Making $10,000/month with a blog is many people’s dream. That’s when you finally graduate from a side hustle to making the “real” money. 6-figures per year!
With blogging, you can make a huge amount for relatively little work, especially when you compare it to most real-world careers.
There’s no going into work 8 hours per day, 5 days a week. There’s no annoying office politics to deal with, a mean boss, or irritating coworkers bothering you.
You don’t need to request vacation days or feel bad for missing a few days of work due to illness.
For the most part, a blog business can be considred a passive income. If set up properly, it runs 24/7, 365 days out of the year whether you’re actually present or not. The work you do put in is to grow your passive income.
In this article, I will explain the basics of blogs that make 10K a month. We’ll run through some numbers and then get into actionable strategy to build a successful blog.
Take a look at the success and popular blogs for inspiration.
The fastest way to grow a blog to $10,000/month
There are a lot of different blog monetization options you can choose. I’ve tried most of them.
The easiest way to monetize your blog is display ads. Easiest does not mean best.
The quickest, and most effective strategy for growing a new blog to $10K/month is to sell your own digital products.
Yes, it’s possible to get there using display ads or affiliate marketing, but selling your own products provides the shortest path to big revenue numbers with the least amount of traffic.
This makes it easy for most people to replicate and actually make money online.
With advertising and affiliate marketing, you need a lot of traffic. You’re not making much per conversion, so you need lots of visitors.
With selling products, the earnings per conversion can be 100x higher.
Let’s break down some numbers about how to make money blogging.
Breaking down the numbers
Our goal: $10,000/month.
I’m going to go through a few examples.
$10,000/month may sound like an impossible figure to reach with your blog at the moment. But once you see the numbers, you’ll realize that it’s easier than you’re making it out to be. Anybody who works hard, and works effectively, can do it.
Example #1: $100 product
Let’s say we’re selling a $100 digital product.
$10,000 / $100 = 100 sales – we need to make 100 sales in a month.
100 sales / 30 days = 3.3 sales per day.
So on average, we need to sell 3 of our products per day to make $10,000/month.
Example #2: $300 product
$10,000 / $300 = 33 sales – we need to make 33 sales in a month.
33 sales / 30 days = 1
So on average, we only need to sell 1 of our products per day to hit $10K in revenue.
Example #3: $500 product
$10,000 / $500 = 20 sales – we need to make 20 sales in a month.
20 / 30 = 0.6 sales per day.
So really, we only need to sell one product to our target audience per weekday to hit $10K.
Example #4: $1000 product
$10,000 / $1000 = 10 – we need to make 10 sales in a month to be a six-figure blogger.
Calculating per day doesn’t really make sense here, but it’s mind-blowing to realize that you only need to convert 10 people into customers every month to build a 6-figure business.
And while a $1000 product may not seem realistic, a high-value online course could easily fall into this price range.
Email subscribers matter more than traffic
Like I said before, with advertising and affiliate marketing you need a ton of blog traffic to build it into a 6-figure business.
But with selling products, traffic and social media are not the most important aspects of your business model. Instead, it’s email subscribers.
Often, most of your product sales will come from your email list.
How email lists make sales
People rarely land on a blog for the first time and purchase a $500 product right off the bat.
Selling products take time. You need to warm up your leads, build trust and connect with your audience. To do this, you need to contact them more than once.
The best way to do this is through emails.
Here’s how an email list converts new visitors to customers.
The sales journey of a new blog visitor
Let’s set up an example scenario here to better understand the process (and to make it more interesting).
Let’s say you have a blog about muscle building for guys, and you’ve built a premium product priced at $300.
Jim, our example website visitor, searches Google for some information on how to build muscle quickly.
He lands on your blog post and reads through it. At the end of the article, he sees an opt-in form where he can subscribe to get updates, and to receive a cheatsheet of the best recipes for high protein meals that will support his goal of growing muscles.
He signs up.
He gets a great welcome email thanking him for joining, and let’s him know all the quality material he’ll receive as a new subscriber. He then goes through your opt-in incentive and likes what he sees.
Over the next few weeks, he receives high quality content with different tips and tricks to build muscle quickly.
He now knows you and your blog by name, and thinks of you as an expert.
He is used to seeing emails from you in his inbox. Each time, he’s excited to open your emails because they have been helpful.
A few weeks later, you pitch him on your premium training course.
It’s $300, but contains a step-by-step training regime that’s been tested and proved to work. He buys right away.
Because you’ve developed a relationship with Jim through your emails, you’re not a stranger pitching some random product.
Every part of your interaction with him helped in building up your trust and reputation.
Over time, because of all the free value you’ve provided, Jim didn’t hesitate at all to buy your product when it was offered.
This is how email lists convert to sales.
Going further
In our example, we only went through the journey of one person, Jim.
But imagine that you’re getting 100 email subscribers per day. That’s 3000 people per month.
That means that every month, 3000 new people are joining your list and going through the exact same journey as Jim.
Not everyone will convert right away. With our example of a $300 product, you should get about a 3% conversion rate if you’re doing things properly.
That means for every 100 people who join, 3 will convert (purchase).
3 x $100 = $300/day.
$300/day x 30 = $9000/month.
Over the year, $9000 x 12 months = $108,000 which is about $10,000/month for your digital marketing efforts.
This is a clear example of how you can grow a blog to 6-figures in revenue, and it’s exactly how I grew RankXL to 6-figures in 12 months.
And if you implement an affiliate program and recruit some affiliates to promote your products, you can scale up quickly.
Conclusion
Building a 6-figure blog can seem like an outlandish goal for most people. It sounds crazy, something that only seasoned bloggers ever achieve.
But if you can build an email list and sell your own products, it’s very possible to scale to $10,000 per month blogging. You don’t need that much traffic, and you don’t have to make thousands of sales.
Chief Marketing Officer
Entrepreneur. Investor. Husband & Father. I balance that out with a healthy dose of CrossFit and Chess. Currently working as a CMO/Co-founder at MMA Warehouse & CMO at Odys Global.
Connect with Andrej:
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