Many people still wonder if blogging is profitable. To me, it’s one of the most enjoyable and convenient methods to not just earn an income but also create an online business and free yourself from the 9 to 5.
While the Internet is full of stories of 6-figure bloggers, that’s not what most people need or want. Some simply dream about earning their first $1000 blogging so they can make some money on the side.
Maybe it’s to increase your savings, support your family, live a better life, pay your debt, get a degree, or else.
The beauty of blogging is that once you get the hang of it, you’re hooked and can only grow. You will always be after more blog traffic and that, in turn, will mean doubling your income at every next stage of your blogging journey.
If you haven’t started a blog just yet, now is your chance. It doesn’t need to take more than 1 hour to set it up.
I’ll even walk you through the steps in my FREE course. Sign up here:
Now, let’s get to the main point I want to make in this post: you can earn money from your blog with ads.
And no, it’s not with Google AdSense. Instead, you should rely on a premium ad network and helps you make real money even without much traffic.
How to Make Money with Advertising on Your Blog
I signed up with Mediavine in 2018 and didn’t have ads on my blog until that point. You first need an established blog, enough content and traffic on it before you can be approved.
Luckily, you can use Pinterest to drive a ton of traffic to your site quickly. The other option is SEO (which means writing a lot of content, optimizing it for keywords and hoping for Google to rank it). However, that takes months or even more than a year, it’s a ton of work and there’s a lot of competition too.
The other way, however, is ideal for new bloggers. You can use Pinterest to grow your traffic even with a new blog.
Here are 2 articles that will walk you through the exact steps of setting up your account and bringing thousands of Pinners to your blog:
- How to Get Your First 100K Pinterest Page Views in 30 Days
- How I Grew My Blog to 78,000 Monthly Visitors Using Tailwind for Pinterest
After bringing traffic to your blog, you can start thinking about monetization. Usually, in the beginning, it’s easier to earn from ads and sponsored posts.
Later on, when you know who your ideal reader is, have an email newsletter where you can form a relationship with them and post content strategically, you can try affiliate marketing and selling your own digital products such as eBooks and online courses.
But what about earning your $1000, and passively, for that matter? Well, you can partner with a high-quality ad network.
Choosing The Right Ad Network
The choice of many bloggers (myself included) is Mediavine. They accept blogs with 25K-30K monthly page views and you can begin earning money from day 1.
They are a Google Certified Publishing Partner. The team is always there to answer your questions via chat or email. And the detailed dashboard you get once you have a Mediavine account is great.
You can install the WordPress plugin they offer and connect your account. After that, there’s nothing else you need to do.
Every time you log into Mediavine, you’ll see your dashbord, how much you earned yesterday and this month so far, as well as what posts performed best.
In the Settings tab, you can choose where to display ads (mobile, tablet, desktop), the ad frequency and limit, in-content placement rules, and more.
Set up the payment info too so you can be sure you’ll receive your money in a convenient for you way.
With 25K monthly page views, you can earn a few hundred dollars from day 1. All this passively. That’s the dream, right?
Remember that it’s important to sign up with the right ad network. It’s okay to experiment with others. See how each works for your niche and audience. I believe that once you grow over 100K monthly page views, you can try one of the other best ad networks on the market – AdThrive.
As far as I know, many bloggers who have reached that milestone have still stayed with Mediavine as they are pretty happy with the user experience and income.
The next step on your journey to monetizing your blog is to optimize your site so you can increase that income (even if your traffic isn’t growing). Here’s how.
How to Make $1000/Month from Ads on Your Blog
In April 2019, I had my first $1000 solely from ads on my site and it felt really good.
That was thanks to an increase in traffic due to a few viral pins.
One article (this one) even got 10K page views in April! Imagine what you could do with a few articles like that. This is a good example of why Pinterest is more powerful than many other social media platforms.
To achieve the same, you can not only learn all you can about Pinterest and create pins for all your blog posts, but also optimize your site so you can earn more from ads.
Meet the ad network requirements to be approved.
First things first. You need to partner with a high-quality ad network before you can get to making $1000 thanks to it. That means following their rules.
Luckily, these are also the things search engines want from a website. And basically, it’s how a blog should look and feel like.
That includes:
- A self-hosted website (that means starting a WordPress blog using a web host and purchasing your own domain);
- Quality and original content;
- Traffic (according to their words, Unlike other ad management services, we use sessions as our metric of choice, and require 25,000 sessions a month (usually around 30,000 pageviews), according to Google Analytics.).
Write longer content.
The longer your posts are, the more ads you will be able to display on each page. That will then lead to making more money blogging.
Make it more scannable.
Readers skim blog posts. So make sure you break down longer paragraphs into shorter ones, use images, headings and bullet points (much like I did in this post).
Check your Mediavine dashboard.
Dashboards exist for a reason. All the data is there at a glance and you can learn a lot about the type of visitors your blog has and how they interact with your ads.
Experiment.
What if having fewer ads on the page will mean more profits for you at the end of the month? You never know until you try.
Head to the Settings tab in Mediavine and click ‘In-Content Ads’ to choose the frequencies of the ads and set a limit.
Here’s how I’ve set it up for mobile:
Add a sidebar if you haven’t already.
While a full-width blog template allows the reader to focus only on the content and gives the blog a cleaner and more minimalist look, adding a sidebar can help you make more money blogging with ads.
The Sticky Sidebar Ad unit that Mediavine offers is only visible to desktop users but can still contribute to your monthly earnings.
Speed up your website.
Ads, no matter how responsive they are, slow down websites. So you need to make sure you’re taking care of the speed of your blog.
To make pages load faster (which makes your visitors happier and keeps them around for longer), you can install the following WordPress plugins:
- W3 Total Cache (a caching plugin is necessary to improve your blog performance with features such as browser caching, compressing certain files, saving bandwidth, and more);
- Lazy Load (this plugin makes sure images on your blog are only loaded when they are visible, which improves page load time);
- WP-Optimize (I use this to clean up my WordPress database by removing unnecessary post revisions and other files).
Other tips:
Have a good hosting provider (Here’s why I chose WPX Hosting);
- Make sure you enable HTTPS on your blog;
- Get a Premium WordPress theme instead of a free one (I use this one for Let’s Reach Success);
- Make your site mobile-friendly with a plugin like WPtouch (as most of your visitors are usually browsing from their phones).
Do all that while working on your traffic and you will be making $1000/month from ads on your blog this year. The best part is that this is passive income and the more content you publish and the more you pin on Pinterest, the higher your ad revenue will be.
This is how to earn from your blog with ads, and this is just one of the many ways to do that.
Stock Photo from Igisheva Maria @ Shutterstock
