How to Make Passive Income with Advertising on Your Blog
Are you looking for a way to make passive income with your blog? If so, you're in luck! In this article, I'm going to teach you exactly how I make between $200 to $350 per day in passive income by literally doing nothing. But before we dive into the specifics of how to make money selling advertising, let's first talk about what you need to get started.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Launching Your Own WordPress Blog
3. Making Money Selling Advertising
4. The Best Ad Networks for Bloggers
5. How to Generate Traffic for Your Blog
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
7. Organizing Your Content
8. Keeping Visitors on Your Site
9. Making Top Dollar for Every Visitor
10. Conclusion
Launching Your Own WordPress Blog
In order to make money selling advertising on your website, you first need a website. I'm not going to go into the specifics of how to launch your own WordPress blog, but I did put together a video that will walk you through how to set up your website for only three dollars in under five minutes. Putting up your own WordPress blog is not rocket science and requires zero technical knowledge. And because WordPress is so easy to use, it literally powers over 25 percent of the entire web.
Making Money Selling Advertising
Assuming you have a blog and a readership, the easiest way to make money advertising is by signing up with an ad network. An ad network is a platform that matches advertisers with publishers. Ad networks collect ad inventory from various publishers and bundle it all together to sell to advertisers. By offering this service, they take a cut of the ad revenue.
There are five main ad networks that are popular among bloggers. I'm going to start with the best ones first, which require traffic minimums to join, followed by the ones that any website can join. The first and one of the best ad networks in the world is called AdThrive. AdThrive is a premium ad network that only takes on blogs that generate a minimum of a hundred thousand page views per month. The next premium ad network is called Mediavine, which I personally use for my blog. Mediavine requires a 50,000 page view per month minimum in order to join. Going further down this list, we have Ezoic and Monumetric, which each carry a 10,000 minimum page view per month requirement. And at the very bottom, we have AdSense, which is Google's own ad network that has no requirements to join whatsoever.
Even though AdSense is at the very bottom of my list, there's nothing wrong with using it. After all, if you don't qualify for some of the more premium networks, then you can make a couple of extra hundred bucks or even a thousand dollars per month for doing nothing with AdSense. Once again, there are zero requirements to join AdSense, so you may as well do it from the start.
To make the highest amount of money selling advertising, you either have to sell your own ads yourself or join the best ad networks, which in this case is AdThrive or Mediavine. Obviously, using an ad network is not free. They need to get paid out somehow. Here are some specs regarding AdThrive and Mediavine:
- AdThrive takes a 25% cut of all the proceeds, and their average CPM is 15.
- Mediavine also takes a 25% cut, and their average CPM is also 15. But their approval process is much longer, and they only pay you out after 65 days, which is literally double what AdThrive offers.
The Best Ad Networks for Bloggers
Why did I choose Mediavine over AdThrive? It's because Mediavine offers much better site speed. Typically, one of the big negatives of adding advertisements to your website is that it will slow down your blog. But Mediavine has specifically optimized their ads to not affect your site speed at all. And because I care about how fast my website loads, going with Mediavine was a no-brainer despite its disadvantages compared to AdThrive.
Even though both Mediavine and AdThrive advertise CPMs in the 15 range, in reality, you could get paid out much more. For example, if your blog is in the business or finance space, you can easily get CPMs in the 60 range or more. And the amount you get paid also depends on where your traffic is coming from. In general, any English-speaking country will get paid more than a non-English speaking country.
The amount you are paid also depends on two other factors: viewability and fill rate. Viewability measures whether the viewer actually sees the ad. In order for an ad to be watchable, it must be placed in a highly visible area, such as directly within your content. Another high visible location to place your ad is at the bottom of your screen on mobile. So basically, in order to earn top dollar for your ads, you're gonna have to sacrifice some amount of readability on your blog. And then finally, there's the fill rate. The fill rate is the percentage of ad impressions that actually deliver a paying ad. Premium ad networks generally have higher fill rates than the lesser ad networks because they have plenty of ad inventory to make sure that you are paid for every page view on your site.
How to Generate Traffic for Your Blog
Now that you know how to make money selling advertising, let's talk about how to generate traffic for your blog. Even though this money is 100 percent passive income for me today, it did take a while to reach this point. First off, when it comes to actually putting out written content, you definitely do not need to be an experienced writer. There are countless niches out there for you to explore, whether that's travel, fitness, personal finance, or anything else that you're passionate about. And if you don't enjoy writing, you can easily hire writers on the ProBlogger job board at the rate of about five cents per word.
The writing is actually not the challenging part. The hard part is figuring out exactly what to write about in order to rank in Google search, otherwise known as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the practice of enhancing your website so that it's more discoverable by search engines. When you optimize your website for SEO, you're making it easier for Google to understand, index, and present your content in relevant searches.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to replicate what I've done with my blog over at MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, you must first use a keyword tool. The two I recommend are Ahrefs or Ubersuggest. You only need to get one of these. The reason why I'm presenting two options here is that Ahrefs is pretty expensive at $99 a month, whereas Ubersuggest is free for up to three searches per day. Ahrefs is by far the better tool, but Ubersuggest is better than flying blind.
The secret to ranking in search is to optimize your posts so that it answers the exact questions that people are searching for on Google. In order to do that, you have to know what people are searching for in the first place. For example, I ranked number one for the term "is DHgate safe?" DHgate is a place where people can find wholesale suppliers for their online store. If I didn't use a tool like Ahrefs, I might have haphazardly written about DHgate, how to use it, etc. But Ahrefs specifically told me that people were searching for the exact query "is DHgate safe?" And as a result, I wrote a blog post where the title exactly answered that question. You can see that post right here.
Google always wants to return the best answer to any question. Because my entire blog post answered that exact query, I was able to rank for that term. There's no way you can possibly know what people are searching for unless you use a keyword tool. And in general, when starting a popular blog, it pays to focus on a very narrow topic. Google tends to rank websites that it feels are the foremost experts in a particular niche.
Organizing Your Content
Once you have a bunch of posts that describe every aspect of a specific topic, you want to organize your content in such a way that a reader finds your site and stays on it forever. Remember, the more pages that a visitor views on your site, the more you get paid. And the amount of time they stay on your website matters as well. Here's what I do:
I put together special category pages where someone can find more information about related topics. If you look at my blog here, I have a section on the blog on how to start your own online store. Then, if you dig deeper, I have subsections on how to get started, how to find products to sell, how to find the best e-commerce platform, how to advertise, how to generate traffic, etc. So basically, when someone lands on my website, it's like a black hole of information, and they stay on and read it forever.
Keeping Visitors on Your Site
Here are some other things that I do on every post to keep people on my site for longer:
- Every post has a breadcrumb at the top that leads viewers to other pieces of content in the same category.
- Below the content, I have a list of related posts as well.
- Within almost every blog post, I embed YouTube videos and podcasts to keep people on my site for as long as possible.
The collection of all these strategies allows me to make top dollar for every single visitor on my website. And from there, the ad network does the rest, and I make money on autopilot.
Making Top Dollar for Every Visitor
Some of you watching this video might be thinking to yourself, "Won't ads negatively affect the user experience for your visitors?" And the answer is yes and no, and it depends on your audience. The best way to tell if ads are driving people away from your website is to look at your stats. When I looked at the analytics for my site, the ads did not affect my time on site or my bounce rate whatsoever.
So basically, I'm getting an extra six thousand to nine thousand dollars a month with my blog for doing nothing, and it's not affecting the usability of my site.
Conclusion
In conclusion, making passive income with advertising on your blog is a great way to generate extra income. By signing up with an ad network, you can make money on autopilot. And by optimizing your website for SEO and organizing your content in a way that keeps visitors on your site, you can make top dollar for every single visitor. So what are you waiting for? Start your own blog today and start making passive income with advertising!
