.
I started my blogging career few months back but I have taken the same mentioned approach. I have calculated by achievable goal on an daily basis and use Adsense, CJ and direct affiliate… but as of now very little success but that seems to be ok.. still growing
Thanks Darren for such a nice post. I totally appreciate your sharing.
This exactly how I planned when I started blogging ! 2 years ago. I am glad to hear about the 3 year success period, that means this year will be a good one for me :)
As many have commented I migrated from Hit and miss to niche specific to writing about something I actually know and enjoy and others would benefit from.
I’ve made about $1100 last month, and already $250 into this month. Definitely making progress and I’m feeling quite positive about things, but like you said, I’m not quitting my day job just yet.
Hi Darren
I guess that a lot of us reason along the lines…
1 Tens of millions of people use the web.
2 If only a fraction visit my blog, that is still a huge number.
3 If only a small percentage of my visitors buy or donate… I am still doing very well.
Your breakdown shows the real side of making money from blogging..
$30,000 a year = $576.92 per week
$30,000 a year = $82.19 a day
$30,000 a year = $3.42 an hour
Bottom line… do I have enough visitors and will they contribute $3.42 an hour?
I know my answer, at the moment, is a big big NO!
Thanks for putting it into perspective and thanks for giving me some ideas on how to turn my resounding NO into a definite YES.
This post is at the top of my favourites…
$30000 a year is too far away from me. Yet, like what you said, it’s achievable but won’t happened overnight.
Your post not only helping.. but very encouraging. Thanks Darren.
I am a new reader at this blog – this post contains some incredibly valuable information within the readers comments – I find it fascinating how variables like the target niche affect the efforts to monetize a blog to such a degree.
I agree.. Set the target means you must work hard to achieve it
Darren,
This was an awesome post. You’re the inspiration I needed today to keep going.
Thanks,
Brian
wow. and i’m only earning a hundred bucks a month. LOL. anyway, that’s a great goal, esp since if you’re paying for mortgage and your kids are in school.
you have one itsy bitsy typo there. 2nd to the last paragraph, last sentence. “(and for me to quite my day job)”
i hope i could earn more this year. ^^ to blogging!
I really like the breakdown approach you showed.So much easier to look at the daily goal than a big figure, the yearly goal.
Many people are looking for a part time income from their blog, and by diversifying your income to 5 different income streams it would be quite simple to make $15 – $20 per day down the road.
ıt’ true
30000 a year is too far away from me. Yet, like what you said, it’s achievable but won’t happened overnight.
Thank’s
Nice Post! I’m a new blogger and been looking for many ways on how to make my blog more meaningful to me and to my readers. Also, on how to make it profitable as I finds a lot of people are making money from blogging. You inspired me and I am motivated again to keep going. thanks, Darren!
Setting goals really, really help. My first year or so I was simply learning how to blog and network along with what the different monetization methods were out there. After my first year I started setting really specific goals (monthly, anything else would’ve been too cumbersome for me) on how much revenue I wanted to bring in, unique hits, bounce rate…etc.
For me, I break down what my goals are for each monetization method and within that I also break it down by site. So, for example CPA (comissions) I break down as one large group and list each site as a subcategory. So for me those would be CJ, Linkshare, SAS, GAN, PJN and a few others. I’ve found the more effort I put into categorizing things and trying to understand conversion rates, my traffic, and what monetization strategies work the best for my sites it all seems to improve gradually over time.
For newbies I will tell you that it is definitely a process. Meaning that you will not figure this out overnight nor will you have it figured out completely after 2-3 years. It’s an ongoing learning process especially if you are working at FT job while trying to build your site(s).
I will say this, $30k is definitely possible after 2-3 years of work. However, if you only put in a few hours a week and don’t learn from the gurus (Darren of course) and only post about what pops into your brain then those chances decrease dramatically. Having multiple sites provides a broader range of revenue opportunities and gives you an portfolio of sites to generate revenue from as opposed to putting all your eggs in one basket with just one blog. Not saying it can’t be done but generally speaking for most of us I think the “more is better” strategy will give you a better shot at making a FT income at some point. Just remember that finding a targeted Niche is key and having a real interest in what you’re talking about also really helps.
Sophie
The making – money thing in general is overwhelming for me. But to “improve” my blog – THAT is something that I can breakdown. And by improving the user experience, the way search engines crawl the site, and the relevance of the words I use, I hope to get more traffic and make more money. But it is the quality of content that I can set goals toward without being overwhelmed.
For me – an editorial calendar
– daily monitoring what interests people on my blog
– improving links and titles on all my posts for this month
– once a week bloggy maintenance
– daily times for reading others’ blogs.
Those are goals that I can do, and will provide the feedback I need in teh form of what my readers are looking for.
Before making money, I need the blog that readers WANT to read! But without a doubt – breaking down goals into SMART goals are the only way to go!
Cathy
Great approach! I wish if I could also join $30k club soon!
Thank you so much, there aren’t enough posts on this… or at least i cant find them. I am turning into such a blog nut, I just cant get enough and this is such an important topic… i’ll be sure to write something about your site
Wow – Sophie’s comment was nearly as good as the actual article itself. Thank you for the additional real-world experience you have shared, Sophie!
Just when I was getting a little frustrated, you’ve resored my fiath that making money from a blog CAN happen. The added bonus of starting one to share knowledge and help others, I’ve already done, so it’s just a time thing I guess.
Phil.
Great article! I have been working on my website for over a year now I’m not seeing much money come in at this point, I’ve decided to put some of your ideas to work. Thanks! Hopefully buy next year i’ll be making that 30k a year. :)
Wonderful post. I think the key points are persistance, creating websites about what you love and above all having realistic expectations.
By breaking things down into an hourly figure you can plan your work day, I also agree do not quit your day job instead use your day job income to help grow your online business. One final point a person should be prepared to reinvest anything they earn online for atleast the first 12 months
Nice article . Most of times it needs more than 2 years to work and make money from a website . It needs a lot of work to generate money . The best thing is never quit trying .
A very good article. Very informative for beginner like me.
Nice article Darren!
I think if we break down our goal to a daily basis target it becomes much easier and clear to achieve.
I just started my new blog and I already made my daily goals.
Thanks.
I loved reading the way you kept playing with numbers. Anyway, you proved at the end that whatever target you fixed is achievable and YOU DID IT.
Thanks for the suggestions, they are real, practical and inspiring. I’m doing hard work.
There’s no such thing as an overnight blogger celebrity :p taking baby steps towards your goal, splitting it into smaller stuff, and doing everything you can to promote your blog can definitely help.
Going to your $30,000-goal shouldn’t be hard – if you like what you are doing. But when you feel it is dragging and you aren’t really enjoying it, you won’t seem to succeed.
darren this good post, very motivating us as a beginner
http://penajam.blogspot.com
Wow! Breaking down enlighten me.
Darren,
Getting down to short term numbers is exactly how you focus on getting to a big goal. I like the approach and in any business this is how you take your annual goals and bring them down to daily/weekly goals. The thing we are looking at right now are the precursors to revenue which is of course traffic and the sources of that traffic. For instance, we have a daily goal of what we want our Google search traffic to be. So we focus on SEO and watch the results. We also look at RSS, registered users, etc. And of course pages per visit. All of that stuff comes together to generate traffic which in our case drives the CPM ads which drives revenue.
Another way we started looking at things is how much traffic does the average article get. If you assume 6 ads served per article (ours average 3 pages), and 1,000 views, you have 6,000 impressions which for us would generate about $8-$10 an article. Put out an article a day and you are looking at $3,500 a year or so in income. On a CPM model, we determined that we need to get to about 10,000 views per article and 3 to 5 articles a day to make decent ad money. We’d love it if the ad rates went up as the traffic established itself but we have to model what we can currently get.
What we have focused on is which topics seem to get the most traction and after analyzing a couple months worth of data, it was obvious. We are completely new at this, but at least there seems to be a cause and effect relationship that you can work off of.
This article really motivated beginner like me.
A very nice break down and you are right about the numbers. I think most of us start blogging as a hobby, but then it becomes like a full time job if you want to write fresh content daily or even a few times a week. I get frustrated when I don’t get enough time to spend on my blogs because of my full time job.
Hey just wondering how you went aout setting up your design etc. I’m fairly new to the whole internet thing, Was blogengine easy to install
Seems like a reasonable goal, $30,000. That’s really part time income in the US, maybe it’s good money in other countries. Affiliate marketing is the way to go. Adsense and the like bring in so little it almost is a waste of time.
$30,000 is a great goal to set. It isn’t so far out that you would get discouraged if you didn’t hit it right away. And when you really think about it making $30,000 on your blog is really like making $38,000, because you don’t have to worry about the taxes coming out:) Blogging usually starts out as a part time gig. BUT somewhere down the road it hits you that you can make this a full time job. HINT! This usually happens when you realize how to incorporate all the necessary elements needed to get good relevant traffic flow to your blog. Not limited to niche, content, ad revenues, email marketing, and great SEO, etc. And good meta tags like title, description, and keywords aren’t enough, there is more to SEO than that. Webmasters and bloggers should be concerned with getting their images ranked in google as well.
http://www.stumbleuponguru.com
Great article, many good pointers and hints. I am not the expert, but I hope I will be :-) Thank you for helping me on the way…..
My biggest challenge has been taking the time for backlinks and getting my site rating as high as possible. A process that is requiring much patience. Wish there was a way to speed up this process.
great post man, i learned a lot.
great blogger, I will learn how to make money online this year
I love this blog, I think this blog would help any person out there looking to make money online.
Thanks so much Auntie Val! You are very welcome. I am by no means a big-time blogger (yet) but it’s a real passion of mine and my revenue from my blogs has really started to grow in the last year. So glad to see so many people commenting on this, it truly is a long process for most of us starting out. Remember to test, test and test as far as ad placements go, different affiliate programs (conversions vary greatly) and setup multiple revenue streams so if one drops a little you have others that can grown or at the very least balance income out somewhat.
Getting organized has also really helped me. I break down what I want to accomplish on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis. I try to keep my folders on my desktop maintained and set up in a way that is convenient and easy for the way my own brain processes information. There are certain areas I’m stronger in than others and so I try to dedicate a little time each week at strengthening those areas.
One thing I really love is that there are so many more tools, tutorials, gurus and so on out there than even 2 years ago. One tool I could absolutely not live without is Evernote. Not sure if everyone here is familiar but this tool really helps you save everything you want in one program. You can tag things and categorize in ways that makes sense to you personally. If you don’t use the software currently I would suggest giving it a try… I believe it’s still free. There’s also an iPhone app as well for those of you that stay on the go.