Hey everyone and welcome to my 2nd annual blog income report. Here, I’ll share how to make $50000 a year from your blog, how much I made each month in 2019 as a full-time blogger, how my income streams have changed, and the best monetization strategies I’ve learned.
2019 was the best year for my blogging business so far and I’m excited about the things I’ve planned for the new one.
I hit 2 huge milestones – $50K in annual revenue ($51,379, to be exact) and 1 million page views (1,095,074, to be exact). However, as these 2 are different aspects of running and growing a blog and there’s a lot I wanna say about each milestone, I’ll create two different annual blog income reports. One for blog income and one for traffic.
In this article, we’ll talk about my earnings as a blogger, what happened last year on Let’s Reach Success, and – most importantly – how to make $50000 a year from your blog too. Let’s get started.
If you haven’t started a blog yet, make sure you read my free guide How to Start a Blog and Earn $1,000/Month.
Blog Updates from 2019
I completely replaced freelancing with blogging.
In 2018, I earned $47,000 blogging but that income also included freelance writing. In fact, I earned around $10K from client work then. My goal was to never have to write for others again as it’s not something I enjoy.
In 2019, I earned just a bit more than the year before that, but I’m happy to say that none of this money came from freelance work. It was solely earned from sponsored content on the blog, affiliate marketing, ads, and selling my digital products.
That means I’ve reached the next level of my blogging career and even if nothing changes, I would be truly grateful and keep enjoying my work.
However, the ultimate goal is earning mostly from passive income. Also, affiliate marketing and digital products are better income streams than ad revenue and sponsored posts, but that also requires forming relationships with readers which is quite hard these days with so many blogs around.
And yes, many people in my place would keep doing freelance work and reach $60,000 blogging in 1 year, I might say. But the mindset of a freelancer works differently and you can’t really scale your blogging business from a mental state like that.
You need to be focused on growth instead of on daily tasks related to client work. For example, in 2019, I spent a lot of my money and time on completing online courses created by some of the top bloggers online. Which brings us to the next point.
That was the year of educating myself as a full-time blogger.
Want to know how to make $50000 a year blogging? Learn from those who’ve already done it!
It’s scary to invest hundreds of dollars for a course and not know if it will pay off. But when you know who created it, believe in the product and hear many other bloggers recommend it, it’s usually worth it.
At the beginning of 2019, I purchased and completed a Pinterest Course (Pinterest Traffic Avalanche) and I grew my Pinterest profile to over 500K page views in 2 months and got a lot of traffic to my blog.
I learned all I could about how Pinterest works for bloggers, tested many strategies, made my Pins go viral, and to this day get hundreds of visits on my blog from Pinterest.
I now added a whole new module about this in my premium blogging course Financial Freedom Through Blogging (as Pinterest is the second-best way to drive a lot of traffic to a blog after SEO). Not to mention that’s a stepping stone to making $50,000 blogging.
Last year, I also took my most professional blogging course so far (by the creators of Pinterest Traffic Avalanche again) – Six-Figure Blogger.
It’s a product I had my eyes on for a long time now, and felt like this was the moment to finally learn what’s in it.
I interviewed Alex here – he’s one of the creators and earns 6 figures blogging himself (which means he makes over $100K/month).
The course delved into email marketing and selling digital products. These 2 things are what helps most bloggers make six figures from a single website and can’t be overlooked.
It’s what motivated me to switch to the best email marketing software for bloggers – ConvertKit (it was a big investment) and to create an automated email series that introduces me and my work to new subscribers and also tells them about my product.
Six-Figure Blogger is worth every penny and I’ve taken so many notes throughout the course, that I re-read them often.
Finally, in the last months of 2019, I took an SEO course. It helped me take massive action that I’ve been postponing for years such as going through my blog archives and deleting a lot of content as well as updating/republishing/redirecting the rest.
That process is still in progress and will continue for a long more time as there are many articles on Let’s Reach Success.
There are modules from the course I haven’t yet gone through as there are so many SEO-related tasks to get done now.
I used Ahrefts to see my backlinks, keywords, top pages, and my competitors. And to also extract valuable data about my competitors such as their dofollow backlinks, top-performing pages and keywords.
The course is called Stupid Simple SEO. It’s opened only 4 times a year, so make sure you stay tuned because if you want to know how to make $50000 a year, you need to build traffic to your blog and SEO is the way to go.
I did a content audit.
There’s a lot I changed about the blog and most of it happened with old content. I now have a few niches I want to focus on and the rest isn’t really relevant anymore (plus, I want Google to know what my site is about instead of confusing it with multiple topics).
I updated the categories of the blog, deleted a lot of content, redirected thin content to more detailed posts, and updated most of the rest.
Many pages were optimized for keywords, and have quality images and opt-in forms now. I also interlinked my top content the most as I want every reader to know about the success stories I’ve shared on the blog (in the form of interviews), my income reports and the cornerstone content (such as my blogging and side hustle guides).
I’ve also removed mentions of the eBooks I’d published many years ago and only talk about my courses now (which are also on the topics I want the blog to be known for).
My Monthly Blog Income Reports for 2019
Here’s a list of my income reports for each month of last year. You can see exactly how I earned $50,000 from home as a blogger as well as the top things that happened on the blog that month:
- Published my first annual income report and reflected on the previous year
- Released a new freebie
- Started publishing new content less often but updating old posts more
- Set the goal of learning all I can about Pinterest for bloggers
- Completed modules of Financial Freedom Through Blogging
- Released a new paid course – Next Level Productivity
- Published some of my best interviews ever with popular bloggers
- Created my affiliate program
- Enrolled in Pinterest Traffic Avalanche
- Started using Tailwind
- Also purchased Tailwind Tribes
- Set the goal of hitting 100K monthly page views
- Learned a lot about Pinterest and Tailwind
- Some of my Pins went viral and traffic increased
- Re-designed the site with a new premium theme
- Hit 100K monthly page views for the first time
- Purchased the course Six-Figure Blogger
- Highest monthly income ever
- Paid my first taxes as a solopreneur in the Netherlands
- Wrote down my business vision
- Re-designed my homepage
- Updated my Teachable school
- Switched from MailChimp to ConvertKit
- Released a new freebie
- Hit a blog traffic milestone – 5K page views in 1 day
- Added an Email Marketing module to Financial Freedom Through Blogging
- Traffic was down
- Purchased an SEO course
- Spent over $1,300 on the blog (yearly payments for ConvertKit and Teachable, etc)
- Deleted 300 blog posts (old and thin content)
- Released a new freebie for subscribers
- Learned about Google E-A-T score and started improving mine
Some interesting things to observe are that income and traffic tend to increase and decrease in certain times of the year. That conclusion is based on data from the years before that too but it doesn’t mean it will be the same for your blog.
My advice, though, is to use the quiet months to invest back in yourself and your blog (by taking a course, for example), update old blog content, focus on Pinterest and create many Pins for your articles, network with bloggers, optimize your site, etc. Because when the busy period comes and traffic is higher, you’ll be busy enough.
How to Make $50000 a Year with Your Blog
So, here are my best tips based on my experience and what I’ve seen from other bloggers, on how to make $50000 a year.
1. Update old content to boost SEO
Even if you have 30 blog posts, don’t skip going back to old content and updating it. You can add more text, optimize better, add new Pins and opt-in forms, interlink with new articles, remove broken links, etc.
Also, Google loves fresh content on evergreen topics and will re-crawl your page once it’s updated and might rank it higher.
2. Bring traffic from Pinterest
To have a blog that makes $50K, you need a lot of traffic. With around 100K, you can make a good passive income from advertising as well as sell more sponsored posts due to your domain authority. You can also place affiliate links throughout posts and mention your product, if you have one.
But it will take a long, long time for this traffic to come solely from Google, especially if your blog is you. That’s why you should have another traffic source and the best one for bloggers is Pinterest. It can happen quickly, you just need the right strategies.
3. Network
Together with other bloggers, your chances of making your site popular and growing your blogging business are bigger. That’s why networking with other bloggers should be on top of your blogging tasks. And it’s yet another answer to the question ‘How to make $50000 a year blogging?’
This is a long-term strategy and it revolves around reaching out to people in your niche (even if you consider them competitors) and providing value. You might not receive anything most of the time, but the overall effect of this will pay off in the future.
You can interview each other and link to the blogs. You can do round-up posts, mention experts in your niche and link to them, and then email them to let them know and hope that some will share the article with their audience. But providing value is your main goal here, not asking for favors (because the inbox of a famous blogger is already flooded with that).
Buying a course from a blogger, becoming their affiliate and sending an email to thank them or share your results is also a genuine form of networking in the blogging world.
4. Create a digital product
Okay, you won’t learn how to make $50,000 a year as a blogger unless you play big. That means not being afraid to create and release your own digital product. You should also never stop selling it and updating it once it’s released.
Affiliate marketing is the other thing that involves forming relationships with your audience and selling, and doing it via email marketing works wonders.
Playing big also means charging more, way more for sponsorships on your blog.
5. Sign up with a good ad network
I didn’t make any money from ads before learning about Mediavine (a professional ad network that many trusted bloggers work with). Once I applied and was approved, I started earning a good amount every month. After a few months, it doubled.
Whenever traffic increases, my daily commission from ads gets bigger too. So if it hasn’t worked out yet in terms of ad revenue on your blog, maybe you haven’t tried the right network.
The same goes for affiliate programs, by the way. Many bloggers sign up for literally 100 of them only to end up earning a few commissions here and there which are so small, that they can’t be considered a real income.
What I teach in Financial Freedom Through Blogging instead, is to choose your top 10 affiliate programs, make sure you’ve used the product or know all about it, write the best reviews for them, and talk about them often to your audience.
6. Stop doing anything that isn’t bringing results
Still wondering how to make $50000 a year blogging? Know which actions aren’t helping you move forward and ditch these activities.
That’s a hard pill to swallow but most of what you’re doing is probably not giving you any results in terms of blog traffic and income. Analyze what that is and stop it so you can do more of what works.
7. Use only good tools
I switched from Bluehost to WPX Hosting, and from MailChimp to ConvertKit. I also invested in Teachable, a premium WordPress theme, stock photos, and some plugins. All that matters to how your domain authority will change in the eyes of Google, how fast your blog will load and what visitors will think about it.
The best time to switch to better and more expensive tools is now. I regret staying with a bad web host for years, not using a premium WordPress theme, and neglecting email marketing. All this could have happened earlier but that’s how my blogging journey looks like.
Are you ready to start a $50K blog?
Hope you enjoyed my annual blog income report and now have an idea of how to make $50000 a year. That can happen in almost any blogging niche, with no experience, and just by investing your time to learn what it takes to start and grow a blog.
If you still haven’t launched your website, then that’s the first step you should take. Here’s my free guide on how to start a blog.
Follow the steps outlined there and in less than 1 hour, you’ll be able to call yourself a blogger and start working on creating content and getting traffic to your new blog.
