how Christian blogs make money!
This article is so overdue.
Why? Because every day I receive questions about how to make money as a Christian blogger.
Thankfully, building a successful blog is not rocket science. And it’s a great way to supplement or replace your full-time income.
Since starting my WordPress site in 2017 I have been able to learn a lot and grow my this blog to:
- Monthly Views: Average of 170,000 – 185,000
- Monthly Income: Average of $1,300 – $1,800
- Monthly Pinterest Viewers: 1 million – 1.2 million
- Newsletter Subscribers: 3.000
And that is very modest for a blog that has been around for 5 years. At least in the professional blogging world, where a successful Christian blogger easily makes $5.000 to $10.000 per month.
But I am proud of my success so far because I did not start this blog with the intent to monetize it.I started it to share my experiences and struggles with other Single Christian women.
And in this post, I am sharing with you how to start a Christian blog yourself.
What is Christian blogging?
The simple answer is, Christian blogging refers to writing a website or webpage where you share personal or informational content about your faith. There are plenty of examples of faith blogs, such as a Christian parenting blog, a Christian lifestyle blog, or a Christian youth ministry blog.
When I first started my website it was supposed to be a personal blog to share with friends and family while I travel the world.
But it quickly evolved as I started sharing more about my dating life and my walk with Christ. I was basically documenting how I was growing my faith daily as a new believer.
I first started to publish various Bible verses that helped me navigate life as a Single woman. Then I started sharing my thoughts on dating and relationships, which ended up resonating with a lot of women around the world. Which then led me to adjust my target audience to women.
But there are many ways to become a Christian blogger.
You can start a ministry blog to teach men and women God’s word. Or you can start a devotional blog, full of Christian books and bible study help.
I’ve seen it all and I know that they make money. But the question is how?
How do Christian bloggers make money?
If you are wondering how Christian blogs makes money, then this section is important.
The three main ways to monetize your blog are advertising, affiliate marketing, and selling products. Each one has its pros and cons and highly depends on what type of Christian blog you have.
Advertising Income
As I mentioned before I am with Mediavine, an advertising network, that you can join once you get more than 50k monthly sessions to your blog. If you are just starting out, most bloggers will use Google Adsense.
The big advertising networks, such as Ezoic, Mediavine, and AdThrive work with advertisers that are willing to pay top dollar for exposure to your readers.
And depending on how much consistent traffic you have, this is a very lucrative source of mostly passive income.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when a Christian blogger promotes third-party products and services on their blog.
The most common one is Amazon. Here you use an affiliate link, a hyperlink that leads to Amazon’s products and receives a commission every time somebody makes a purchase.
Depending on the products or services you recommend to your readers, affiliate marketing programs can be a very lucrative source of income.
Products
Products are considered the most profitable form of income.But also the most advanced one.
They take on many forms, from physical products such as t-shirts or merchandise to digital products such as e-books or online courses.
Again, it depends on what your specific audience needs and what your best-performing blog content is.
A lot of Christian bloggers will create printables, bible studies, devotionals, and e-books.
Is Christian blogging profitable?
Yes, Christian blogging can be very profitable if you do it right. There are many Christian writers that make 5-figures per month with mostly passive income streams.
While it highly depends on the niche you are in, a lot of bloggers grow their business to $1,000 USD per month.That’s usually achieved through ad income and affiliates.
Of course, I can only speak for myself and mention how much money I make as a Christian blogger. Which currently is around $2,000 USD/ month.
However, I have a blogging mentor in the Christian blogging space and she consistently makes $5,000 USD/ per month. That is thanks to her books and devotionals.
And I know there are many who make even more than that. The question is, how do you start a Christian blog step-by-step?
How to start a Christian blog
The first step is to create a website.
There are two ways you can do that. One is with a free platform and one is with a self-hosted platform that costs a small monthly fee.
Because this post is about how to start a Christian blog that makes money I will not talk about the free blogging platform as you cannot monetize those.
Step 1) Set up your Christian website
In order to set up your Christian blog you will need a hosting platform.
In the beginning, I always suggest that you keep your expenses low. So you want to choose a web host, like GoDaddy.
Their platform is very easy to use, includes a free domain name, and can easily integrate your WordPress theme.
Plus their hosting plan starts at as little as 8 USD/ month. Talk about a good deal!
The main reason why I love using GoDaddy and continue to recommend it to new bloggers is that as a newbie you will have so many questions when you first build your site.
When I first got started, I kept calling GoDaddy customer service for every question or challenge. From how to create a contact form, to the installation of a third-party plugin.
Their customer service was super nice, knowledgeable, and quick.
So, if you have been wondering if it is hard. Then the good news is, it’s not because there is a lot of help.
And if you want a step-by-step guide on how to set up your WordPress website, then click here.
Step 2) Think about your blog purpose
So here’s the thing I strongly believe that to be a Christian blogger, you don’t have to exclusively blog about faith unless you want to start a devotional blog.
Before you gather any stones, hear me out. I believe that each of our lives is our ministry, but not all of us are ministers, right?
In the same way, your blog can be your ministry but be about something other than Christianity.
For example, if God has blessed you with an eye for aesthetics you could have a home décor blog. If you were blessed with great cooking skills, you could have a food blog. If you are blessed with a great sense of fashion you could start a fashion blog.
In order to have a successful Christian blog you have to meet a need! Great content always offers a solution to existing problems.
The worst thing you can do as a blogger is to have a blog where you only talk about yourself and your experiences, without identifying or solving anybody else’s problems.
Especially, as a Christian blogger, you want to make sure that you don’t just write about yourself. Instead, share your experiences as a practical solution to other people’s problems.
When you are able to share practical and useful content with your readers, then they will be interested in what you have to say.
Step 3) Decide on a blogging niche
Number three is a very important step. And for some reason picking a niche seems like the hardest part at the start of the Christian blogging journey.
And even though there are many “blogging for beginners” tutorials out there, many female Christian bloggers tend to get stuck.
But in reality, it’s not that complicated.
All you need to do is to ask yourself where your gifts and talents lie and what things you are passionate about. Ideally, you want to choose a topic you love and could talk about all day. Because that is literally what you will do.
Talk and write about it.
If you are not sure, ask the people around you. Friends, family members, or even your co-workers might be able to tell you.
Then once you identified where your strengths lie, you have to identify if there is an opportunity in this niche.
Choose your niche based on the following 3 things:
- Am I passionate about the niche/ topic?
- Does my niche/ topic solve a real problem?
- Do I have knowledge/ wisdom to share?
If you focus on these three questions, you will be able to determine which niche is best for you.
Step 4) Promote your Christian Blog
The best way to promote your blog is to make use of your social media accounts.
At first, you start off by sharing it with the people you already know through Facebook and Instagram. Afterward, you want to reach a bigger audience by using Pinterest.
That’s where a lot of new bloggers get organic traffic from.
Before starting my Christian blog, I did not even know what Pinterest really was. All I knew was that my best friend and many other women used it for inspiration.
But once I started doing my research about Christian blogging I was introduced to the world of Pinterest and quickly started using the platform on a daily basis.
It quickly became the most effective way to promote my blog out of all the social media platforms. And I share more on that later.
Step 5) Learn how to do SEO
Of course, it would not be a complete guide on how to start a Christian blog if I didn’t cover the most challenging topic of all.
Search engine optimization also called SEO.
SEO is the art of optimizing your blog posts for big search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The goal here is to create content that ranks (high) on those search engines and can be found by people all over the world.
Why is that so important?
Because people that search for something on Google are already looking for the content you provide and therefore much more engaged once they find the answer on your blog.
These readers tend to subscribe to your email list, buy your products and use your affiliate links. Which is how you make money as a Christian blogger.
However, SEO is one of the more challenging skills to learn when you first start out as a blogger. In order to become an SEO pro, you need to master two things, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO refers to everything you can do to improve your own blog.
It entails things like improving site speed, optimizing keywords for your blog posts, and interlinking blog posts so that readers stay on your site longer.
You can find a lot of information on that online for free or take courses by successful bloggers who have mastered it.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is harder to figure out.
Here you have to find ways to link to your blog from other websites, which in return helps increase your credibility and domain authority in Google’s eyes.
Learning SEO took me a while but ended up being the best use of my time and money. I share more on who I worked with below as well.
How I make money with my Christian blog
The journey to making money with my Christian blog was not easy and certainly did not happen overnight.
It took me exactly one year after starting justinemfulama.com until I received my first check if we disregard the few dollars I made on Amazon prior.
That’s when I joined Mediavine, an advertising network that professional bloggers can join once their website traffic hits 50,000 sessions within a 30-day period.
It might sound easy, but it definitely is not.
See, in order to get 50,000 sessions in a month, you need to have at least 1,650 sessions per day. That means 1,650 different people need to visit your blog in one day. That is wild!
For someone who was used to seeing maybe 250-300 people a day that sounded impossible. Now I’m well over that number and still ask myself how.
But it all started with one blog post: “10 Godly Signs that He Is The One“. I posted that post in June 2018 and it took off on Pinterest shortly after.
One of my Pinterest pins went viral thanks to the Pinterest Strategies course. It really opened my eyes to how Pinterest works and why it is the best platform for bloggers to promote on.
Within a few days after implementing the things I learned in the course and creating pins according to the formula, I was suddenly at 1,000 page views per day and shocked.
I immediately started piggybacking on the post and wrote a few more posts that talked about being single, dating, and relationships. A topic I am quite familiar with.
After 6 weeks I finally hit 25,000 sessions per month and applied for Mediavine (back in 2018 the threshold was lower)
Sounds like a breakthrough story to you? Well, it’s not!
Reality is, by the time my first blog post took off I had already invested around $1,000 USD into blogging material. I purchased e-books, courses, and other stuff to learn about how to start a Christian blog that makes money.
Because no matter how good of a writer you are, blogging requires different writing skills.
There are techniques and principles you need to understand in order to craft practical and informative content. And there are even more rules about how to do marketing for your blog.
That’s why I tell anybody that is wondering how to become a Christian blogger, that you have to invest in learning as soon as possible. Trying to figure it out by yourself will only cost you a lot of time.
Instead, learn how successful Christian blogs do it by taking different courses. Here are two of my favorite:
Becoming a good blogger lies in knowing and understanding your readers. And for that you need to pay attention to the following two points:
- Where does your audience spend time
- What are they searching for?
- What type of Pins perform the best in your niche?
Thankfully, I learned all about Pinterest in the Pinteresting Strategies e-book, which was my personal catapult to Blogging success.
In it, she teaches a detailed pinning strategy for both manual and scheduled pinning.
Carly herself hasn’t been blogging for that long, I believe it’s been three years, but she has optimized her pinning strategy so well, that she now makes well over 5 figures a month as a mommy blogger.
In Pinteresting Strategies, she goes over seemingly very detailed information on how to create attention-grabbing Pins, master Pinterest Keyword analysis, and uses Google Analytics to create multiple viral pins.
She does that with a lot of width and fun and if you subscribe to her Newsletter you will quickly learn that she is a Christian. Whoop whoop.
So, if you have wanted to start your own Christian blog that makes money, definitely check out her Pinterest e-book.
SEO
Quite frankly, I struggled with off-page SEO in the beginning and did not know how to improve it until I came across “Easy Backlinks for SEO”.
I hesitated for a long time before buying it because a lot of times in the blogging world people will endorse a product just so that they can make money from their commissions.
But that book truly delivered on its promise and taught me stuff I had NEVER read anywhere else. That’s when you know it was worth the money.
And thanks to “Easy Backlinks for SEO”, I increased my traffic by 140% and surpassed $1,000 USD in ad income per month.
Within just 3 months I started ranking on page 1 of Google for multiple high-traffic keywords, which brought in tons of more traffic.
And even though, keeping up with SEO can be a lot of work, it’s the single most effective strategy to build passive income.
Because a lot of traffic means higher ad income, which is a nice way to make money as a Christian blogger without working 40 hours a week.
So, once you are ready to take your blog to the next level, then you will have to start focusing on SEO and for that honestly, there is no one better to get started with than Debbie and her SEO books.
Well, this is all I have to share on how to start a Christian blog that makes money for now. I love updating this post with any new tips and tricks I learn on my blogging journey.
But if you ever have specific questions about Christian blogging, then feel free to email me at: contact@justinemfulama.com
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