How to Make $100/Day with Your Blog: Step by Step Guide

Making $100/day with a blog is a dream come true.

I mean, that’s $3k a month. That’s $36,500 per year!

Sure, it’s not $1 million per year, but if it is 100% passive, then wouldn’t you like to get that income straight into your pocket each month?

Me too! That’s why I developed some strategies to improve my RPMs and increase my ad revenue from $80 a day to $100/day in just 1 month!

I’m not here to gate keep, so I’m going to tell you exactly how I did it – and how you can do it, too.

My $100/Day Mediavine Week

I’ve made $100 here and there from Mediavine over the last year – mostly during the Christmas ad season.

But from April 12 to April 18, I finally had my first $100/day week with Mediavine. In fact, my lowest day was $103.53 during that period.

And since that week, I haven’t dropped below $120/day (as of May 27, 2023). I’ve even had my first $180 day!

Why Am I Sharing This?

When I was starting out as a travel blogger, I was pretty sure $2k a month was the best I could ever expect.

And I thought that would come from a mix of ads, affiliates, and social media sponsor work.

Little did I know, you could make well over that every month from just ad revenue with Mediavine!

2018 Nina had 0 clue that one day she’d make over $30k/mo from her travel blog.

If I had known back then that this was possible for a travel blog, I probably would have had a more direct journey. I wouldn’t have wasted years not investing in my site, jumping from platform to platform, and writing about whatever I felt like without a strategy.

So I want to share this with you to help you understand the income potential awaiting your blog!

A Note on My RPMs

Now, before you think this is impossible for your blog, and that 4k sessions a day is insanely far away, remember that my traffic is largely Canadian.

Which means my earnings are a lot lower (about 1/3rd of US RPMs). 

But, the good news is that most people with this traffic get 2-3x more than I do.

You’ll probably make this much with 2k sessions a day if you have a US site.

I mean, it’s not good news for me, but it’s definitely good news for you!

What Are RPMs?

So I just talked about my RPMs being low. But what the heck are RPMs, you ask?

RPM, also known as Revenue Per Mille or Revenue Per Thousand, is a performance metric that measures the revenue generated by a website for every thousand impressions it receives.

It provides website owners and advertisers with valuable insights into the effectiveness of their monetization strategies and the overall profitability of their digital assets.

Calculating RPMs

To calculate RPMs, you divide the total revenue earned by the number of impressions received and multiply the result by one thousand. The formula can be expressed as follows:

RPM = (Total Revenue / Number of Impressions) * 1000

For instance, if a website generates $500 in revenue from 100,000 impressions, the RPM would be calculated as ($500 / 100,000) * 1000 = $5.

Your ad network will do this for you to give you a rolling average.

Using RPMs to Determine Traffic Goals

If you want to make $10k a month from ad revenue, and you make $35 RPMs, then you need 286k pageviews.

How did I determine this?

$Income Goal / $RPM = # * 1,000 = Traffic Goal

Now I know the traffic goal I roughly need to work towards to make my dream income from ads.

Yes, it will vary based on location, season, etc. But this is a strong way to calculate your potential income rather than just hoping that one day you’ll hit $10k.

If I know I’m at 165k pageviews now, then I need to write enough posts to get the last 159k pageviews to get to those $10k months in ad revenue.

Other Ways to Get to $100/Day from Your Blog

Ad revenue isn’t the only way to earn an income from your blog.

It’s definitely my favourite way since it’s so passive and easy to just let run in the background. But it’s not even my highest earner.

I make the most of my money on my travel blog from affiliates.

Affiliates allow you to monetize way earlier than ad revenue (since Mediavine is really the first ad network I’d join, considering the issues I had with Ezoic and SheMedia).

In fact, you could make your first $100/mo from affiliates with just 1k pageviews! (Although it typically takes longer since you’re brand new to blogging.)

Another option is to create a digital product and sell it. This could be a membership, a newsletter subscription, an ebook, or a video course.

Digital products are challenging in the travel niche, but it can be done as long as you have something more unique than a packing list or a basic planner that everyone seems to sell (I’ve been guilty of this too, don’t worry!).

👩‍💻 Looking to create a digital product? This is the best beginner course to get you started!

There are also sponsorships, both on and off your site, and ad revenue from things like Tiktok or Youtube.

The key to getting $100/day with your blog is to be consistent and focus on one main strategy at a time. Once you get traction in one area, it’s easier to diversify into others.

“Nina, My RPMs Are Really Low. What Do I Do?”

That is to be expected, to be honest.

Mediavine is one of the bigger names in ad networks, along with Raptive (formerly Adthrive).

These platforms that have traffic limits to get in are able to negotiate higher rates with ad partners, since they can guarantee higher quality/higher trafficked sites.

Networks like Ezoic, SheMedia, Monumetric, and Adsense pay a lot less than Mediavine or Raptive.

They have a lower caliber of clientele, so it’s a lot harder for them to present the blogs they represent to ad buyers as being as good of a fit. People don’t want to pay $35/1,000 viewer on a site with 1,000 views.

But they will on a site with 50k pageviews.

The best way to increase your RPMs is to get onto Mediavine or Raptive (aka. growing your traffic to 50k sessions or 100k pageviews) as soon as possible.

Learn how to do just that in my Profitable Part-Time Blogger program:

How to Increase RPMs

Increasing RPMs for a blog requires a strategic approach that focuses on maximizing revenue potential and optimizing user experience.

It’s really only something you do once you are already with a good ad network.

Here are some effective techniques to boost your blog’s RPMs:

1. Quality Content and Targeted Keywords: Publish high-quality, engaging content that aligns with your target audience’s interests. Conduct keyword research to identify relevant, high-value keywords that can attract organic traffic. By providing valuable information and optimizing your content for specific keywords, you increase the chances of attracting quality visitors and improving RPMs.
2. Optimize Ad Placements: Experiment with different ad placements to find the most effective positions that drive higher click-through rates (CTRs) and revenue. Strategic placement of ads within the content, such as above the fold and alongside relevant text, can enhance visibility and user engagement. However, be mindful of maintaining a balance between ads and user experience, ensuring they do not overpower the content. For example, lots of white space for ads to fit in works really well. But having an ad every 2 sentences will put users off.
3. A/B Testing: Implement A/B testing to assess the performance of different ad formats, sizes, colors, and placements. By comparing the revenue generated from different variations, you can identify the most effective combinations that yield higher RPMs. Continuously experimenting and optimizing based on data-driven insights will lead to incremental improvements over time. For example, some titles will convert better. Other times a video will help keep people on the page.
4. Optimize Website Speed: Page load speed is crucial for user experience and can impact ad viewability and engagement. Optimize your blog’s loading time by compressing images, minimizing CSS and JavaScript files, and utilizing caching techniques. A faster website not only improves user satisfaction but also enhances the opportunities for ad impressions, positively impacting RPMs. Check out the best plugins to help with this. Don’t forget about a quality host, too!
5. Target High-Paying Advertisers: Identify and attract high-paying advertisers relevant to your niche. Conduct research to understand the types of advertisers willing to pay a premium for ad placements on your blog. By focusing on quality advertisers, you can increase the average revenue earned per impression, leading to higher RPMs. For me, this means targeting US traffic as much as possible.
6. Increase Time on Page: You get paid more for people being on your site longer. If someone shows up for 30 seconds, they are going to encounter fewer ads, which means you get paid less. Someone who stays on the page for 4 minutes will get you 8x more income due to ads running longer and them encountering more ads on the page.

Conclusion

Hitting your first $100/day with your blog is incredibly exciting, but it’s even better when you can start to rely on your blogging income month after month.

I love the consistency of ad revenue and knowing it will be coming in day after day. Unlike affiliates that sometimes dry up – especially if they’re seasonal tours – and products that have lulls if you don’t promote them, ad revenue just keeps on coming!

It’s further reason to focus on your traffic and getting your blog into Mediavine as soon as possible.

The money really is a gamechanger, even if it’s only a few thousand dollars a month. But it’s so exciting to have that consistency and to be able to use that money to further invest in your site, like by hiring writers to pump out more affiliate posts when you prioritize that strategy.

I teach all this and more in my Profitable Part-Time Blogger program – including a detailed tutorial of how I evaluated posts as higher RPM targets.

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