How to make money on your blog…with advertising

I may get paid commission for purchases made after clicking a link in this post.

There are many ways to make money on your blog. One of the most popular is advertising. But what are the pros and cons? How do you actually go about it? And what do you need to do to make serious money with ads? Read on to discover how to make money on your blog with advertising.

I recently shared a post in response to a question I get asked A LOT: “How do blogs make money?”. In that post I explain how there are lots of ways to make money, but basically, they boil down to 5 main categories: traditional advertising, affiliate links, sponsored posts, products and services.

That post is great overview of the main ways blogs make money, but I wanted to go a bit deeper into the nitty gritty of exactly HOW to make money on your blog via these 5 ways: the pros and cons, the steps you need to take, and what you need to do to make serious money. So today I am kicking off the first in the series, sharing how to make money on your blog with advertising.

What do we mean by advertising?

Traditional advertising, sometimes known as ‘display ads’ are the really obvious adverts you typically see in the sidebar of a blog, a popup along the bottom of the blog, within the content of individual blog posts and sometimes above the header of the blog. These ads are served by ad companies (for example, Mediavine) who automatically fill pre-determined ad spaces on your blog. You earn money by people seeing the ads.

Pros and Cons

The great thing about advertising is that you can make money from advertising right from the start. The bad thing about advertising is that until you have a fairly high number of pageviews, you won’t make very much money.

To give you a rough idea, with a good ad network you are likely to make $10+ per thousand pageviews (often known as RPM or Rate Per Mille), so if you have 100,000 pageviews per month, you are looking at $1,000+ per month. (Though if you work hard to optimize your ads, you should be able to earn more than this.)

The bad news is that those really good RPMs are only available from certain ad networks like Mediavine and Raptive, which will only let you join when your pageviews reach a certain level… typically 60,000+

The other issue is, of course, that ads can make your blog look cluttered and spammy if you are not careful. They can also slow your site down. And if you are selling something, you may end up advertising your competitors! Advertising is definitely not the right route for everyone.

So how do you go about it?

If you are just starting out, you can get ads on your site from Google AdSense. You just have to fill in a form and, so long as they approve you, you can start putting ads on your blog straight away. However, my experience with Google AdSense was not great, however. My RPM was about $1 and those ads really slowed my site down. If you have less than 10,000 sessions, I strongly recommend you wait to put ads on your site, and instead concentrate on growing your blog to 10,000 sessions instead.

If you have a larger number of pageviews, you will almost certainly be able to get a better level of ad revenue from an ad network like Journey, Mediavine or Raptive. The minimum requirements for these ad networks are as follows (based on Google Analytics figures):

Journey (by Mediavine) – 10,000 sessions per month
Mediavine – 50,000 sessions per month
Raptive – 100,000 pageviews per month

I am currently with Mediavine and I can’t recommend them highly enough. The sign-up process is super smooth, they are incredibly helpful, and they do all the backend work so there’s no tricky tech stuff to worry about. AND they have an awesome Facebook community too. RPMs are typically $10+ when you first start out and once you’ve optimized your ads, they will be even better than that!

How to earn lots of money with advertising

The only two things you need are a good ad network and lots and lots of pageviews.

As far as a good ad network is concerned, I can highly recommend Mediavine (though Raptive also gets good reviews). If you don’t yet get enough pageviews for Mediavine, then I recommend going with Journey by Mediavine, instead.

As far as getting the pageviews, the best way to consistently grow your blog and get good pageviews month in, month out is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you want to learn more about SEO, you can find my beginner’s guide to SEO here.

Find out more…

Find out more about making money with advertising:

Find out more about the other ways of making money with your blog:

And for a good overview on the subject of making money with a blog, check out this post: How do blogs make money?

Don’t miss a thing!

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Or why not subscribe to Productive Blogging and get blogging and productivity tips straight to your inbox every week?

Pin this post to read later

2 Comments

Hi. Thank you for your articles. I’ve just started blogging, and not sure about making money with blogs. Affiliate program may be the most recommended. Since I’m a newbie, I’m not sure if these programs are safe, and would I be responsible for the promoted products?

Eb Gargano says:

5th February 2020 at 9:03 am

Hi Chloe! Yes, I agree – if you are new to blogging, the best place to start is most definitely affiliate links. In general, if you join a reputable affiliate scheme (e.g Amazon, Share a Sale) then yes these programmes are safe. You should not be responsible for the promoted products – you are only linking to another website with a recommendation. But if it makes you feel safer, then why not include a line in your Disclosure Policy which says that the products you link to are recommendations only and you do not accept any liability for any losses/problems people may experience by buying them? Hope that helps! Eb 🙂

Reply