Zoe Griffin, 27, makes £80,000 a year from celebrity blog zoegriffin.co.uk

I fell in love with blogging when I was the celebrity and showbiz columnist at The Sunday Mirror. After two years building up the column and testing the waters by blogging for the newspaper, I decided to go it alone. In October 2009, I launched zoegriffin.co.uk with the aim of attracting readers by publishing gossip before anyone else.

In a year I’ve gone from zero to 100,000 unique users a month, through a combination of being in the right place at the right time and hard work. To launch the site, I held a party and invited celebrities that resulted in lots of coverage. Now I attend celebrity events every night and spend at least eighteen hours a day blogging. But it pays off. When Leona Lewis did a book signing at Waterstones and was dramatically attacked, I filmed the whole event and it was picked up in every national newspaper, and was all over TV.

Making money out of a blog is complicated. Approximately 40% of my revenue is from adverts. Depending on the size of the ad, I can charge between £500 to £1000 a month. I make approximately £200 a month through affiliate schemes like Skimlinks and Buy.at, where you pick banner ads and internal links to online stores and earn commission if someone buys as a result.

As a consultant, I charge an hourly rate to write blogs for fashion and beauty brands and earn anything from £500 to £1500 a month for each. I am advising a new lifestyle website www.gocitygirl.com about ways to get girls engaged with gossip, where I charge an hourly rate of £100/hr. I organise celebrity parties where I get paid between £2500 and £5000. I am often a talking head on TV programmes and Breakfast News, which is £100-£150 a time. I write features about celebrity destinations for Ryanair magazine which is a free holiday and approximately £400.

What I do isn’t rocket science. You can do it too if you work out what you are good at and establish yourself as the best in your field. People pay for what they cannot do themselves. Also, make a plan of what you want to achieve from your site, identifying potential advertisers and people in need of your expert subject. Keep going back to that plan. Stop making excuses. Just do it!

zoegriffin.co.uk

Make money from blogging