We have been blogging for more than five years, and throughout that time, we have earned more than one million dollars.  In order to help you learn from our successes and mistakes and increase the speed at which you generate revenue from your blog, I would like to share with you my expertise on how to make money blogging in 2025.

How Blogging Can Earn You Money
You've seen that blogs may be a real source of income.  You're prepared to take a risk and give it your best after witnessing how amazing it is to be your own boss and relish the flexibility of working from home.
We do want you to be prepared for the task that blogging presents, though.  Making a full-time living from writing, like we do, is absolutely feasible, but it takes a lot of effort to get there.
Although it's not as easy as writing articles and expecting to get paid overnight, anyone can succeed if they know what it takes.  Blogging is a very viable startup, even if you have limited capital.
We'll outline the same process we employed to develop our six-figure blog and walk you through the process of earning money from blogging below.
These strategies have been shown to work for all niches and are simple and effective.  A degree or work experience is not necessary to succeed as a blogger—just any useful information will suffice!


1) Pick a Reliable, Lucrative Niche
A small warning: you are far more likely to stop blogging completely before your site has had a chance to establish itself if you select a topic for your website based only on its profitability.
Everybody has a passion project that, when done well, has the potential to generate revenue.  We know a lot of bloggers that earn money by discussing everything from coffee (yes, really) to personal development and horse training!
Without doing some study beforehand, it is unlikely that you would get the inspiration to start a blog one day and have a domain and website constructed the next.
However, there is a huge market for gardening knowledge sharing, a website devoted to producing tomatoes well, or even just talking about the many tomato types. Well, we're making progress now.
Investigate whether your passion may be transformed into a business that can both make money and keep you feeling inspired every single day.

2) Create a Blog That You Own
How to generate income from a self-hosted blog
Your website must be self-hosted.  Yes, that does seem like a very clear-cut, zero-tolerance policy.
A decade ago, or even five years ago, you might have been able to get away with establishing a website on a shared platform like Blogger, gaining some followers, and learning a few tactics to start making some cash.
Perhaps some businesses contacted you via social media or something similar, and it simply kind of happened to be a source of cash for you.
There are a lot more individuals blogging these days, large companies have begun to include a "blog" area on their websites in an effort to better engage with their clientele, and it's more difficult than ever to locate a blog on the internet and figure out who you want to follow.

However, it is precisely the reason you require a self-hosted website.  This allows you the greatest amount of control over your website and its content, which is crucial if you want to make your blog a profitable venture.
It's crucial because without authority over your own material, it's impossible to generate revenue!  You are in charge of determining what may and cannot be included in an article, where it appears, how much you promote it (and what you promote inside it), and other guidelines on a self-hosted website.
Since it's THEIR platform, shared hosting may occasionally limit what you may discuss.

In summary, having a self-hosted website is essential if you want to earn money writing, and for optimal use, we always suggest WordPress as the editing platform.  It takes a lot of work to have your website developed, created, and published, but once it's finished, you won't need much work going forward.

 

 Develop a Strategy for Monetization
You will initially have over 5,000 ideas for potential revenue streams while you are first creating your blog.
You're considering ways to earn money from businesses by reviewing their goods or creating and selling t-shirts with catchy slogans.  You're considering authoring e-books (or print books), giving speeches in front of an audience, getting paid to appear on television, or even getting paid to just promote other people's goods!
These are all excellent (and legitimate) ideas, and there are countless methods to monetize your site.
To keep you laser-focused and focused on what has been shown to work time and time again, I want to concentrate on the "big four."
I will even tell you which blogging niches are most successful with each form of monetization. 😉
Ideal for blogs on food and lifestyle.
Display advertising are the quickest and most straightforward approach to monetize your site.  These are advertisements that appear in a website's header, sidebar, footer, context, etc.
You receive a little payment for each impression or click that your viewers make on such advertisements.
However, you'll need a ton of visitors if you want to make a lot of money with display advertisements.
For a few thousand bucks a month, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of page views.
To begin using display advertisements on your website, you have a few choices.
You could start with Google Adsense, but because they pay so poorly, we don't advise it.
I would advise delaying joining AdThrive, Mediavine, or Monometric.
You will receive far higher compensation on these premium ad networks.
Marketing through affiliates
Ideal for specialized blogs, health and wellness, and personal finance.
Though more challenging than advertisements, this is still a fantastic method to immediately start earning money from your site.
Partnering with a business, product, or brand that you personally use or that your audience would find useful is known as affiliate marketing.
Using YouTube, social media, or blog articles, you advertise a product or service and are compensated each time a customer makes a purchase or converts (signs up).
Depending on the item or service you are marketing, payouts might be anywhere from $0.25 to hundreds of dollars.
Although affiliate networks host and administer several affiliate programs in one location, businesses frequently run their affiliate programs directly through their websites.
Although there are many affiliate programs available to bloggers, these are our top picks.
PARTNERSHIPS

How to use sponsorships to monetize your blog
Ideal for almost any type of blogging theme.
This is by far our favorite method of earning money from blogging, and it helps the majority of bloggers earn thousands of dollars a month.
In some months, sponsorships alone have brought in over $30,000.
One example of a sponsorship would be Lebron James and Nike.  Lebron represents Nike as an ambassador.
In essence, you are doing the same thing when you collaborate with a company or brand on a sponsorship.
This is referred to as influencer marketing.  Once you have an audience built up and have gained their trust they are much more likely to trust you.



The options are endless and the more creative you can get when reaching out and working with brands the better.
Just like affiliate marketing, there are many influencer/sponsorship networks to start with:
Perfect for more advanced bloggers that know exactly what their readers want.
One of the most profitable ways to make money blogging is by selling your own digital products and services.
Things like eBooks, printables, courses, worksheets, binders, etc. can all be created and sold to your readers.
The key to being successful in selling your own products or services is asking your readers exactly what they want/need and creating it for them.
A good way to understand your readers a little better is to run a survey once in a while.  Or even just send them an email saying,
“Hey what’s going on?  What are you struggling with?  How can I help you today?”
Once you understand your readers like the back of your hand creating products and selling them to your avatar can be very lucrative.

BONUS – FREELANCING
Perfect for new bloggers to earn money fast and learn the ropes.
A really excellent way to make money online is by offering up freelance blogging services.
These can include:
A great place to look for this kind of work is right in Facebook groups, job boards, Upwork, Freelancer, and WeWorkRemotely.
How To Make Money Blogging Step-By-Step
how to make money blogging mindset
 

1) Choose The Right Blogging Niche
This is honestly the make-or-break point for every single blogger as they start their journey, but not for the reason you might think.
It’s not going to be the wrong niche if you decide to start a blog about raising your new pet puppy, thinking you’re going to sell every dog product under the sun to new and inexperienced puppy owners who need a fast way to clean carpets and a little more sleep at night.
It IS going to be the wrong niche, however, if you hate puppies.  No matter how much income potential there is, if you utterly despise the topic and have no passion for it, you’ll never see things take off.
But there are some specific questions you’ll want to vet out before you make a firm decision on what your blog will be about.  Let’s look at each one.
We highly recommend Niche Site Academy as your go to source for growing a niche site.

1. Is there money in the niche?
Let’s think in terms of earning by affiliate marketing for this question.
Is there money to be had recommending puppy products to new adopters, or baby gear to brand new parents?  Absolutely.  The number of products out there that you could review and recommend is almost limitless, with more coming down the pipeline almost daily.
But what about that example we used earlier, blogging about the different color shades of ripe tomatoes?
There *might* be money in that niche if you put a spin on that topic and, say, review those different varieties of tomatoes that give those unique colors and you can sell seed packets or plants through gardening companies that sell online.  So it’s not impossible to find a way to blog about how much you love the different shades of reds to purples that tomatoes may come in, and still make some money from it.
But there’s more to consider than just “is there money to be had,” so let’s keep going with these two examples.

2. Do you have experience or expertise in the niche?
This one is a pretty simple thing to understand:  you can’t expect to successfully blog about what products are best for newborn babies if you’re a 12-year old boy that obviously has never been a parent before.  You’re really just going to be taking stabs in the dark no matter what you do, and it will likely show in your content.
You can’t expect to sell people on why they should buy one tomato variety over the other if you’ve never grown a garden before.  This is also going to be evident in your writing.
Passion for a topic and the opportunity to make money in the niche only go so far if you literally have no clue what you’re talking about.

3. Is there enough demand?
Baby gear is a VERY high demand niche because babies are born every day.  You will not find it too hard to get new customers making affiliate purchases through your site on a regular basis!
A blog that discusses, I don’t know, the mating habits of red squirrels, on the other hand, probably isn’t exactly a high-demand topic.
You might be able to make an absolute killing, selling high-end (i.e. expensive) binoculars, outdoor gear, cameras to capture those, um, special moments, etc.  The affiliate commissions from those could easily stack up to a nice number per customer.
The problem is that very few people are going to be THAT into squirrel-watching, so while one customer alone might earn you, say, $100… I’d be surprised if you get more than 1 or 2 customers per month if that.  So you’ll likely never earn what you’re hoping to, just because there aren’t enough potential customers in that market.

4. Is it a passion of yours?
Listen, I’m glad you love squirrel-watching.  The GOOD news about that, is that your passion, your absolute fascination with that topic WILL SHINE in your content.
THAT is invaluable when it comes to making money blogging.  If a reader can FEEL your emotion, your intensity, your excitement about something, they’re far more like to feel those things themselves.  THAT is where the cha-ching comes from.
If you’re not a parent or your kids are teens and you’re SO OVER BABIES… good luck.
Unless you’re an absolutely incredible (fiction) writer, your writing about why one car seat is safer than another, or why these 5 bedding sets are perfect for an adorable elephant-themed nursery will likely come across quite dry and fact-based.  Readers will be able to tell that you’re writing this content purely to write it, not because it’s something you’re truly passionate about.