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Buy Me a Coffee hails itself as “the best way for creators and artists to accept support and membership from their fans.” Today, we're going to talk about whether that's truly the case.

When we're talking about memberships, Patreon is the first name that comes to mind, but Patreon really hasn't figured out the “casual supporter” dilemma – ie. the reader or subscriber that might love what you're doing, but doesn't want to be locked in to a monthly subscription.

Buy Me a Coffee has made strides recently to become more membership focused, but at it's core what makes it worth it for creators is that it's a very easy method to give your audience a way to say thanks. As they note, “In just a couple of taps, your fans can make the payment (buy you a coffee) and leave a message. They don’t even have to create an account!”

Jeremy and I put a lot of time into This Week in Blogging and so we set up our own Buy Me a Coffee account (though you'll notice that we went for the “Buy Me a Beer” option based on what we like sipping on!). Thus far, it's been a fantastic way for us to not only bring in extra revenue to support the project, but also to hear from subscribers directly about the value they're receiving.

Besides the income, which is both humbling and appreciated, the emotional boost that you get when a new supporter takes the time to throw a few bucks your way is immense, and that's part of the reason we're big fans.

If you are thinking about starting a blog (perhaps a 2nd or 3rd blog), or run a site that is not monetized, you may be thinking the question we all have on our minds: how do I make money blogging?

While we will be the first to admit that there is no one-size-fits-all business model for blogs, as the field is truly quite versatile, when we stopped to think of it we realized there are five main models that blogs follow to earn revenue.

So in this one, we wanted to take a broad look at the most common business models blogs have, share some pros and cons of each, and explain why the best model of all may be doing a bit of everything!

Note: While income potentials vary, we will try and equate models with each other by using the Revenue per 1,000 impressions (RPM) term. While there is no hard and fast rule that Model [X] will always make RPM [Y], we will fill the gaps in with our experiences of what we have seen in the industry.