How does blogging generate income?

Image via Alicia Jaye Phillips

I’m excited to cover a fav topic in this week’s edition!

​The blogging neighborhood of the independent business (indie biz) community is alive, well and still generating income for millions of bloggers. How much depends on how long they’ve been at it and what types of monetization they incorporate into their content.

Personally, I prefer to keep my content simple and not long ago, accepted an offer from AdSense to monetize By the Way. More recently, I accepted an additional offer to partner as an affiliate with my beloved Scrivener. Scrivener is one of my top-two fav writing programs, the other being Google Drive (where I initiate or paste, all of my literary work). 

In regards to monetizing, I’d steered clear of Google AdSense for more than ten years. I finally relented and began monetizing with them several months ago. I went with them because they do most of the work. I just place the code for their ads within my content, where I want it to sit.

​Since my website is housed on Weebly (owned by Square). I’m not keen on Square’s website platform so my colleagues and I, who’ve been using Weebly for years, have remained with the Weebly platform. 

AdSense has always played well with Weebly. Weebly users just paste in the code, or allow AdSense to produce their ads automatically, within each blog post and on the site. I choose to do the manual selection to ensure the ads don’t over-populate my content and to ensure they don’t cover up important information on the site.

AdSense is used by millions of bloggers and is blonde-friendly, so works well for me!

There are loads of other ways to get a blog-site monetized. Sometimes it's dependent on the blogger’s niche, meaning the genre or item(s) of focus they write about. Focused genre-writers tend to do better in generating income from their blogs but they lack the freedom to incorporate a wider scope of topics, which has been my own preference, and also that of most of my colleagues.

An example of such is WarnerWords, authored by my friend, Vicki Warner, who resides in Canada’s beautiful Sunshine Coast. I built the WarnerWords site nearly a decade ago, and in the beginning, it was about one thing--living with grief. 

Vicki had been leading a grief-support program for a good while before coming over to write on her own site rather than solely writing for eZines (online magazines, like HubPages). I began as an eZine writer as well, with automatic monetization, but was having to share a chunky percentage of my earnings with the eZine platform. I also had to write within their scope of rules and regs. 

​Why I left off writing for ezines

​I gained some excellent experience but it wasn’t long before their platform began changing. Soon I was feeling hounded to do stuff that I didn’t have time for or interest in, such as being pressured to rewrite older content, writing with their preferred usage of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which often ended up sounding so corny I didn’t like reading it, et alone producing it for others to read.

Feeling cramped, discouraged, and disappointed, I set sail for independence and went solo. I built my first website and suddenly, I was an indie blogger (independent blogger)!

Sometimes the money has been good, and other times not. However, much of that has been due to health challenges, preventing me from maintaining a steady publishing schedule and trying monetization options that produced too little to generate much income. 

And so, for now, after a rough year of starts and stops, while I endured several surgeries and cancer treatment, life is becoming a bit more stable and AdSense has stuck with me through the many weeks when I wasn’t able to work. I appreciate that and am beginning to see some growth in money generation.

I’ve not yet incorporated Scrivener, but plan to soon as I finish up this last series of chemo. For more info on that, click here for a short explanation.

AdSense isn’t the only game out there. Other monetization opportunities exist that have worked well for many bloggers. One indie blogger listed his preferred monetization companies, which I’ve shared below, just in case you’re curious. 

• Ezoic
• LiveIntent
• Media.net
• Monumetric
• AdThrive
• Medivine
• Amazon Associates
• Taboola
• Outbrain
• Infolinks
• Revcontent
• PropellerAds
• Adversal
• BuySellAds
• Sovern//Commerce

​Building up a readership base is an aspect that helps increase a site’s moolah-generation considerably. The more subscribers, or regular readers, the more the site’s ads will be seen and potentially interacted with. 

Thankfully, just being seen is enough to generate income. Bloggers, at least with AdSense, get paid for viewers that only see those ads, not just the ones that interact with them.

Not to be singling out AdSense but since it’s my preferred (for now) company for monetization, I gotta say I love that it produces personalized ads, based on your preferences.

An example is, when I visit a site that uses AdSense, I see ad content promoting products I enjoy, like books, camping equipment, tiny house and off-grid living products.

What I don’t like about monetization on some sites is ad-saturation. It’s something that annoys me enough to not visit the site again and warn others of what they’ll be subjected to if they go to the site.

I have seen blog posts that have an ad at the end of every paragraph. Three words... Annoying. Tacky. Unprofessional. 

Yup, they’re worthy of boycotting for the rest of my days.

Point is, advertising doesn’t have to be, nor should it be, overwhelming to readers in order for it to generate money, be it on a blog or a video channel. I’ll watch ads on video channels that last no more than 30 seconds. If it takes longer, I skip them. The ones I sincerely appreciate are those that cover genres I have an interest in and last no more than 15 seconds. I’m a busy lady and those are what I have time for.

​I wanted to keep this post short, and positive. And, I definitely didn’t want to saturate your visit with ads. I pray I’ve succeeded in both. After all, it’s for you that we bloggers write! 

​“Let’s consider how to provoke one another to love and good works, 25  not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.” Hebrews 10:24-25 World Messianic Bible

​Thanks for your visit today! Your interest and interaction are always appreciated!

‘Til next time,

Shalom