How Much Money Do Bloggers Make Per Post | Real Survey Results!

June 3, 2019

I’m not afraid to admit that this blog isn’t my highest earner. I have some distance to go to meet my mid-term target of £1000 per month from it. Unfortunately, I struggle to commit enough time to it with my busy day job in the military and other more lucrative projects. Nevertheless, a common query I come across is, how much do bloggers make per post?

I decided to do some research to provide a conclusive answer. It includes data from surveys and real-life case studies to make it as reliable and accurate as is possible.

There are many ways to monetise a blog, the big ones being ads (Adsense/Adthrive/Mediavine etc), affiliate partnerships (Amazon/Clickbank/Ebay etc), personal products (physical or digital) and sponsored posts.

In short:

The amount a blogger makes per post will be proportional to the amount of traffic the blog receives. With a combination of basic ads and affiliate partnerships, earnings per 1000 pageviews (rpm) range from about £10 – £80. The addition of products and sponsored posts will increase this considerably.

If we take £45 per 1000 pageviews as an average, a blog post that receives 30,000 pageviews may expect to make £1350 if monetised correctly.

Unfortunately, this is about as specific as I can get. The variables involved differ wildly and are quite specific to each blog. A blog that receives 100,000 pageviews a month that is badly manged, can make NO money whatsoever.

However, a blog that is well managed with good use of ads, affiliates, personal products and sponsored posts can be making £5,000+ per post, with the same number of pageviews.

Here’s what some other sources have to say on the matter:

Blog earnings estimates by FinancialSamurai.com

On the same note, the table below shows average monthly blog income as a function of pageviews. These would be good estimates for a typical, more basic blog monetised with ads and affiliate links.

The amount you make per pageview will vary based on a few factors.

Affiliate commissions – the amount you earn will depend on a combination of a) how many people buy through your links and b) what your commission rate/percentage per sale is.

Advertising – the amount you earn will vary on how many people are clicking on the ads on your pages, and how much you earn per click (CPC).

The total amount earned by the blog/post can then be divided by the number of pageviews to give the revenue/earnings.

For your interest, some other ways to make money online:

Blog earnings estimates by Dummies.com

According to Dummies.com, bloggers can earn between $175 to $5,000+ per post. This includes reposting the blog content on social channels. Based on the number of monthly impressions:

The above figures are a rough guide geared more towards what a blogger would make for a sponsored post on their blog. This is called influence marketing, something that will come once a blog is more established in its niche.

Of course, the actual amount earned will vary according to monthly blog impressions, niche and length of post for example.

While we’re on the topic of sponsored posts, strawberrysqueeze.co.uk took the time to survey a range of blogs in different niches with useful results. The survey sample size has been omitted so consider this a ‘rough’ guide.

They broke down how much a blog earns for a sponsored post based on monthly unique visitors and blog domain authority (DA). They produced the table of results below:

Blog earnings study by Optimus Performance

Optimus Performance, a large affiliate marketing agency based in Cornwall, surveyed 1,723 UK lifestyle bloggers to find out a typical blogger’s average earnings per year. Unfortunately, only fashion and beauty blogs were looked at, but the large size of the survey should provide some meaningful results.

I made an infographic to summarise their findings (I love those things!).

The average blogger in the survey made £1,080 per year – not an overly exciting number!

Working on an average of one post per week, this would equate to £1,080 / 52 weeks = £20.7 per post.

However, it’s worth mentioning that these earnings are based on affiliate commissions only. As I mentioned earlier, this is only one of many ways to monetise a blog. There may have been bloggers in there making a killing with their own digital products or ads for example.

Nonetheless, it’s still a great data set to base some realistic expectations on going forward.

Regrettably, not every blogger is lucky enough to sleep on a bed of cash – but what we can do, is consistently work towards providing a good second income for ourselves over time.

Blog earnings survey by Blogging.com

A survey by blogging.com of 1000 US-based bloggers found some interesting results. Infographic below, this one is made by them though not me this time.

17% – able to sustain their lifestyle and support their family with their blogs.
81% – made less than $100 from blogging.
2% – spend 1-2 hours a day making over $150,000.

While the cross section of blogs in this survey may be representative of most blogs on the internet, I don’t feel many of the bloggers here are particularly serious with their endeavours.

Admittedly, every man and his dog seem to have given a quick post or two a go over the years. However, if the survey were based on people treating the venture as a business (like hopefully you reading this), the results would be very different.

Blog earnings survey by ProBlogger.com

Another survey done by ProBlogger.com, looked at how much money 1,500 of their readers are making with their own blogs. Interestingly, half of the blogs in this survey were less than 2 years old. Blogs tend to make more and more money the longer they are worked on.

Exactly how the blogs are monetised is not made apparent, so I’ll assume this is the total amount earned by the blogs from all avenues.

The results show that 63% of blogs made less than $99 per month. Again, working on a basis of one post per week, this equates to $24.75 per post or £19.6 per post for us brits.

Encouragingly, 20% of blogs surveyed were making $500 – $10,000+ per month. This equates to $125 – $2,500+ per post or £99 – £1,978+ per post. This is a very reasonable income.

Case study: how much MatthewWoodward.co.uk makes per post

Matthew (the owner), declares some great information about his blogs’ income. It’s a great resource for blog building and SEO, I would highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t before here.

Here’s a summary of the blog’s performance in 2017:

I’ve highlighted November randomly as a month to dig into further.

Matthew admits that only two new blog posts were added to the site in November, less than he normally would. However, the blog still received 55,657 users (1,855 per day), this equated to 131,620 pageviews for the period.

This blog clearly generates more than the average £45 ($56) per 1000 pageviews. Matthew achieves this mainly through sublime use of affiliate commissions.

He made £1930 ($2,439) per 1000 pageviews from his affiliate partnerships in November alone. This could be equated to £12,640 ($15,974) per post. However, the two new posts will most likely not be responsible for this income and thus not a good metric in this instance.

Hopefully you find results like these inspiring, I certainly do. Few will achieve such a high level of success, but know that the possibilities are there for the committed.

Case Study: how much does WhatMommyDoes.com make per post

Finally, let’s have a look at the blog whatmommydoes.com. Not only for inspiration but also for a demonstration of the income achieved by different monetisation strategies.

Lena, the blog owner publishes some excellent income reports which breakdown exactly how the blog generates income.

She earns money from the four strategies outlined at the top of this post, ads, affiliates, sponsored posts and products.

Here’s a quick table to summarise the numbers for April 2016:

The blog received 306,000 pageviews for the month, generating a total of $7,464 (£5,906).

An impressive feat! This equates to just shy of £20 ($25) per 1000 pageviews.

She’s been running the blog for 10 years and has around 700 posts, an average month therefore would consist of 6 posts give or take.

Thus, £5,906 / 6 posts = £492 ($623) per post

For anyone interested, you can read some of Lena’s income reports on her blog here.

Parting thoughts

Working out exactly how much money bloggers maker per post has been somewhat of a difficult task. There’s just so many variables with the blog niche, traffic count, monetisation strategies, competency of the blogger, post frequency and the list goes on. However, here a few considerations:

Blog earnings are proportional to the traffic it receives. More traffic = more money in most cases.
Blogs can be monetised in different ways; use a combination of the strategies we’ve talked about to maximise income.
With a combination of basic ads and affiliate partnerships, earnings per 1000 pageviews (rpm) range from about £10 – £80.
The addition of products and sponsored posts will increase income considerably.

Hopefully this has been helpful, I will be making my next question a bit more tangible I think!

Take care,