This post was originally published in January of 2018. Here’s is the updated version.

How to Make Money Blogging About Real Estate

If you’ve read 5 Reasons Every Agent Needs a Strong Real Estate Blog, you already know about the game-changing benefits a blog provides to your real estate business. But there’s one spectacular benefit we haven’t discussed in-depth: how your blog can become an income stream all its own! Get ready to learn how to make money blogging about real estate.

4 Ways to Make Money Blogging About Real Estate

People typically make money blogging in one or more of the following ways:

• Membership content – You offer subscriptions to exclusive content
• Sponsored content – You are paid to promote products or services through your content
• Ads – You sell advertising slots on your blog to other businesses
• Affiliate links – You link to certain products and are compensated when a member of your audience purchases the product through your link

The method(s) you select depend on your blog’s focus and your goals. Are you writing only about selling and buying? Are you including posts for homeowners interested in DIY repairs and upgrades? Maybe you’re focusing on investors, helping them make smart buys, manage their portfolio, and find vendors to service their properties.

Let’s look at the different ways to make money blogging and see how they fit with the focus and goals of your blog.

Make Money Blogging with Membership Content

With the membership content model, your members pay a monthly, quarterly, or annual subscription fee to receive access to a library of information. This model is really popular in the health and fitness sector where readers will pay a monthly fee for fresh meal plans and workouts. It’s a perfect fit for that industry.

CoStar is one example of a membership content model in the real estate industry. You pay a periodic fee for ongoing access to constantly updated commercial real estate data like sale and lease information.

As an agent, you immediately run into a few challenges with the membership content model:

1. There is a lot of free, up-to-date real estate information already available online
2. Membership content requires constant work. You need to update your content continuously to keep providing new value to your subscribers.

Having said that, it is possible to make this model work if you have a creative idea with a not-so-cumbersome way of consistently updating your content.

Real-World Example of Membership Content

One way Key Real Estate Resources makes money blogging about real estate is by offering real estate agents monthly subscriptions to done-for-you monthly marketing packages. With DRIP by Key Real Estate Resources, you get access to fresh social media posts and newsletters, ready to share with your social media followers and client base. It’s an easy, affordable way to stay top-of-mind with your sphere, generate new leads, and convert those leads to clients!

While the membership model is possible, it is time-consuming. You have to continually pump out fresh new content, month after month. This can easily become a full-time job (as it had for us!). But when you’re busy selling homes, there are other, easier ways to make money blogging. Let’s look at other options…

Make Money Blogging with Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is exactly as it sounds. You partner with sponsors who pay you to promote their products or services on your blog.

If you have a product or service you think your readers would find useful, you should reach out to the business and offer to write a post about their product or service for a fee, usually a few hundred dollars. Naturally your post will include a plug for the company, and a thank you to them for sponsoring the post.

Before you think, “I’m not a professional writer; no one’s going to pay me to write a post,” note that this is much more about the visibility it provides the vendor than about your skill as a writer. For that reason, the vendor may want to see statistics on your blog’s views and the number of subscribers before agreeing to pay a few hundred dollars. Be prepared to share your numbers. And note that the larger your audience, the more you can charge.

And if your blog gets big enough, you’ll have companies reaching out, offering to send you ready-to-publish articles and paying you a small fee ($20-$50) to publish them! While I don’t like to crowd my blogs with too many of these, they provide a couple hundred dollars each month.

There are a few things you want to be aware of when using sponsored posts to monetize your blog:

• Only write sponsored content for products, services, and vendors you actually use, or you would recommend to your family and closest friends.
• Be honest, even about small downsides! Readers respect reviews that include a negative or two because it indicates that the reviewer isn’t completely biased. Just let your sponsor know what to expect ahead of time.
• You must legally disclose at the beginning of the post that this is sponsored content, for which you were compensated.
• Compensation may not always be money. You can negotiate for a free product or service in lieu of cash. My first-ever sponsored post for my first-ever blog was for a custom, at-home teeth whitening system. Instead of cash, I received the $199 system for free so I could try it and write about it.

Real-World Example of Sponsored Content

There is no shortage of potential sponsors in the real estate sector.

Perhaps you recently had a great experience with a roofing company. They may want to sponsor a post all about the Do’s and Don’ts of replacing a roof.

Or maybe you’re planning a move, and you need movers. Reach out to movers you (or someone you trust) has used before, and ask if they would be interested in providing you with a gratis move so you can write a review of their service on your blog.

Just think about all the vendors homeowners use, the services they provide, and how you can pair a vendor with a useful blog topic to serve your audience.  

Make Money Blogging with Ads

You should know up front that, unless you have a lot of traffic coming to your blog, you’re not going to make much money from selling ad space. On the plus side, ad income requires very little investment of any kind on your part, and you’ll enjoy increasing returns as your audience grows.

You usually sell ad space on a per-click basis. Every time one of your readers clicks on an ad, you make a small amount of money (usually somewhere between $0.50 and $5.00 depending on the advertiser).

AdSense by Google is a popular option for ads because 1) Google partners with advertisers so you deal only with Google instead of with hundreds of advertisers on an individual basis, and 2) Google tailors the ads to each individual readers’ search history, so they are more likely to present an ad that appeals to each individual reader. That will increase the number of clicks and the amount you make as ad income.  

But there is a fine balance when it comes to ads. We’ve all been to sites that have so many ads you can hardly find or reach the content. They can really detract from the reader’s experience of your blog. So tread lightly.

On a similar note, the Google Ad default programming is to insert the ads in the body of your posts where the ads are statistically most likely to be clicked. That’s good for income, but leaves you with no control over where those ads are inserted. If you want to control the experience, you’ll need to work around the default programming.

Real-World Example of Ads

I happen to use Google ads with the default settings on this site, so you can see exactly how they appear. What do you think of them? Are they intrusive? What would your readers think if they saw the ads on your blog?

My audience knows I run this blog as a stream of income, so most people are not bothered by the ads at all. They may actually wonder if I know what I’m doing if I didn’t have ads on my blog! But how would your audience feel about ads on your blog?

Do you think you’ll ever want to include ads on your blog? If so, you should consider adding them from the very beginning. As new readers find you, they probably won’t think much about the ads. But if you were to grow an audience without ads, it would be a bit jarring for them to suddenly see ads where there were none before.

If you’re ready to publish ads on your blog, check out our post on 3 easy ways to publish ads.

Make Money Blogging with Affiliate Links

Now we’re talking! In my opinion, affiliate links are the best way for agents to make money blogging. Even if you’ve decided to use one of the previously mentioned methods, you should also take advantage of affiliate links.

Here are the basics of how they work:

• You apply to be an approved affiliate marketer with multiple affiliate programs (like Amazon.com affiliates for example).
• Once approved, you can generate custom links to your affiliates’ products and services.
• You insert these links into your blog where appropriate. If you’re writing a post on home-staging for example, you can link to a bunch of Amazon home decor products that would help with staging.
• When a reader clicks on your link and buys a product through your affiliate, you receive a small commission.

I love affiliate links for real estate blogs because they are so flexible. Even if you’re only posting about buying and selling real estate (not specializing in DIY renovating property management, etc.) you still have options for linking. You can post about preparing your home to sell by fixing the nagging little repairs and link to home repair products on Amazon. Or you can post about saving for a down payment and link to Smart Asset. The opportunities are endless!

And these links are a win, win, win. Your audience gets easy access to a useful product, you earn a commission, and the vendor makes a sale. Everyone wins!

But there are also a few caveats for affiliate linking:

• Only link to vendors and products you use or would recommend to your family. Your audience will quickly stop trusting you if you link to crap or if you link to only the most expensive items to increase your commission.
• You must legally disclose your affiliate links. You’ll notice that all my posts begin with an affiliate disclosure. That’s mandatory by law.
• You won’t make money overnight, but you’ll get increasing returns over time. Once your post is published, your links exist for years to come, so you might earn a commission for the next ten years from a link you post this month. As your number of readers increases and as your SEO improves over time, your returns will continue to grow.

Real-World Example of Affiliate Links

As I mentioned, I use affiliate links on this site.

Not every link on this site is an affiliate link. Many of the products and vendors I recommend don’t belong to an affiliate program, so there is no commission to collect. And many of the products and vendors I recommend are free, so there is no commission there either (but of course I’m not going to let that prevent me from recommending a great product that would benefit my audience!).

If you’ve clicked any of my links to sites like Bluehost web hosting or Amazon.com, thank you! You’re financially supporting this blog so I can continue to provide tons of free information for agents looking to create multiple income streams to keep their businesses growing in any market! And yes, those links are real, working examples of affiliate links.

Ready to start making money with affiliate links? Sign up with these 5 affiliate networks.

Don’t have a Blog Yet?

You can’t make money blogging if you don’t have a blog!

If you have a blog page, but haven’t been consistently posting, make a commitment to invest in consistent posts. At least one post per week. Agents often ask what they could possibly have to post about every week. If you need some ideas to get started, just enter your email address below to get my list of 100+ Blog Post Topics for Realtors® delivered to your inbox!

Need more of a head start than just a list of blog topics? You can purchase complete real estate blog content calendars on Etsy! Topics have already been scheduled, keywords have already been researched, and titles have already been crafted for you! You’re several steps closer to having a successful real estate blog.

Now…what if you already have your own website, but no blog page? A blog page can easily be added in no time! I have step-by-step instructions for adding a blog page to your WordPress website in just 5 minutes. If you’re not using WordPress, you may want to re-think your web strategy. WordPress (which is free, by the way), has become the industry standard for content management. You can read more about it on the Resources page.

If you don’t have a website of your own yet, now is the time to get one! Check out How to Build a Real Estate Website for completely free step-by-step instructions on building your own website. It’s easier than you might expect, and DYI-ing your site will save you thousands of dollars!

Get a Small Win

Great victories are made possible by small wins. Before you move on with the rest of your day, get a small win!

Your Small Win Challenge is to select which of the four ways you’re going to use to make money blogging. And yes, you can choose more than one. Let me know in the comments which method(s) you’re choosing. If I can see which methods appeal to most readers, I can focus future posts around the details of maximizing your profits using those methods.