This is ProBlogger. Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 150 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today, I want to go through exactly how I make money blogging. I want to talk you through the income streams that I use to monetize my blogs and to build an income for my family off the back of my blogs. This is something I have done from time to time over on the ProBlogger blog.
Today, I want to give to you on the podcast. I know some of you don’t read the blog and prefer to listen. That’s what we’re doing today.
Back in 2002 when I first started blogging, and then over the next couple years started to make money for my blogs, the first question I would almost always be asked when I say to someone I’m a blogger. The question was almost always, “What’s a blog?” It would usually come with sort of a glazed overlook. Sometimes I’d say, “What’s a blog ball?” There was just almost no comprehension back in 2002 what a blog was, at least here in Australia.
Almost everyone asked it. I would have this little spiel about what a blog was for anyone who genuinely seemed interested in finding out what it was, which wasn’t everyone, I have to say.
Over the last few years, when I say I’m a blogger and that’s how I make my money, most people now know what a blog is but the question I get asked more than any other is, “How do you make money from a blog?” Sometimes people know what a blog is and they may even have a vague idea of how you make money. The most common thing that people guess at is something like, “You make money like a newspaper from ads?” It’s rare that people know too much more than that unless they are a blogger, or have some online experience, or know someone that doing it full time.
Even today, I was in a café getting my long black in the morning which is my coffee of choice. The barista there asked me the question again, “How do you make money blogging?” His brother actually was a blogger who wanted to go full time. He thought his brother was on a road to nowhere. He was amazed when I mentioned that I was a blogger making a full time living from it. He was amazed that someone was actually doing it full time. He asked the question. As I was explaining to him how I make money from my blogs, I realized I haven’t really talked about it explicitly on the podcast. That’s what I want to do today.
What I’m going to share with you today is based upon a recent income report I did do over on the ProBlogger blog. I summarized my income streams of the first half of 2016. As I record this, it’s September. It’s a couple of months ago that I published that. I will link to it in today’s show notes. I thought it would be useful to go through because it does represent the last couple of months as well.
Before I get into the nitty gritty of it, let me say three things. Firstly, this is for my total business. It’s a combined profit for both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School that I’m talking about. I have two main blogs, my biggest one is Digital Photography School. It’s about eight times bigger than ProBlogger. The bulk of what I’m talking about today in terms of income is from Digital Photography School but I will be referring to ProBlogger from time to time as well. Think of it as the overall. For each income stream that I mention, I’m going to give you a little bit of insight into which of the sites I’m talking about. Hopefully you can get it straight in your head.
The second thing I’ll say is that I’m talking here about profit rather than revenue. These things are very different. I see a lot of people doing their income reports based on revenue but it doesn’t really take into account the expenses. I don’t know that that’s overly helpful. What you’re going to hear me go through today, I’m going to give you a percentage of what each income stream makes in terms of profit.
The reason I do this is there are elements in what I do that generate a lot of revenue but which also have significant expenses. The main one I’m thinking of here is the ProBlogger event which is happening in the next week. That bring in a lot of income. We have hundreds of bloggers paying $300 or $400 a pop, $400 or $500 a pop. That brings a lot of income. It mounts up very quickly but the reality is we have massive expenses as well.
When you hire a hotel for two days for 500 people, the mind boggles at the bills you get. There’s a lot of revenue there but it’s not as much profit. You’ll see how little the profit is in a few minutes.
The last thing I want to tell you is that I’m not going to tell you my actual income in this particular podcast. I don’t generally reveal specifics of how much. Rather, I’m going to talk in percentages here.
I do this for a couple of reasons. One, I always found a little uncomfortable talking publicly about exactly what I earn. It’s probably just the way I was brought up. Also, sometimes I think when people share the figure, people don’t actually see the lesson behind that. Sometimes for a small blogger just starting out, it can seem, I think almost detrimental when you’re comparing yourself to someone who’s earning a lot of money. It can perhaps not be helpful.
Really, the point of this podcast is to show you the diversity of income streams and how they are mixed together to build up a full time income for me. I will say in terms of how much, back in 2006 I revealed that my profit was over a $100,000 a year. It’s only gone up from there. That’s about all I’ll say on that particular front. I will say when I did the blog post, someone tried to calculate it based upon some of the publicly available information as well. You can probably dig in and find out a little bit more, if you did choose to do so.
Let’s get into breaking it down, if you’ve got it in front of you, you’ll be able to see that the number one income stream for me for the first half of 2016 in terms of profit was affiliate income, affiliate commissions. It makes up 46% of my overall profit for the first half of this year. When I calculated this out, I was actually a little bit surprise when this category came up as high as it did. I knew it would be number one or two but I’d been thinking in terms of just basic revenue.
Number two category is product sales. Usually, the revenue that products sales brings in is pretty similar to affiliate but there’s a lot more expenses with product sales and that’s why affiliates is number one because any earnings you make, you keep. There’s not really too many direct expenses with affiliates. That’s one of the reasons I really like it.
As you look at that 46%, I will say upfront, it comes from both Digital Photography School and ProBlogger. I do some affiliate promotions on both.
Generally, my affiliate income comes from three different sources. Let’s break them down for you. Over on Digital Photography School, we do two really big promotions every year. The biggest one is our 12 Days of Christmas Sale. We also do a mid-year sale, we call it our Summer Sale even though it’s winter here because most of our audience is in America. Our mid-year sale is the second biggest one.
In each case, we for a week in our mid-year, and for 12 days Christmas sale, we release a new deal everyday. The deals are half our own products. We might reduce an ebook by 60%. Say for 24 hours, you can get now your book at 60% off. Or, it’s an affiliate deal where we negotiate with someone else who’s got a product. It might be a course, in might be an ebook, it might be a membership site, it might be some software that’s relevant for photographers. Again, we say for 24 hours you can get this deal. That’s where that affiliate income is coming from.
These two promotions are our biggest earners of the year on Digital Photography School. They’ve done amazingly well over the last couple of years. Our ebook and courses, our products do pretty well but our affiliates, some of our affiliate deals do very well as well because they’re new to our audience.
Many of our audience have already seen our ebook and might have them already but some of these affiliate things are really new. I think last year, the year before, we had one that just went massively huge. It was a presets package. The year before that, it was a course that we promoted. I can earn a lot of money very quickly in 24 hours. That’s the main source of a lot of that affiliate income.
The second one is on ProBlogger, we do a little bit of affiliate marketing as well. We don’t do the deals like on Digital Photography School that has something we’ve talked about doing. We do have some partners like SumoMe who I’ve mentioned on this podcast. When I mention them on the show notes, there’s a link, an affiliate link to their product. LeadPages is another one. We also mention those on our resources page on ProBlogger as well. That resources page we linked to very prominently around the site so it gets quite a bit of traffic.
We also have affiliate promotions on ProBlogger with Bluehost, a serve option which we mentioned in How to Start a Blog Page as well. There’s lots of mentions of the partners that we use, and recommend, and their affiliate links around ProBlogger. We don’t tend to do big campaigns like we do on Digital Photography School.
There have been a few times where I’ve recommended training programs on ProBlogger as well. But in this six month period, there wasn’t any that were included in that. The other type that we occasionally will link to is WordPress themes on How To Start a Blog Post. As well, there’s links to StudioPress, I think there. That would be the second category that makes up this 46%.
The third one is Amazon. I linked to Amazon a lot on Digital Photography School. Anytime I mention a camera, a lens, a photographic accessory, a photography book, anything that is mentioned on Digital Photography School that can be bought on Amazon, we link to it with an affiliate link. Amazon makes up about 9% of that 46%, just to give you an idea. The other 81% is ebooks, courses, software and online services that we recommend.
Affiliate marketing is big. It does go up and down a little bit from month to month. Usually, it’s in our number one or two category for profit. It’s great. The other good thing about affiliate, I mentioned this a few times on the podcast is that, when you’re promoting ebooks, and courses, and software, and services with affiliate marketing, it gives a you a real insight into what your readers like, which might give you some insight into the type of products that you might like to create.
<