Blogging is becoming more and more popular with people who want to earn a little extra income speaking and writing about a topic that they love. However, many others are put off the idea by thinking that the set up costs would be too high, that they can’t create ideas for an e-commerce site, that they couldn’t find an audience or that making income from blogging would be impossible.

Hopefully, we can show you today that this isn’t the case and demonstrate how to make money blogging. Let’s look at the costs of setting up a blog and an easy method to allow you to earn income from your blog.

 

Costs of setting up

People often think that setting up a website is:

1. Difficult
2. Costly

Luckily, it’s neither.

For an explanation of why it’s not difficult, see our previous article discussing the ins and outs of setting up your own website.

Related Article: How hard is setting up your own website?

For an explanation of why it’s not costly, keep on reading…

Let’s imagine that I wanted to create the website: www.howtomakeloadsofmoneyblogging.com. Catchy, huh?

What do I need to do? Well, all I need to do is visit a hosting and domain service (I personally use 1and1.co.uk) and perform two steps:

1. Register your domain: this simply means that you buy the name of the website and now howtomakeloadsofmoneyblogging.com belongs to you. This can cost as little as 99p:

2. Select a hosting product: the simpliest, which is almost always sufficient for new bloggers, is a simple hosting package allowing the use of WordPress, which only costs £0.99 per month with 1and1.co.uk

Additionally, as a blogger, it’s very likely that you’ll want to keep in touch with your readers and a mailing service, such as Mailchimp, can be an excellent way to do so. This will allow you to manage a subscription list, send automated emails and replies to your readers and a number of other things to help improve your reader (and customer) engagement. For less than 2000 subscribers, you can use Mailchimp for free, and then pricing starts from $10/month.

We’ll assume for our calculations that you pass the 2,000 subscribers mark after 6 months and therefore have costs of $60 (equivalent of £40).

Therefore, our total costs per year amount to £0.99 + (12 x £0.99) + £40 = £53 per year.

 

Normal income

The most common and easily established form of income for new bloggers comes from Google Adsense (or alternative advert providers). The idea is simple. All you need to do is sign up for an account, place an advert block on your website, and google will show an appropriate advert (based on the content of the page and on the interests of the reader) to each visitor. Any time someone sees the advert (an impression), you earn a fraction of a penny, and anytime someone clicks you can earn anything from £0.05 to £0.25. A combination of these will lead to your RPM (revenue per thousand impressions).

Let’s assume that your RPM on your site is £1. People’s RPMs vary hugely depending on their site and niche, but this seems like a reasonable average.

Based on the costs above and these theoretical numbers for the income, to break even we would need:

Total costs = £53 per year x 1000 impressions = 53,000 impressions

Wow, that seems like a big number. But, really it isn’t. To get that many impressions, you can assume that each unique visitor makes 3 impressions and therefore you’ll need around 17,700 visits during the year to break even on your costs.

This still might seem like a lot. However, when we break it down its less than 50 visits per day, which is much more manageable.

Once you get past this point, every new visitor is profit! Not a bad place to be.

 

Learn More

This post is written in collaboration with Scottish Friendly who are currently running a very interesting series of articles on how to earn money blogging. They have already released the first part in their series, Make Money Blogging – a rough guide – part I, and there are more parts on the way.

So, don’t be scared. If you do your research, and your maths, you too could make some additional income blogging about any topic which interests you (and hopefully your readers as well).  Good luck!

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