Welcome new bloggers to my new series of Wix Blogging which I thought to start to help you decide if Wix is good for blogging or not, and how much can you earn with a Wix blog.
This blog post is a classical example of the Wix Blog, which I have been using since 2019 and now it has been 2 years since I started blogging on Wix . I have tried multiple templates, designs, coding and new features of the Wix Blog and I am still exploring more page designs for my website to increase my earnings.
I will try to answer the most common queries that you might have before starting your blogs on the Wix website builder.
This article might not be the ultimate guide for you to compare Wix with other website builders like WordPress and SquareSpace but will definitely give you an example of the earning potential of a small Wix blog website.
Note: I am not an expert in blogging and still exploring further so you can just use this article as a reference of starting your blog on Wix.
Why did I choose Wix for Blogging?
Let's start with why did I even think of starting a blogging website. I work in I.T sector and my profession is related to application development and the operations so I had an idea of earning money by displaying ads on a website, and I started exploring further on it.
While I was exploring on how to create a blogging website, I started getting Wix ads on various platforms like Youtube videos and multiple websites on which I was watching videos and reading articles. I was part of the targeted audience placement ads, which you might have also noticed in the recent years that how you start getting the ads based on your interests and browsing history. It diverted my attention to a particular Wix advertisement of starting a website for free on Wix and I just thought of giving it a try.
How did I start Blogging on Wix?
After watching multiple advertisements on how easy it is to start a website on Wix for free, I just signed up on Wix as it was exhausting for me to understand how to integrate the domain, hosting, content management with WordPress.
So I created my free Wix website with a quick signup and one of the available templates, this free website was part of Wix subdomain with extension as wixsite.com/<your site name>.
When I started researching further on how to monetize the Wix website by displaying ads from various platforms like Google AdSense, media.net or with affiliate marketing from platforms like Amazon associates, I realised that I will need to have a domain connected to my website for it to be successful. Otherwise, it would have been too difficult to get your website optimised stand out on search engines and attract enough users which is the criteria for approval from various ad networks.
Then I started checking on how to buy a domain for a Wix website and was presented with multiple domain registrars available on the internet (like GoDaddy, Namecheap etc), however at the same time I was getting mails and notifications from Wix to become a premium member including a free domain by Wix at 50% discount. I remember comparing the price with Wordpress (with separate hosting and content management) and found that Wix was a cheaper option at that time.
So I became a premium member of Wix at 50% discount and got the domain name without any additional cost for free. My first payment for the Wix premium membership got deducted and now I had a website with my own selected domain name on the internet.
My advice: Consider buying domain from independent domain registrars like GoDaddy and not Wix as it becomes easier for you to migrate from Wix to WordPress later on if the need be.
How did I start making money from the Wix blogs?
The fastest and the easiest option to start money with blogging on Wix website is to get your website registered on Google AdSense and use it to monetize your website. Google AdSense does not have any minimum visitors criteria like some of the other ad networks.
Wix has multiple options to display google ads on your Wix website pages and blogs.
Got my Wix website approved for Google AdSense
First of all, I read all the Google AdSense articles on AdSense help page before signing up for AdSense. You need to ensure that your Website design and content of the pages are according to their best practices.
I optimized my website for SEO (search engine optimization). You will find various Wix articles on how to prepare your Wix website and the blogs for the SEO. Follow all the recommendations by Wix to ensure that your website is ready to get approved.
Once I had enough content on the website (for example 15-20 blogs) and my website had few blogs listed on google, I applied and activated my Google AdSense account.
I think I got approval from Google Adsense after a month. It does take time for Google Adsense to review and approve a new website. If it takes longer for you, try to contact them from their help page as your website might be violating some of the their policies.
Once my AdSense account was activated, I placed the Google ads on the Wix blogs.
I explored the other options to monetize my Wix website
You can also earn money with affiliate marketing networks like Amazon Associate, Rakuten and CJ affiliate programmes which have individual advertisers available. You can apply for particular advertisers for example Microsoft if you are a software blogger or Jabra if you do the headphones reviews etc. I used Amazon associate and Rakuten as well on my Wix website.
There are other ad networks which optimize the layout and have higher CTR for example mediavine, Ezoic etc where you can also register your Wix website, however most of them have a minimum monthly users requirement which you will need to fulfil before getting your website approved. Unfortunately my Wix website does not fulfil their criteria yet.
Note: The key thing to be successful depends on the kind of blogs that you publish and testing different ads network and affiliate marketing in your blogs. For some, affiliate marketing works better than the Google Adsense. So keep trying and exploring further on improving your earnings.
How much have I spent on Wix website until now?
Let me just give you the estimate of money that I have spent on the Wix website over the 3 years now. I started blogging on Wix in year 2019 and I have already paid for the year 2021-2022 in advance as Wix deducts the payment for the upcoming year upfront.
Year 1 : Wix provided me the 50% discount for creating my first website. Do check if there is a first time discount plan for you before becoming a premium member. I paid US $75 for the first year.
Year 2 and Year 3: For the next 2 consecutive years 2020 and 2021, I have paid US $150 for premium unlimited plan and US $15 for the custom domain.
So in total, I have spent around US $405 on Wix website from 2019 to 2022 (3 years)
Check the Wix premimum plans to determine which works best for you. For example, you might want to go ahead with Wix pro and VIP plans based on your requirements.
How much did I earn from Wix Blogging?
My bank statements show that I have earned around 440 US dollars from my website's ad networks until Oct-2021 (2 years). I spent around US $240 ( $75 + $165) for the first two years, so total return on my Wix website's investment is US $200.
The earnings from a website is totally subjective and depends on the multiple factors as mentioned below.
I just wanted to give you an overview of my experience, so please do not take this as a definite guide to determine your annual or monthly income.
My lessons learnt through blogging:
The earning from your blogs depends on the content of your blogs or niche. If they are unique and have long tail popular search keywords, they will rank higher in Google and hence give you more earnings.
The website's layout and your blogs ability to keep your users engaged decrease the bounce rate of your website and ultimately increase the blogs earnings.
The frequency of the blogs and the internal backlinks also keep your website updated and your users subscribed.
The backlinks also matter, if your blogs are in any of the forums of the products website or discussions, they are going to rank higher in search engines and hence yield higher returns.
Lastly, the CTR and CPM of the ads on your blogs depend on the content and the keywords used in your blogs.
Is Wix good for blogging?
I have not used any other website builder yet and have been associated with Wix since the beginning my blogging career so I cannot compare Wix vs Wordpress as such. I can provide you the pros and cons of using Wix for the blogging.
Pros:
Wix has a simple user interface to start with and you can select from some of the pre-designed templates to start your blogging. When I started in 2019 there were not many templates but now they have released lot of templates to choose from.
If you are just into blogging, you don't have to modify much in your Wix website layout with pre-designed template and then just do some modifications using Wix ADI (platform to design and customize your website).
Wix Blog has improved a lot in these 2 years where they released lot of new features related to Blog feeds, images SEO, tagging, advanced SEO patterns and introducing HTML widgets for the blogs.
Wix has a dedicated forum for the Wix blogs where you can post your queries or issues and the moderators and experts usually reply within a short period.
Wix customer care response is also pretty good in terms of response time and they also have the chat option available to you.
Wix help articles have good tutorials, blogs and instructions to keep you going in the blogging journey.
Cons:
Once you select the website template and use the Wix ADI for any customizing, you might loose the pages customizing if you decide to apply another template to your website. For example, I had done some coding with Wix velo for creating a tool in one of my website pages and now I cannot select another template to be applied to my website as I will loose that page and will have to re-design that in new template.
There is only one page layout for the Wix Blogs as of now in 2021. All your posts appear have the URL as https://www.<yourwebsite>.com/post/<post-name>, which means the design of all the posts page is only one and you cannot apply different designs to different blog posts.
Wix does not have any pre-defined sticky plug-ins (unlike WordPress) which you can use to display the related posts on the sidebar or to display the sticky ads, so it does have the drawback of loosing the bounce rate and money due to that.
I have just posted 40 blogs in 2 years and you know my earnings now, I also experimented a lot in between. I am still not there in terms of my targets so probably I need to explore further with the website layout and write more blogs
Wix vs Wordpress
I have not used WordPress yet so cannot really compare the differences but from the first blogger perspective and being a blogger on Wix, I can provide you my view based on pros and cons mentioned above.
Why Wix Blog over Wordpress?
I think it is much easier to start blogging on Wix than Wordpress since Wix provides all the services : hosting, domain and content management, so a beginner does not have to worry about choosing the different vendors after comparing them and signing up for each of them.
Wix Blog has an excellent user interface. If you are not looking for blogs monetization and just starting a business (e.g restaurant, mechanic, classes websites etc) on Wix website with additional blogs, Wix might be an easy and cheap option for you without having a need to involve a website developer.
Wix has improved a lot over the time with new features related to advanced SEO for the blogs, images and multiple sections.
Though they don't have the sticky sidebars plugins directly but you can still create them indirectly by pinning the elements and doing some basic Velo coding provided by them in the tutorials (see the sidebar on your right if you are reading this article on desktop)
They do have a proactive Blog development team which releases new features frequently and responds on the features requests by their users.
Why WordPress over Wix Blog?
WordPress is in the blogging game since a long time while Wix is comparatively new. Most of the blogging websites run on WordPress and WordPress would definitely have much more templates and themes to choose for your website.
You will get more troubleshooting articles, recommendations and user experiences in various forums related to the WordPress blogging.
WordPress has different sidebars and templates which would help you in decreasing the bounce rate of your website.
I am not sure on the SEO capabilities comparison of both but I have seen my Wix blogs appearing on the first page of the google results. It might be the unique content of my blogs or the backlinks of my blogs in Samsung or Google forums which resulted in the great SEO.
Let us know in the comments section below if you would like us to publish more content on the Wix websites or blogging, we are happy to help you decide or get started on Wix.