Blogging has changed drastically over the years. At one point, it was like Field of Dreams – if you built a blog, people would come and the money would pour in.
Although the blogging landscape has changed drastically in recent years, there’s still an opportunity for success.
Discover how to make money blogging in 2025 and beyond.
Building a Profitable Blog
Building a profitable blog takes hard work and dedication.
If you put in the work, there are tons of ways to make money. However, most articles on “how to make money blogging” stop there.
They share the different ways you can monetize, but never take it a step further and explain how to make those ways work for you. There’s far more to making money blogging than dropping an affiliate link in a post and praying someone will click it.
Although we’ll cover the options, we’re also going to dive into the nitty gritty with the real truth on what it takes to use these monetization methods to actually earn an income.
The Different Ways to Make Money with Your Blog
One of my favorite things about blogging is that the options for monetization are nearly endless. Here are the most popular ways to make money with it:
- Affiliate Marketing: Linking to a product or service and earning a commission when someone uses that link to make a purchase
- Display Ads: Ads you see on the internet. Bloggers earn a share of the revenue from all display ads on their website
- Printables: Bloggers create digital products that their visitors can purchase and download
- Courses: Online courses help bloggers share their expertise with their audience. The classes are usually comprehensive and in a niche that the blogger is an expert in. Visitors pay for access to the course.
- Sponsored Posts: Brands pay bloggers to write about their products.
- Coaching: Bloggers offer coaching calls and one-on-one sessions with users for a fee
- Donations: Content creators set up a donation system on a platform such as Patreon, so their number one fans can support them
- E-Books: Many bloggers find writing a book is the next step up from blogging. They make money from selling these books online.
- Private groups: Some bloggers monetize their communities by creating exclusive groups, like a special Facebook group for paid members.
- Selling Websites: Many people build blogs with the intent to sell them. They constantly build new websites and sell them for a profit.
- Selling Links: Although this is against Google’s terms of service, and I don’t recommend it, some companies still pay bloggers to place links on their websites. Please don’t do this if you want to stay in Google’s good graces. The difference between this and a sponsored post is that all links in a sponsored post will be marked “No-Follow.” A sponsored post is not meant to help the company with SEO. It’s intended as an advertisement.
Although these are the most popular methods of making money with a blog, the sky is the limit. Innovative bloggers are constantly coming up with new ways of monetizing.
How To Make Money Blogging
Everyone who searches for how to make money blogging comes up with this list. The truth is, we all know that bloggers make money from ads and affiliate marketing.
But anyone who has been blogging for a few months or longer knows this doesn’t answer the question.
The real question is how to make money blogging, not ways to make money blogging.
How do you make money with display ads, affiliate marketing, etc? People aren’t just going to use your affiliate links because they are there, and if no one visits your site, you won’t earn anything with display ads.
Making an income from blogging is hard work, but it is achievable. Here’s what you need to do to make money.
Hey folks! Transparency Disclosure- Some of the links in this article are affiliate links. That means I’ll receive a small commission if you decide to click on it and buy something. Don’t worry, it doesn’t cost you anything extra!
1. Get Traffic
It is possible to make thousands of dollars with display ads, but the unfortunate truth is that you won’t make that much money unless you have high traffic. You can’t even get into the best ad networks without high pageviews.
Adthrive requires 100 thousand monthly pageviews for applicants, while Mediavine requires 50 thousand sessions. Mediavine recently created a new “journey” offering, allowing website owners with 10,000 monthly sessions to join.
You can get into smaller networks before achieving these stats, but they typically have lower RPMs, and you will make less money overall. Still, it’s better to join a lower-paying ad network and start making a little money. You can always change networks once you achieve higher page views.
The hard truth is that getting traffic isn’t always easy. Here are some strategies that will help.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and historically, it was the best way to drive traffic.
Unfortunately, SEO has changed drastically in recent years, making it harder and harder to drive organic traffic.
Google’s Helpful Content Updates of the early 2020s decimated traffic for many bloggers. Some were completely removed from the monopolistic search platform, while others saw their rankings drop as giant corporations, web forums, and AI answers skyrocketed to the top.
Because of these difficulties, many small bloggers give up on SEO, but that’s a mistake. Yes, it’s challenging to rank, but we don’t know what the future will hold. Google was deemed a monopoly, and we don’t know how that will impact future search engines. The algorithms constantly change, and you never know when a change will elevate independent publishers once again.
How to Write for SEO
I believe the old days of hacking the system with SEO are over. Although you should still follow best practices with an engaging headline, well-placed H2 and H3 headers, good grammar, and a well-researched piece, you can no longer depend on keyword stuffing and link building for ranking.
Instead, focus on high-quality articles offering unique insights and new information. Don’t regurgitate the same old stuff. Write in your own voice, and give your perspective. Make sure you cover all aspects of a topic, so users don’t have to search for a missing piece.
For example, the vast majority of bloggers writing “how to make money blogging” only offer the ways to monetize, and don’t dig into the weeds of how to implement the strategies. This article is different because it offers that valuable information.
In addition, you should write about topics you know, showcasing your expertise and authority. I’m one of the few bloggers who didn’t throw in the towel after the HCU. Although I’m not making as much money as I did before, I’m still growing in different ways, and I’m sharing my unique perspective on making money blogging in 2025 as someone who’s in the weeds doing it.
Pinterest is slowly becoming my top traffic driver, and I’m not even in a visual niche like food or travel.
The platform craves high-quality content, both in the pins and the articles the pins lead to. You must have both to be successful on the platform.
In my last year or so of experimenting with the platform, I’ve learned that pins offering information right on the pin do far better than call-to-action pins asking you to visit the site. Instead of a pin with “100 motivational quotes,” grab one of your motivational quotes, put it on a nice background, and post that.
However, you must also remember that Pinterest is a search engine. You must optimize your pins with keywords people search for on the platform. Use a resource like Pinclicks to help find great keywords for your content.
Like Google, Pinterest’s algorithm is constantly changing as the company attempts to better serve its users, make more money, and battle bots. You must be willing to change with it and adapt your pins to what the platform wants.
2. Get Social
You can make money blogging without blogging.
Of course, your website is your main attraction, but building a community outside of it can help you build your fan base and drive traffic.
Use social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, and Facebook to attract followers and build a network.
Post quality content that people want to engage with. The more likes and shares you get, the more your community will grow.
The downside to community building on social media is that all the platforms are making life more difficult. It’s harder and harder to grow on every platform, unless, of course, you pay for ads.
Still, despite the challenges, I get between 100-200 users a month from Facebook, despite only having 500 followers on my page. I ignored the platform for a long time because organic traffic was king, but I started gaining more traffic as I began sharing images and inspirational content outside of blog posts.
People who do well with social media can make money directly from the platform, either via affiliate links or sponsored content.
3. Build a Community
Though we typically think of building a community on social media, there are other options. Consider using platforms like Skool or Discord to create private communities just for your fans.
Skool makes it easy to create a paid community right off the bat (if that’s what you want to do), but you’ll have to pay a monthly fee for the service. Discord is free unless you want the add-ons, but it’s a little more complicated to create a paid channel without using a Discord bot, which you might have to pay for.
However, you can earn money with a community without making it paid. You can attach your RSS feed to a Discord channel so your fans never miss a post. You can share your articles, products, or affiliate links. However, don’t overdo it. People will leave if they think you’re only trying to sell them.
Getting people to join your community is the hardest part. It’s far easier to click a “like” or “follow” button on social media, and harder to convince folks to join a private group. However, those who do join will be your biggest fans.
4. Solve a Problem No One Else Has
If you want to make money via product sales, you need to identify a pain point for your visitors and solve that pain point. Many bloggers have found success selling courses about how to blog, while others use their expertise to create a course in their niche.
There are courses on side hustles, getting out of debt, making money online, and a wide variety of other financial topics in the personal finance blogging community. These courses identify a specific problem for their users and offer an opportunity to solve it.
Identifying and solving problems also works for selling digital products and coaching.
5. Build an Email List
Building an email list is similar to building a community with social media, but different in that you own the list, and it’s harder to get followers.
The great thing about email subscribers is that email is likely not going away. Email servers don’t have algorithms to change. The list of email subscribers you build is a built-in customer base for your content and possible affiliate sales.
Building an engaged email list is hard work. You need to offer people something to get them to sign up, which is called a lead magnet. You’ve seen it on most websites, this one included. The lead magnet draws people in and gets them to sign up, but you must keep delivering great content to keep them engaged.
6. Build Trust
Making money through affiliate sales is one of the best ways to earn money online. However, people aren’t just going to click your link and buy the product you recommend because it’s there. You must build trust with your audience and show them exactly why they need the product to get them to buy.
To do this, it’s essential only to promote products you know about and fully disclose the relationship you have with them. For example, many bloggers promote Bluehost as a web host because they have a great affiliate program. The problem is that many of these bloggers don’t even use the platform, and you have no idea whether they use it or not.
Bluehost is a great starter host and perfect for folks who want a hobby blog. It’s cheap and easy to use. I used it when I first started. But it has a lot of downtime, it’s slower than some other hosts, and it won’t fit the needs of people who want to grow their blog into a business.
I still promote Bluehost because I’ve used it, and I know who will benefit. But I also give an honest opinion and offer other options for those who need more from a host (I’m currently on Inmotion, which is a little more expensive, but offers really great service).
People will lose trust in you if you promote crappy products to make a few bucks. Promote things you know and trust, and you will continue to drive sales over time.
7. Target Your Audience
If you’re trying to sell a specific item, whether your own or an affiliate product, you must target the people who need it. You can do this with ads, which will cost money, or old-fashioned SEO.
SEO is vital for both driving volume and driving a targeted audience. When you are trying to monetize via display ads, the volume is essential, so you should target high-volume keywords that you can rank for in search engines.
However, when you are trying to make sales, that changes. You want to drive targeted traffic that will buy the product you are selling.
For example, let’s say you have a blog about pets. You could write a post about dog breeds, a super high-volume keyword with over three hundred thousand monthly searches. It’s a difficult keyword to rank for, but with effort and fantastic SEO, you might be able to get some traffic.
However, you aren’t ever going to sell anything with that keyword. If you want to make affiliate sales, you have to write about things with buyer intent in mind. Consider something like “best harnesses for huskies” instead. This is an extremely low-volume keyword, with only about 20 monthly searches. But it’s also easy to rank for and has excellent buyer intent if you’re in the business of selling husky harnesses.
Of course, you may also have to compete with Google’s shopping platform, which now showcases ads for merchandise at the top, limiting the clicks to websites. But people in the research phase will look beyond the easy click-to-buy for real reviews.
(All keyword information was found using MOZ – a must-have tool for SEO research!)
The point is that your strategy may be different depending on whether you are trying to monetize via display ads or affiliate marketing. A good approach is to have a mix of both on your website.
Making Money with a Blog Isn’t Easy
Sorry to disappoint if you were looking for an easy way to make money blogging. No matter how you try to monetize, it’s hard work, especially in today’s environment.
Although some folks get lucky and skyrocket immediately, the harsh truth is that most bloggers fail within six months because they set unrealistic expectations.
If you want to make quick cash, consider taking surveys, freelancing, or driving for Lyft. Blogging is not the way to fast cash.
However, blogging can be a lucrative side hustle you can parlay into a full-time career, unlike those easy money gigs.
It takes hard work to get to that point, but the payoff is worth it.
Are You Ready to Start a Blog?
Learn how to start a blog, from hosting to niche to installing WordPress here.
You will not make money quickly, but you will learn many new skills and start building a business that can provide lasting income.