This article was automatically translated from Japanese using AI. The Japanese version is the authoritative version.
Blogging is a popular side hustle, but how many people actually make money from it?
And how much can you really earn?
Most of the information floating around in books and online comes from professional bloggers or people who write posts in earnest. There’s almost nothing out there from people who just blog casually.
When I set up this blog, I decided to use WordPress, but it costs money, and I remember wondering when I would ever break even.
I’m still in the red, but revenue has finally started coming in, so I’d like to write about where this blog stands right now.
The current state of the blog
Starting with the basics: my first post went up in March 2021, and as of writing this in September 2022, the blog has 46 posts.
That works out to about four posts a month. The quality varies quite a bit, and most posts are things I can write in about an hour.
The main topics are programming and everyday life.
The latest traffic numbers are about 3,500 pageviews and about 2,500 visitors per month.
My most popular post gets about 35 views a day.
The trends I can see are that programming posts are in high demand, and that even with few visitors, pageviews add up because the same people come back repeatedly.
Everyday-life posts, on the other hand, are mostly diary-style pieces that don’t turn up in searches, so they get far less traffic.
The current state of the income
Right now I mainly use Google AdSense and Amazon Associates.
I passed the AdSense review in May 2022 (I think I had about 35 posts at the time), and my total earnings so far are 5,000 yen.
My Amazon Associates earnings are 0 yen.
So the blog’s total income to date is 5,000 yen.
As for trends, I don’t really write Amazon product reviews, so the reality is that I hardly ever post Amazon links in the first place.
Which means it might as well not exist…
Thinking about revenue rates
Google ads pay roughly 1 yen per 100 impressions, and for a click, around 10 yen on mobile and around 50 yen on desktop.
So the return rate is fairly low, and it seems hard to earn any real income without racking up serious pageviews.
With Amazon Associates, I believe the commission is somewhere around 3–10% of the item purchased. (Apologies if I’ve got that wrong.)
So if someone buys a 10,000-yen item, you can earn up to about 1,000 yen.
It’s the kind of ad that can bring in decent income even without huge traffic.
Apparently, for most people who make money blogging, ads like Amazon’s bring in more than Google ads do.
Blog running costs
In my case the running costs are high: 15,000 yen a year.
Almost all of that is the hosting contract.
If you shop around, there are hosts that charge about 5,000 yen for three years and keep setup fees down too, so that’s much better value.
I’m sticking with my current host because I don’t really know how to migrate, and because it has a good reputation.
At this rate, who knows when I’ll actually turn a profit.
That said, even doing this pretty haphazardly, just keeping at it earns more than I expected.
I’ve come to feel that blogging rewards you in proportion to how seriously you take it.
Also, pageviews don’t usually drop sharply all of a sudden, so as long as you keep writing reasonably well, the numbers steadily climb.
More than anything, blogging is genuinely fun, so I’d encourage everyone to give it a try, even for free.