One of the most common questions I hear is about how to make money as a Christian blogger. Many assume that since I blog about blogging, that is where all of my income comes from. While I do offer a course and a membership (to teach blogging stuff), I generate consistent income from multiple avenues – some of which have zero to do with blogging!
The truth is that making a consistent, significant monthly income as a Christian blogger requires a solid plan for growing your ministry. It isn’t as simple as throwing a few affiliate links into a post and hoping for the best. It takes consistent, organic traffic. Like any business – it takes a plan.
This post may contain affiliate links. You can read my full affiliate disclosure here.
How to Make Money as a Christian Blogger
Before I go into the nuts and bolts of monetizing your Christian blog, I want to mention something. If the sole focus of your intentions is to make money, you will continue to struggle. If, however, your intention is to seek more ways to glorify God with your ministry, then your efforts will be rewarded.
The reason for your ministry is to glorify God and a residual benefit is to hopefully earn a living from it.
When you get tunnel-vision on the dollar signs, you will lose focus of Him and the enemy can easily cause you to engage in not-so-Godly behavior.
Have a Plan
In order to earn consistent money with your Christian blog, you need a plan that will generate consistent, organic traffic to your site. This is not traffic generated by other bloggers that visit your site from share threads. Organic traffic is traffic from people who literally went looking for your content on Google (or other search engines). When these people land on your site, they were literally looking for what you write about and are much more likely to make a purchase based on your recommendations.
If the majority of your traffic is forced (share thread reciprocation) and you aren’t getting visitors directly from Google, Yahoo, Bing, or even Pinterest, then you will continue to struggle with earning income from your Christian blog.
As with anything in life, success comes with careful and intentional planning. The truth is that most Christian bloggers come into this blogging journey with no actual plan other than to write about whatever they feel like writing on a particular day. There often isn’t any rhyme or reason to what they write about, other than it relates to faith in some way.
There are 3 main components to getting organic traffic to your site:
- Defining Your Target Audience
- Learning and Implementing SEO
- Serving Your Audience
If your goal is to serve your audience AND generate consistent income, you need 2 things:
- consistent organic traffic (from SEO)
- traffic generated from money-making keywords
Define Your Audience
The first mistake that prevents Christian bloggers from earning money with their blogs is that they often don’t have a defined target audience.
The most important part of having a blog that can earn money is to have a clearly defined target audience for it. When you know your target audience, you’ll know so much about their needs that you will have no problem deciding on products to recommend or promote (or create).
The key to making money with your Christian blog is to have a clear idea of who your “customer” is and how you are going to serve them. Randomly writing content and randomly recommending products are just that – random!
You need to write to a particular segment of the population so you can focus your content directly to them.
Learn and Implement SEO
The second mistake that prevents Christian bloggers from earning money with their blogs is that they don’t take the time to learn SEO correctly.
Once you know who your target audience is, you must get your content to THEM! This is accomplished by the use of SEO – picking the right keywords and formatting your content in a way that search engines can index it. Without SEO, your blog content may as well be in a box under your bed because people won’t be able to find it without consistent effort on your part. Without SEO, you will have to consistently share the links on social media and create new pins to add to Pinterest. With SEO, however, you can skip all that and, eventually, your blog posts will be found in Google searches.
Erin from Lullaby Lark recently reported a huge win on her goal of monetizing her site:
I had been blogging for over a year before I decided to get serious about SEO. I began doing basic backend SEO on my site, re-working old posts and formatting my new posts for SEO, and my traffic skyrocketed. Like 900% growth in three months. The extra organic traffic is what made all the difference for me in terms of monetizing my site. I went from making a few dollars here and there and taking my blogging expenses out of my family’s budget, to having a self-sustaining blog. It’s pretty incredible what a difference SEO made for me.”
Focus on Serving Your Audience – Not Your Bank Account
The third mistake that prevents Christian bloggers from earning money with their blogs is that they write content to promote a product instead of writing it to serve their audience.
Your blog content plan should be centered around topics that specifically help your target audience. So many bloggers make a list of products to promote and write their content around that. Instead, you need to make a list of ways you can help your audience – then see if there is a product that you can recommend to help them in the context of what you are writing about.
People – not products!
Also, by continuing to focus on serving your target audience (and using SEO), you’ll gradually start bringing more and more of your target audience to your blog (which will increase conversions on your affiliate links).
How I Finally Started Earning Money on My Christian Blog
Earning money with a Christian blog isn’t going to be an over-night event. I’m sure you’ve read tons of blog posts about “How I Earned $1000 in My First Month of Blogging” but I’ve come to learn that most of those aren’t completely truthful and/or quite misleading. Yes, some people may have these results, but this isn’t the norm.
Earning income with a blog requires traffic – organic, consistent, and significant traffic. These three types of traffic take time to build so putting in the work at first will have long-term results for your blog.
[bctt tweet=”Are you struggling to figure out how to monetize your Christian blog? Here is how I finally started earning consistent monthly income with mine! ” username=”kingdomblogger1″]
How Do I Earn Money?
I’m now earning consistent monthly income from a variety of sources through Kingdom Bloggers. As my organic reach grows, so does the monthly payouts for each of these which is why it is so important for you to have that solid SEO foundation.
I currently earn regular monthly income from:
- Media Vine Ad Network
- Affiliate Marketing
- Courses & Membership
- Offering Services
- Etsy Shop
Ad Networks
While some may be opposed to using ads on their blogs, this is a simple (passive) way to earn consistent recurring income.
I’m currently using Media Vine, which requires you to have a minimum of 50k monthly sessions to be approved. These ads pay you based on the number of impressions for the ads – meaning the more traffic you get, the higher the earnings. (This is where your target audience and learning SEO comes into play.)
I do advise against using Google Adsense because
- You can get approved without any significant traffic to your site (they will approve a brand new blog). Without traffic, you have no earning potential.
- Ads are difficult to filter (you want to ensure you aren’t displaying ads that are not conducive to a Christian site)
- Ads are difficult to set up and manage (the installation just isn’t a simple process)
Affiliate Marketing
I currently earn recurring income from several affiliates programs.
Shareasale – I earn recurring income from several affiliates through the Shareasale network. While some of these are for blogging products/services, the majority of the commissions come from regular products such as planners and craft/journaling products. Some of these include:
- Cricut
- Cratejoy
- Erin Condren
- Best Bully Sticks (This one comes from a combination of Pinterest affiliate pins and sharing great deals for dog treats on my personal FB page).
Amazon – I do get a payment from Amazon every single month now. It’s not a huge amount, but each month is more than the previous month. I finally started earning with Amazon by:
- adding a native ad to the end of every post
- creating product posts such as this one about coloring Bibles
- inserting one in-post link in every blog post
Related: How to Increase Conversions on Amazon Affiliate Links
Other Bloggers – There are so many Christian bloggers out there who have created some amazing products (Bible studies, E-books, etc) and offer affiliate programs.
Courses
I currently have one SEO course and my KB Membership which do make up a large portion of my monthly income.
Offering Services
I also offer services such as tech support for setting up a new blog and blog audits. Since I don’t really promote these services, this makes up a very small percentage of my total monthly blog income.
Freelance Writing
This month I will begin doing freelance writing for another site. Unlike regular guest posting, I will earn a small fee for the content because the content will be written with SEO in mind.
Related:
A Plan Will Provide a Return
So there you have it! These are the strategies that I use here on Kingdom Bloggers to earn consistent monthly income. It isn’t a single strategy focusing on one single method. I have a plan that includes knowing my audience, implementing SEO, and focusing on serving my audience first.
I’m not going to say that you will be “rolling in the dough” if you also work on this plan. But I will promise that if you really focus on a plan that includes those three elements, you will start seeing an increase in your monthly income from the blog.
If you are serious about scaling your Christian blog to be able to serve your audience AND generate consistent income, enroll in my Affiliate Marketing for Christian Bloggers course. This course was created specifically for bloggers in the faith niche (strictly faith blogs as well as dual-purpose faith blogs such as Christian parenting).
Also, be sure you are creating multiple income streams and not just focusing on affiliate marketing (especially Amazon because their commission structure is quite low). Instead, think outside the box in creating your own products or courses or even offering services. What do you know well that you can offer to others for a small (or large) fee?
I’d love to hear about your wins as far as earning income with your Christian blog! What methods or strategies have worked the best for you?
