I hear all the time from bloggers comments like, “I’ve written 200 blog posts on my website, but I only earned $20 last month. Can you tell me why?”
I feel for these people, who put in the work but haven’t reaped the reward for their hard work. There are a few reasons that some blogs just don’t earn as much money as they seem like they should. That’s why I can’t ever give people a simple response to this question.
That’s why I made this flowchart for you and made a video to show you exactly how to use it to figure out what’s preventing you from earning as much from your blog as you could and exactly what to do about it.
You can download a pdf of this flowchart by clicking here (totally free, no email address required).
Learn Why Your Blog Earns Less Than It Should
This video goes through each step of the flowchart, describing each of the causes for low income on a blog and helping you figure out what is causing your blog to earn less than you want it to.
The Reasons Blogs Earn Less Than Average
There are 3 main reasons that some blogs don’t earn as much as other blogs with the same amount of content.
1. Too Little Aged Content to Drive Organic Traffic
Lots of people start blogging with the expectation that their blog posts will just start getting traffic almost immediately.
It doesn’t work that way.
In fact, we find that it can take 6-9 months for a brand new website to be trusted enough by Google to start getting the amount of traffic that their site merits. There are steps we can take to speed up that timeline, but if you’re just writing content, don’t expect each article to get 500-1,000 pageviews per month from search engines.
Just keep working on content and building your online reputation if you’re in this stage. The traffic and earnings will come soon.
2. Your Content Doesn’t Successfully Attract Traffic
In some cases, bloggers do the work to write a lot of content, but after waiting for a while, they still don’t get traffic.
This is usually because the content itself isn’t of a quality to outrank other content in the search engines, or the more common cause is that the topics they chose to write about aren’t working.
For picking article topics, we have a process called “search analysis” which is similar to but not the same as what other bloggers call “keyword research”. Either way, the concept is that we need to pick topics for our articles that answer specific search queries, or questions that people will search online.
A lot of bloggers make the mistake of writing the stuff that they feel like writing without considering what questions someone might type on Google. If your article doesn’t answer a question that people actually search, you won’t get traffic from search engines.
Likewise, if you’re targeting a search query that has a lot of competition, you’re going to struggle to rank for it until your site gains more authority.
New sites should target several low-competition search queries to win high rankings and get initial traffic.
But writing some blog posts on low-competition topics isn’t enough these days. Search engines like Google expect you to build authority on the topics that you talk about on your website. That’s why it’s important to make sure you write several articles covering the most important aspects of each sub-topic you talk about on your website.
That’s called “topical authority” and that’s a big topic that I cover in more detail in several videos on the Income School YouTube Channel.
3. You Haven’t Monetized Your Website Well Enough
Most bloggers monetize with ads. But if you’re just using Google Adsense and you’re not an expert, you’re probably leaving a lot of money on the table.
Programmatic ads are a huge step up from Google Adsense. Companies like Ezoic and Mediavine can serve ads on your site for you, placing them in the best spots and getting the most profitable ads you can get on your site.
However, if you’re just monetizing with ads, your still missing out on big opportunities.
Affiliate marketing helps bloggers earn an average of 74% more for the same amount of traffic as sites that just have ads according to a survey I ran in 2023.
Digital and Information Products help bloggers earn 5.7 times more per blog post that they write than just having ads on their site according to that same survey.
That’s why I teach strategies for Affiliate Marketing and teach how to create and market Information Products in my Project 24 membership.
For less than the cost of any of the popular keyword research tools (that you don’t actually need to succeed), you can learn how to do effective search analysis, how to write high-ranking blog posts, and how to monetize your site to earn a lot more.
According to the same survey, members of Project 24 earn an average of 91% more than viewers of my channel who aren’t members.
