How to Make Money With A Blog?

There are a number of reasons why you might be looking to learn how to make money with a blog.

Perhaps you’re deadly serious about turning this into your full-time gig, generating enough income to support yourself while ditching the 9-5 in order to throw yourself fully into something that you’re incredibly passionate about.

Maybe you’re hoping to start a blog as a side hustle, pulling in a little extra spending money while still having enough time to tend to your other commitments.

Or perhaps the only financial goal you have for your blogging career is to cover your expenses, ensuring you can always pay for things like WordPress web hosting and your blog domain name without being out of pocket.

Whatever the case may be for you, this guide is here to help.

Over the past few years, I’ve learned how to successfully monetize my portfolio of blogs and content websites to the tune of several million dollars in revenue using the same tools, techniques, and strategies that I’m about to share with you here.

Below, I’ll show you the best ways to make money from blogging, as well as answers to the most frequently asked questions I receive from bloggers looking to turn their projects into income-generating machines.

How to Make Money From a Blog? 6 Simple Strategies

Below, I’ll show you the best ways to make money from blogging, as well as answers to the most frequently asked questions I receive from bloggers looking to turn their projects into income-generating machines. So, without further ado, let’s find out these strategies. 

1. Choose a Profitable Blog Niche

If you know that you want to make money from blogging but you haven’t yet started, your first step should be to choose a subject to write about that provides you with some solid monetization opportunities.

The truth is that, with a little creativity and ingenuity, it’s possible to make at least some revenue from just about any topic you can think of.

However, if you’re really going to make the big bucks, it pays to choose a niche that is typically known to be a good money-earner.

Good examples of profitable blog niches include:

That’s not to say that earning potential should be your only consideration.

As you’ll learn in my guide to choosing a profitable blog niche, the best blog subject to pick is the one that offers revenue opportunities, and also, it should be on something you’re genuinely passionate about writing about. 

After all, without that passion, you’re simply not going to maintain the kind of motivation needed to turn your blog into a long-term moneymaker.

Once you’ve chosen your niche, learned how to come up with great blog post ideas that people want to read about, and actively created some content, it’s time to start actively monetizing that content.

Here are a few options that will allow you to do that:

2. Sign Up For Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing has long been one of the most popular tried and tested methods for making money with a blog.

For the unfamiliar, it’s a process that involves referring your readers to third-party companies and earning a commission every time one of those readers purchases a product or service from those companies.

To give you an example of how this might work, let’s say you’re running a cooking blog, and you mention a particular cooking utensil that helps you to create the perfect soufflé.

You link out to that product on a site like Amazon and get paid a fee every time somebody follows that link and buys the utensil.

When it comes to finding affiliate marketing opportunities, you have three main options:

A. Amazon Associates Program

I doubt that there’s a single active Internet user on the planet who hasn’t at least heard of Amazon.

The colossal online marketplace accounts for 45% of the US eCommerce market, with close to 96 million Americans owning an Amazon Prime Membership. 

What’s more, with a combined total of around 350 million products for sale via a combination of Amazon’s own products and those offered by third-party sellers through Amazon Marketplace, there’s an enormous array of products relating to almost every niche you can think of.

It’s for this reason that Amazon Associates, the company’s own affiliate marketing program, remains one of the most popular ways for bloggers to make money.

The best part is that it’s incredibly straightforward to get to grips with and doesn’t cost a penny to get started.

After signing up to Amazon Associates for free, you can add in the URL of your blog so that the system knows where your referral links are coming from. 

You’ll then be asked to create a profile to give Amazon some contextual information about your blog, such as your overall subject matter, how you build links, and any other blog monetization strategies you may be using. 

Finally, you can choose how you want Amazon to pay you, whether that’s by cheque (with a minimum payout threshold of $100) or by direct deposit into your bank. You can even opt for an Amazon gift card, both of which have a minimum payout threshold of just $10.

With your payment and tax information added in, you can then search Amazon’s bottomless product database as you normally would when shopping for yourself. Only this time, you’re looking for products that tie into your niche.

If you were hosting a blog about tennis, for example, you might decide to write a post about your favorite tennis rackets. 

You’d find that racket on Amazon, and use the Amazon Associates site stripe to grab either a text link, an image-based link, or a native ad such as the one shown in the picture below, then add that into your content. 

From then on, whenever somebody clicks that link and buys a tennis racket, you get a commission on that fee. 

So far, so simple, but if I’d remiss if I didn’t say that you might find it a good idea to wait until you have some content and a decent readership before using Amazon Associates, as you’re required to drive at least three sales within the first 180 days in order to continue with the program.

B. Affiliate Marketing Networks 

After Amazon, the next best places to look for affiliate opportunities are affiliate marketing networks, such as Commission Junction, Impact.com, and ShareASale.

Sign up with any one of these networks, and you can apply to be an affiliate partner for any number of brands, then manage multiple affiliate programs from one dashboard.

After signing up with Commission Junction, for example, you’ll first have to complete a quick on-boarding process in which you tell them everything they need to know about you, your blog, and your payment/tax information.

From there, you’ll be able to search through a huge list of advertisers to partner up with, giving you the flexibility to earn income from multiple brands via one single platform.

C. Partner Independently With Brands

Finally, if a brand or service that you use has its own affiliate program, there’s nothing to stop you from signing up directly to their programs. 

Companies in the tech, digital, and web markets are ideal for this as many of them offer some pretty high payouts for referrals, making them well worth the investment. 

3. Use Display Ads 

After affiliate ads, the next best approach to monetize your blog is to display ads on your site and around your content via an ad network. 

Of the multiple networks out there, Google Adsense is by far the most widely used, boasting some 2 million publishers and generating billions of dollars in revenue each year. 

The way it works is pretty straightforward:

After heading to the Google Adsense website, click the ‘Get Started’ button and log in with your existing Google account (or create one if you don’t already have one). 

You can then create a profile by adding details about yourself and your blog before entering in some payment and tax details so that you can get your payout.

Finally, you need to connect your blog to Adsense by adding a few lines of code to the backend.

If that sounds complicated, the good news is that Google has very clear instructions on how to connect your WordPress website to Adsense. Meanwhile, their own Google Site Kit tool not only manages Adsense but other helpful tools like Google Search Console and Analytics all in one place, making it one of the essential must-have WordPress plugins.

Google Adsense Approval Process

Once your site is connected to, Google takes a while to review your site and ensure that it meets the eligibility criteria for Adsense.

Google is kind of vague on its approval process, noting that the only real eligibility criteria include:

However, there are a few other things you’ll need to do to ensure your chances of approval, including:

You’ll also need to avoid posting about topics that are on Google’s Publisher Restrictions list. This includes things like:

Being approved for Adsense can take anywhere from a couple of days to two weeks. Once approved, your site will start displaying ads relevant to your individual readers, and you’ll earn 68% of the revenue generated from clicks on those ads, meaning there’s great potential to turn this into a nice little earner.

Alternatives to Google Adsense 

If you find that you’re continually rejected from Google Adsense, or you simply want to try out something different, there are a number of Google Adsense alternatives you can try, including:

4. Create a Product 

There’s no reason why you have to rely on ads and affiliate links as your only method to make money with a blog. 

You can always sell directly to your readers by creating a product that they can buy from you.

Naturally, this is pretty easy to do if you’re blogging about something creative. 

If you’re an artist, a jewelry maker, fashion designer, or photographer, for example, then why not use your platform to sell what you create?

Using a WordPress plugin like WooCommerce, you can create an online store within your blog or alternatively encourage readers to check out your products on a third-party platform like Etsy. 

You could even create tutorial content showing readers how you made a specific product and then provide readers with an opportunity to buy it at the end of each post. 

If you don’t have a specific product that would be a natural fit for you to sell via your website, there are still opportunities to make this blog monetization method work for you.

You could, for example:

Write a Book

Using platforms like Amazon KDP or IngramSpark, you can create eBooks and print-on-demand books based around your blog niche and sell them from your blog to make more money.

Create a Course

Services such as Udemy, Skillshare, and Pathwright provide you with the tools to create courses that you can sell to your readers. These can prove to be great money-makers in any number of niches, especially if you already provide how-to type content on your blog.

A blog about building websites, for example, might create a course on how to create a WordPress website, or a health and fitness blog might provide a perfect opportunity to create a course on learning how to eat healthily or start a fitness regime. 

Merchandise 

If your blog has a cool logo, tagline, or anything else that’s visual and memorable, you could always use print-on-demand companies such as Printify, Zazzle, or TeeSpring to create branded merchandise based on the things people love about your blog. 

5. Sell a Service 

Products aren’t the only things you can sell directly to your audience. 

Take some time to think about the kind of problems and questions your readers usually turn to you for help with.

What service could you offer to help them even more?

If you run a blog about marketing, running a business, or finance and you’re confident in your knowledge and ability, you could offer a consultancy service for those who want more help or advice from you than you’re able to offer in a blog.

If you’re a musician, artist, cook, photographer, graphic designer, or gardener, why not offer tuition to teach people your skills?

If you’re in the health and fitness space, are you well-equipped and qualified to offer coaching services?

In truth, this approach to making money as a blogger is probably going to take a lot more work than simply displaying ads or selling a product that you’ve already created, as you’ll have to think carefully about how your service can provide unique value and how you convince your visitors that it’s a service worth paying for, but if created and marketed well, offering a service could prove to be your blog’s biggest source of revenue. 

6. Offer Premium Content

Last but not least, if you’ve built a loyal audience who are always hungry for more content from you, you could think about monetizing at least some of that content by making it premium-only.

There are a few ways you could do this.  

You could, for example, sign-up to a service like Patreon or Ko.Fi to create a kind of members-only club where you offer exclusive content on a monthly basis to those who pay a premium fee.

If you’d prefer to keep everything in-house, you could use a WordPress plugin such as MemberPress and charge for access to exclusive members-only content, or a tool such as Leaky Paywall, which gives you the opportunity to offer each visitor access to a certain number of free blog posts before accessing the rest of your content from behind a paywall.

Keep in mind that this is another monetization method that’s going to take some serious work. If people are going to be paying you for premium content, you may need to double your efforts to provide that content in addition to your regular, free-to-access posts. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Making Money With A Blog

Q1. What should I blog about to make money?

Ans. Though topics like personal finance, parenting, and education are all profitable blog niches, the best topic to blog about is one that you’re passionate about, and that has a sizable audience of people who are interested in that topic.

Q2. How do beginner blogs make money?

Ans. Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to start making money from blogging when you’re first getting started, as the eligibility requirements are typically less than with other methods, meaning you can get started right away.

Q3. How long does it take to make money blogging?

Ans. Making money blogging is rarely a quick process. Depending on your monetization method and the amount of work you put in, it can take anywhere from 1-6 months or even longer before you start seeing any serious financial returns from your blog. 

Q4. How many views do you need to make money on a blog?

Ans. There’s no hard rule that says you need to have X amount of page views in order to monetize your blog. As long as you have valuable content and/or a valuable product/service, and as long as you have people actually visiting your blog, it’s possible to make money. That said, certain programs like Google Adsense may only approve your blog once it hits certain audience metrics.

How to Make Money With a Blog – A Final Word of Advice  

The best thing about learning how to make money as a blogger is that you’re rarely -if ever- tied to one single monetization method. 

Sure, on their own, any one of the five methods I’ve mentioned above will help you to generate revenue from their blog, but to really maximize your profits, you may find it most helpful to combine several, or even all, of these efforts.

For example, it’s entirely possible to create compelling, high-quality content that provides value to readers which features both a well-placed display ad and several relevant affiliate links. 

It’s also entirely possible to expand on that content even further by creating a book that provides readers with even more information or guidance than they’d get on your blog, and then take the most helpful content from both the blog and book and structure it into a helpful course and/or consultancy service. 

What’s more, as time goes on, your blog expands, and your audience grows, even more, unique monetization opportunities may come to the fore. 

Perhaps you start to repurpose your blog posts into videos and find that people really enjoy consuming your content in this way, meaning there might be an opportunity to build a profitable YouTube channel or podcast on the back of your blog.

Maybe your keyword research reveals trending questions that people want answers to or problems they need solving, which can generate ideas for new eBooks or courses.

It may even be that your blog becomes so successful that you’re able to partner with various brands, offering sponsored posts or similar content in which you get paid for directly promoting those brands to your audience. 

Whatever the case may be for you, remember that the true secret to making money with a blog is to keep creating high-value, high-quality content and posting on a regular basis. 

After all, it’s this content that drives visitors to your site in the first place and makes all of these blog monetization opportunities possible in the first place. 

To sum up, then, focus on your content, keep an open mind and an eager eye out for new opportunities, and experiment with combining multiple income streams to truly maximize your earning potential as a successful blogger.