There is one thing I have always thought about. I have said time and again that I will post it here but in vain. Today I will say it loudly. You see, there are bloggers getting up to 2 million page views per month yet their income is not enough to sustain their lifestyle. They always wonder what they are doing wrong.
When I was a newbie, around 2011, I used to post on my blog aimlessly—I didn’t have my target audience, I didn’t even know who would consume my content. I remember there was a time I posted an article that generated 2 million page views in two days. I used to get excited with traffic. But there was something I was not contented with—income. With slightly over 3 million page views per month, my income was averaging Ksh150,000. For a Kenyan who lives in an urban area, this money was only enough to feed me, pay my bills and save a little for miscellaneous expenses. I blogged for about three years without any meaningful real life progress.
At some point, I started questioning why in the first place I became a blogger. Yes, there was traffic but no income. Every single month ,I would pay more than Ksh 30,000 to Kinsta for web hosting and remain with less than Ksh 100,000 for expensiture.Some of my friends who joined the corporate world were earning in excess of Ksh500,000 every month—I envied them. I almost got into depression before realizing my mistakes– they were many.
There was an article I read from a popular blogger who pulls in over Ksh 20 million every month from blogging. The article was explaining how one could earn Ksh 1 million per month with 1,000 daily page views–that was the eye opener.
Like many other bloggers, I realized I was chasing traffic, not money. This is the mistake that most bloggers commit repeatedly. I understand that there is excitement in getting millions of people to read your articles but the bottom line is, how much do you earn from the hustle?!!
As a blogger, you should first know your target, the value of what you post and the action your readers will take after reading your articles. Every article should be a well thought one and useful for the readers. But the problem is that a number of bloggers post articles without figuring out their usefulness. Bloggers in entertainment, politics and news niches are the major victims of traffic without money concept, they will amass millions of visitors per month but with nothing to show in terms of revenues.
Highly informed bloggers often post articles with a purpose. The articles have well defined keywords which attract high keyword adverts from AdSense. Google often direct high CPC adverts towards those sites. The general adverts are then directed towards news, entertainment and political blogs (General adverts have CPC of as low as $0.01). You find a blog with 100,000 visitors per month generating $4,000 while one with 3 million generating $1,500. The variation is brought about by the choice of keywords. In recent times, bloggers have started using tools like SEMrush to learn about high paying keywords. The tool has helped them a lot. You can also sign up for the tool for free,click on this link to sign up.This tool will also help you to identify high performing articles from your competitors.
I was shocked sometime back when a friend revealed to me that he was earning Ksh 1.5 million per month with 100,000 monthly page views. That time I was generating Ksh 350,000 from 3 million page views. I noticed that he had dropped AdSense for affiliate marketing. I later came to learn that with affiliate marketing, traffic may not necessarily determine how much you earn, the action your readers take after reading your articles is one that matter. One can attract 10 visitors per day and earn Ksh 50,000 while another one with 1,000 visitors earns less than Ksh 2,000. It’s a fact that bloggers in affiliate marketing don’t attract many readers but they earn more than those monetizing with AdSense. This is a bitter truth that bloggers with millions of readers but earning meagre income should be armed with.
Those two things I have mentioned above are the ones that separate successful bloggers and the ones struggling financially but with millions of readers.
One advantage of having less traffic and more income is that your hosting expenditure is fairly low.You will pay even less than Ksh10,000 per year at Bluehost(Click here to see Bluehost plans) yet your monthly income is more than Ksh2 million. Another person will get 3 million visitors, pay Ksh 40,000 every month yet he is earning below Ksh200,000.