How Much Do Bloggers Make Per Post?

Every blogger, every blog and every blog post has different earnings numbers. There are many factors that affect how much you can make from blogging.

However, when we look on a broader scale and average together hundreds of articles, I think we can deduce what the average blogger makes per article.

This is exactly what I’ve done. Although to be fair my numbers today are based primarily on the earnings from my own blogs.

All in all I believe the average blogger who studies, works hard and perseveres to reach the 100 article mark can expect to make at least $2-5 per month for each article they write.

Now I’ll show you where I got that number.

Two Ways To Think About It

There are two ways to think about how much a blog post makes. Each way has it’s own benefits and drawbacks, but all in all I prefer to think about it in terms of the second method.

1. Total Money Earned

This first, and perhaps the simplest way to think about this, is how much money a blog post earns over its life.

Let’s say you posted an article at the beginning of 2010. At the end of the year you may have earned $5 from that article. But in 2011 you made $20 from the article, which is $25 total.

Then in 2012 you make $25, bringing the total up to $50 and so on…

Now it’s 12 years later in 2022 and you’ve made over $200 from that article, but it’s still making money, so you really don’t know exactly how much it will make when it finally stops.

2. Monthly Income

The second way, and my preferred method, is to think about how much a blog post brings in each month. Obviously, this number will be different from one month to the next, so it’s best to think about this number in terms of the average.

So in the previous example, we made $5 in one year for an article’s first year, then $20 in the second year. So the average monthly income for that first year was about $0.40 per month ($5/12 months) and about $1.70 per month the second year ($20/12 months).

I like to think about blog posts in this way and I’ll talk about why later.

The Life of a Blog Post

I want to talk about one more thing before we get into my actual estimates. And that is the timeline of a blog post.

Here is roughly how an average blog post performs over time:

1. Article is published – The post will get little to no traffic and make no money
2. 6 months after publishing – The post will probably be getting some traffic and making some money, but it won’t be reaching its potential yet
3. 12 months after publishing – After a year many blog posts will be at or very near their peak performance. Search engines will have slowly pushed your post up the rankings to about it’s peak.
4. 18 months after publishing – Nearly all blog posts will be in their peak after 18 months
5. 2-5 years after publishing – Every post will eventually die and quit getting traffic/making money. You can expect most blog posts to last several years, though at some point during this 2-5 year time frame your posts may start dropping.
6. After 5 years – Plenty of posts will perform well for more than 5 years, but some will start dropping off. And again, at some point every post will start to fall.

So as you can see, most posts will start off slow, then reach a peak. They will stay in their peak earning for a period of time and then they will slowly drop off until they eventually quit making money.

Of course that’s a generic trend and some posts will follow very different paths, but on average this is what you can expect from an article.

So How Much Does A Blogger Actually Make Per Article?

OK so now let’s actually talk numbers. First I want to talk about some of my real world numbers. You can also see them dissected in a different way in my article “how many articles does it take to make money in blogging“.

I currently run three websites. And here are some real world numbers from these sites (numbers are rounded, but are accurate within 10%):

* I purchased this website when it was 1 year old, and the earnings have been about $250 per month since I bought.

For reference, Site #1 is this website.

As you can see not every site is consistent. Site #1 is earning significantly more per article than the other two sites. Site #3 isn’t earning much because none of the articles have had enough time to actually reach peak rankings in search.

Let’s break these numbers down a bit more.

By site

First let’s look at the average earnings of an article by site.

Site #1

Clearly, Site #1 is doing much better on a per article basis. $7 per month for each article written is great! I can knock out an article in about 2 hours on average.

You may look at this and say “But you’re only making $17.50 an hour!” Except the earnings keep coming in. If I stopped writing today, then my lifetime earnings per article next month would be $42 per article, and by the end of this year would be nearly $100 per article. Now $50+ an hour looks a lot better than $17.50.

The trick with blogging is that it’s a long game. You don’t realize your earnings for a long time. If you want to get paid up front you’re better off freelancing, but long term you’ll make far more for your time publishing your own articles on a website.

Site #2

Not every site can earn $7 per month for each article. This site is not performing as well as I would like. $1 per month per article is not hitting the mark.

^ The $6 total per article is misleading because these are my lifetime earnings after buying the site. The articles themselves would have earned money in the year before I bought, increasing the lifetime earnings. This is one reason why I prefer to look at monthly income.

Now I’ve only written about 5 articles for this site. 200 of the 250 articles were already written when I bought it, and the remaining 40-50 articles were written by freelancers that I paid (I’m still figuring out how to make this process more profitable).

So I don’t really think about this site in terms of an hourly wage, I think about it in terms of ROI. And even with the poor returns on a per article basis, it has been a good investment for me thus far.

Site #3

It’s probably not really worth looking at these earnings numbers too closely. The site and its articles are just too young to get much good information out of it.

However, this is a good example of the timeline that you can expect from a new website. 6 months in, I’ve still earned very little from this site. I’ll have to wait another 6-12 months before I’ll have more usable data here.

My Average Earnings for a Single Blog Post

If you average all 435 articles across my three websites the average numbers are as follows:

One article for me earns $2.43 per month as of April 2022.

My expected lifetime earnings for each article I publish is between $150-300.

I believe this is a very reasonable and even conservative estimate for the value of a blog post.

As my blogs and articles continue to age and I continue to get better at the craft, I expect these numbers to increase.

My goal is to get my average monthly income for a blog post up to $4 per month. I think this is possible even with paid writers, but I need to make some improvements in my process to reach this number.

My Best Guess For What You Can Earn Per Post

I don’t have millions of data points to reference to give you an average across the whole web. What I have are 3 websites, and the knowledge gained from constantly browsing websites for sale on online marketplaces.

I’ve been regularly browsing sites for sale for more than 2 years now, and overall the numbers seem to agree with what I’ve experienced on my sites.

My best guess, is that the average motivated person of average intelligence and writing ability can earn $2-5 per month for each blog post they write. This is assuming:

• You write the articles yourself
• You learn about keyword research and article formatting from online teachers (like Jon Dykstra, Income School, Authority Hacker, Shaun Marrs, etc.)
• You are a native English speaker
• You write at least 50 articles (100 is better)

If this describes you then I think it’s completely realistic to make $2-5 per article per month. And in many cases you can do much better than this.

Other Things That Affect An Article’s Earnings

There’s a reason why my three websites have such different numbers. There are a lot of factors that affect an article’s earning potential. Here are some things I’ve noticed and read from other web publishers:

• Articles I write myself outperform articles written by freelancers.
• Affiliate articles have thus far significantly outperformed my articles monetized with ads
• Geographic location of a blog’s users can significantly impact earning potential
• The niche/topics you write about can significantly impact earning potential
• Length of article – longer articles monetized with ads will usually outperform shorter articles
• Engagement – If your users click around to different articles once they land on your site, you can earn more
• Trust – if users trust your expertise, motives and judgement, they are more likely to act on your advice
• More articles on a website can make each other article more profitable. Basically, a blog with 1,000 posts will have better performing articles than a blog with 100 posts (on average).

There are literally dozens of things than can affect profitability.

Conclusion

If you’re willing to put the work into blogging, write good articles about the right topics and you manage to write at least 100 articles, then you should be able to make between $200-500 per month ($2-5 per article).

When I’m projecting earnings for myself, I use $2.50 per month per article. And I personally think this is a very conservative estimate.

Happy blogging.

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