Blogging for Profit is a Numbers Game

I have been blogging for a little over two years, and when I started up to this day, my goal was mainly to learn how to drive and generate traffic to Thrifty Hustler. I’m a part-time blogger and a full-time online seller and recently, I’m also trying to become a part-time crypto investor and yield farmer (LOL!). Over the past two years of observing my blog’s performance and by reading other online articles regarding monetization, I realized that blogging for profit is a numbers game and if we play our cards right, then we might be able to earn a living from blogging.

Personally, I’m still in the process of figuring out the monetization strategy that I’d like to pursue. But in the meantime, I signed up with Ezoic to display ads on my blog and I also added some affiliate links from Amazon, Involve Asia, etc so I could profit a little from this blog while I’m still deciding.

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

Table of Contents

What’s My Blog Monetization Plan

Honestly, I don’t have any yet as I have mentioned earlier because I’m still half-hearted in monetizing this blog. So probably, if I’m going to go all the way in monetizing a blog, it might not be this blog – Thrifty Hustler.

But since I don’t have any other blogs as of the time being (I’m thinking of making new blogs in the future), I’m using this blog – Thrifty Hustler as my guinea pig.

It’s taking me some time to decide and to figure things out because as I’ve said, I’m not doing this full-time because I have a very demanding hustle (online selling) that I’m prioritizing most of the time.

Nevertheless, I still make it to a point to read and continue to learn about blog monetization strategies and other ways to earn money online. And as I learn more and more about blog monetization, I realize that there are very important ‘numbers’ or ‘metrics that I need to meet in order to earn a living from a blog.

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8 Important Blog Metrics/Numbers that Could Help Your Blog Earn Money

If you are creating a blog and if you want to profit as fast as possible, then you have to make sure that you keep these things in mind:

Loading Speed or Page Speed

The speed of your website will have a direct effect on your website’s earning potential. Maybe you’re wondering why page speed matters for monetizing a blog.

Here’s why – there are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there who belong to a similar niche as yours. A lot of them might have written a similar article too and even if they find your article on Google or on any social media website, if your website does not load quickly, they will just move on to other websites.

If you think about it, it doesn’t matter if you have the best articles regarding a particular topic, if your website does not load quickly, you will lose potential readers. And if you don’t have that many readers, then the chances of earning from your blog will also decrease.

I’ve read that the recommended load speed is around 1 -2 seconds. My blog loads a bit slower and I’m always in the process of speeding it up every now and then. There are tons of tutorials on how to improve your loading speed. I’ll probably write a separate article on how I do this and I will link it here.

Number of High-Quality SEO-Optimized Articles

Although I do agree that it’s not about the quantity but it’s the quality that matters. But just imagine if you have a lot of high-quality articles on your blog, it would be more amazing right?

I only started to write as much as I could recently. My main goal is actually to improve my writing skills. English is my second language and although we use English at school and at work, I don’t consider myself as a native speaker and I know that I still have so much to improve on when it comes to writing.

Since I have written a lot of articles in the past few months, this helped me increased my traffic consistently. And as you know, traffic is one of the main ingredients in earning a profit from your blog. Without blog traffic, it will be very difficult to earn money from your blog.

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Number of Target Keywords

I’m not talking about the number of times a keyword is repeated in an article. What I mean by this is the number of keywords that your blog can cover.

The more keywords you can compete with, the bigger your traffic would be. For example, in my chose niches, I have written articles that will compete for traffic in the following long-tail keywords:

All of the above-mentioned articles appear on the first page of Google (in my region), and some of them have even landed a Google Snippet Feature. They do contribute to the overall monthly traffic that this blog gets.

Again, the more high-quality articles that you can write, targetting a variety of keywords in your niche, the bigger your traffic would be.

Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash

Number of Articles on the First Page of Google Search

The biggest traffic from Google will be acquired by landing the top spot on Google Search. However, even if you don’t land the first spot on Google SERP, you will still get some traffic especially if you’re on the first page.

Although I don’t track this personally, I do check from time to time if the number of my articles on the first page of the SERP is increasing monthly.

I don’t know how accurate this info is, but I use UberSuggest to check this data. This is a free web tool (with paid option) that you can use to complement the data that you get from your Google Analytics.

Number of Traffic from High-Paying Countries

I’m from the Philippines and the CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions) for the traffic that I get from the Philippines is way lower compared to the CPM of traffic coming from the US, the UK, and Canada.

So for example, if bloggers from the US, the UK, or from Canada are getting 20,000 Pageviews in a month and the majority of their traffic is from their country and I’m getting the same number of Pageviews but my traffic is mainly from my country, then I’ll definitely be getting a lower ad income.

This is because advertisers are of course paying top dollars to countries with higher purchasing power. Chances are, they’re getting better conversions from those countries that’s why they’re investing more of their advertising dollars to bloggers from those countries.

So the goal is, regardless of where you’re blogging from, we should diversify our sources (geographic locations) of our traffic by writing articles that can be valuable to readers around the world. It would be better if we could write articles that will target the readers from the high-paying regions I mentioned above.

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Number of Social Media Followers

Personally, this is something that I have not exerted that much effort yet mainly because I’m concentrating on getting traffic from Google Search.

If you can generate followers from social media, then you can further increase your blog’s monthly traffic.

And also, if your monetization strategy is something similar to online influencers, then you might be able to earn more money if you have a large following on social media.

Number of Email Subscribers

This is something that I’m not also exerting much effort on yet but it got me surprised when I checked my list of email subscribers. It’s continuously growing on a monthly basis.

The great thing about having a large email subscriber is – it’s like having direct access to their inbox. A lot of online marketers value this so much because you can communicate directly to your subscribers.

Backlinks (External and Internal)

External links are very valuable when it comes to SEO because it sends a signal to Google that your blog is reputable and trustworthy especially if your backlinks are coming from highly reputable websites as well.

Internal links are also important in order to improve blog engagement and lower the Bounce Rate.

However, you can still rank in Google even without any external backlinks. Personally, I have experienced this myself. I do still believe that external links are important because it adds credibility to your website and might be able to help your blog stay on the first page of Google for a longer period of time.

Imagine if two blogs wrote an article about the same topic. If both of them wrote a very high-quality article and both have high engagement in social media, both loads pretty fast, which article will be ranked higher than the other.

Google will find other signals to identify which one to rank higher and definitely, the one with the most backlinks (in this example) will definitely be ranked higher in Google. Of course, provided that the backlinks of that website are from reputable sites too.

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Final Thoughts

If monetization is not a priority for you and if you’re just blogging for fun then you don’t have to worry about the stuff that I have mentioned above. But, if you’re thinking of earning money from your blog, then you should pay attention to these metrics.

It is not as easy as it seems though but it’s very much doable and the longer you’ve been blogging, the easier that it will get.

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