Top Earning Blogs and How they Make Money Blogging

The top earning blogs in the world are generating millions of dollars every month. However, blogging is not just about million dollar blogs… actually the majority of blogs on the internet don’t make more than $2,000 per year.
Understanding how these blogs make money, what the end goal for their sites are and how they turn their content into a business is what’s most important for bloggers of all niches and sizes to understand.
That is exactly what we are going to be covering in this post — and even more exciting, we have an infographic to break down the key points as well!

Breaking Down the Different Types of Bloggers in the Blogosphere

There are well over 100 million blogs in the world today and thousands of new content pieces and articles are going live every hour. This means you are up against a world of competition when you start a blog, so it’s extremely important for you to quickly discover what type of blogger you are going to be and where you would like to be six months to a year from now.
Which of these blogger types would you fall into?

• The Part-Time Professional
• The Hobbyist
• The Full-Time Professional
• The Corporate
• The Entrepreneur

Still not sure where you fit into the blogging mix? Be sure to check out our 15 Great Blogger Interviews that Will Blow Your Mind post to learn from some of the best blogging experts in the world today!

How Much Are Bloggers Earning with their Blogs?

As mentioned, most blogs simply don’t make enough money to be considered a full time job or a legitimate source of income. Stats show that only 14% of bloggers are actually earning any money through their blog at all. This could be for a number of reasons, such as blogs being for non-profit, a hobby or the blogger simply has no idea how to get started or isn’t getting enough traffic to their sites.
Let’s take a look at this breakdown of how much bloggers are actually earning with their blogs:

• $24,086 is the average annual earnings
• $33,557 average annual earnings for corporate bloggers
• $1,000/year is what the average blogger earns when they are getting paid to post content to their site.

However, for those blogs that are generating revenue off their content and traffic, there are many different methods for them to choose from.
The most popular blog monetization methods are through Google Adsense, direct banner advertising and affiliate marketing. The good news is that these monetization methods scale across all niches and platforms, which means anyone with a blog and a loyal audience can start generating revenue with their blog as long as they put in the time and effort.
A perfect example of a blog that went from nothing to making over a million dollars per year, is PerezHilton.com. If you take a look at the site you will notice that there is a lot of banner advertising on the site. Perez could be monetizing his traffic through various different methods such as trying to sell his own products or merchandise, but instead the focus is on paid banner advertising.
When visiting their site, be sure to scroll down and see how many different ad placements are located throughout the site. Banner ad sales for PerezHilton can easily top over $45,000 per month for a single ad campaign.

Bloggers are coming up with new and creative ways to monetize their content and traffic all the time. If you’d like to learn from over 50 different professional bloggers and how they are monetizing their audience, be sure to check out our Meet the Bloggers series.

Top Earning Blogs on the Internet

When you think of blogging, you probably don’t think of names like Huffington Post, Mashable and TechCrunch… but they are blogs and they are all running off the WordPress platform.
With that being said, not only are these legitimate blogs, but they are making millions of dollars per year through the use of their content and growing audience.
We all visit these sites on a daily basis. Now it’s time to discover how much some of them are making!

• Huffington Post $2,300,000
• Mashable $560,000
• Perez Hilton $450,000
• TechCrunch $400,000
• Smashing Magazine $190,000
• Timothy Sykes $150,000
• Gothamist $110,000
• Tuts Plus $110,000
• Car Advice $70,000
• Venture Beat $62,000

Of course this is just a small sampling of the many blogs out there that are making money. I could probably add another ten to the list that I know are generating over $100,000 a month easily! Just look at John Chow for example… his blog went from $0 to $40,000 per month in it’s first few years, to now generating over $1,000,000 a year now!

How to Start a Successful Blog & Make Money in the Process

Now that you’ve seen the money being made by some of the top bloggers in the world today, I’m sure you are now more excited than ever to get things moving in the right direction!
Here’s a quick breakdown of everything you will need to consider when getting started and planning for your longterm blogging success.

• Pick a great domain name for your blog. Stay away from numbers, hyphens and non-.com/.net/.org TLDs.
• Always go with a quality web hosting company. Web hosting is cheap, so there is no need to go with an unknown company.
• When you start to monetize your blog content, don’t sacrifice your user experience for a few dollars. It will hurt your blog in the long run.
• Affiliate programs are a great way to monetize your audience, as you will earn commission on products and services that you may actually be using.
• At the end of the day, the success of your blog comes down to your content, audience and brand. Niche down, create killer content and build a brand that people can trust.

For anyone who is looking to get started on the right path or bring their current blog, brand and business to a whole new level, I highly recommend you check out blogging.org, which is our premium online blog marketing training course.

Lastly, I want to give a shout out to ignitespot for creating this very high quality infographic, which has made the process of breaking down the blogconomy that much easier. You can view the full infographic below.