Are you interested in starting your own blogging business? Do you want to earn passive income or build a full-time online business?
But, not sure how to start a blog and make money blogging without the help of experts. Then you’re in the right place!
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In this guide, we’ll show you how to monetize your blog and make money online with 13 proven and profitable ways. While blogging is an enjoyable hobby for some people, it’s also a great way to make money online.
You’ll also be happy to know that making money blogging is easier today than it ever has been before.
Now first, if you’re totally new to blogging today, we’ve put together the tutorial guide to getting started with creating a profitable blog. Actually getting your blog online and well-optimized is the first step, and our 26,000 word guide to starting a profitable blog will position you best for going on to make money blogging in the near future.
While it’s great to start considering ways to make money blogging now, this guide is speaking more to those of you who’ve already started a blog and are looking to take it to the next level. If you haven’t yet gotten your blog off the ground, then head over to our tutorial guide to starting a profitable blog.
Let’s get started!
How to Make Money Blogging in 2025: 13 Proven and Profitable Ways
- Start Affiliate Marketing
- Advertise on Your Blog with Google AdSense
- Sell Ad Space Directly
- Accept Sponsored Blog Posts
- Get Paid for Writing Reviews
- Turn Your Blog Into a Membership Website
- Write an Ebook
- Sell Other Digital Products
- Offer Online Courses
- Host a Paid Webinar
- Make Money with Coaching
- Start Freelancing to Earn Money
- Accept Donations
1. Start Affiliate Marketing
If you’re looking for legitimate ways to make money blogging, you should look into affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is one of the legitimate ways bloggers make money blogging. With affiliate marketing, you promote another person’s or company’s product, and every time someone purchases the product via one of your affiliate links, you earn a commission.
In other words, when you help another company generate sales, you get a commission!
So, say your commission is $50 for every sale. If 100 people buy the product by clicking your affiliate link, you make $5000. Excited!
The best part is that you don’t have to spend the time and money to create your own products, because someone else has already done it for you.
Because of that, affiliate marketing is an opportunity you can take advantage of, and it’s easy to get started with affiliate marketing.
You can begin making money blogging as an affiliate marketer as soon as you have a place to recommend the right products or services, whether that’s a website you have,a blog you’ve started, or even on social media like TikTok.
The easiest way to find the best paying products to promote on your blog is by joining affiliate programs like:
- Amazon Associates
- ShareASale
- Commission Junction
Sign up and browse through affiliate networks like these to find affiliate programs you can promote. There’s pretty much an affiliate program for every industry or blog niche; web hosting, travel, fashion, health, food and drink, and more.
It’s best to choose premium affiliate products related to your blog’s niche. By choosing products that are related to your blog niche, you know that your audience will be interested in them and more likely to purchase.
For instance, if your blog content is about web hosting, you should promote web hosting-related products or services like building a website, hosting a website, buying a domain name, best domain registrars, and so on.
Once you’ve created your affiliate website and started getting traffic, you can use OptinMonster to unlock even more affiliate revenue.
To learn more about how to make money blogging with affiliate marketing, check out our tutorial guide on how to start affiliate marketing.
- Advertise on Your Blog with Google AdSense
Advertising is usually what first comes to mind when you’re thinking about how to start a blog and make money blogging.
An easy way to make money blogging with ads is by using Google AdSense. Google AdSense is an ad network run by Google that displays ads on blogs or websites. When a reader clicks on an ad on your blog, you make money.
The advertisements that will be shown on your blog are targeted to the blog content and the audience.
For example, the types of advertisements that show up on our blog ReliableBlogger are blogging and affiliate marketing-related.
Plus, adding Google AdSense to your blog is super easy. Once you’ve set it up, the advertisements display automatically.
You can also track how much AdSense coins you’re making and which advertisements are performing the best with a tool like MonsterInsights.
Next up, we’ll show you another way how to make money blogging with advertisements.
- Sell Ad Space Directly
While Google AdSense is easy to set up, the amount of money you can generate is limited. So, you might want to consider selling ad space on your blog directly.
By selling ad space directly, you get to set the price. Instead of getting paid a small amount for each individual click on an ad, you can charge a flat rate for a banner ad on your blog. By charging a flat rate, you can get more money and it’s easier to manage than tracking clicks.
To find businesses willing to buy ad space on your blog, you can create an Advertise Here page on your blog or use a platform like BuySellAds to connect with companies.
Selling ad space directly is a bit more difficult to manage than Google AdSense because you’re responsible for negotiating the pricing, coming up with the terms and agreements, managing invoicing, and all the other details.
But, you can make the process a bit easier by using a tool like AdSanity. AdSanity offers simplified ad management for WordPress. You can easily display ads on your website, track views and clicks, and more.
- Accept Sponsored Blog Posts
Want to get paid for writing a blog post? If the answer is yes, then accept sponsored blog posts!
A sponsored blog post is a popular tactic of making money blogging. In a nutshell, it keepsa company pays you to create content about its products on your blog. They may even write the post themselves, so all you have to do is publish it.
It’s similar to how influencers accept sponsorships to promote a product on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram or YouTube.
If you have a great-looking blog with high quality content, a consistent blogging schedule, and engaged readers, many companies are willing to pay big bucks for you to promote their products or services.
To connect with companies offering paid opportunities, you can join blogger networks like:
- ValuedVoice
- Massive Sway
- BlogDash
You can also reach out to brands directly to see if they’d be interested in partnering with you.
Put together a media kit using a tool like Canva. With Canva’s pre-made templates, you can put together a stunning media kit in no time.
Your media kit should include details about your audience demographics, blog traffic, page views, social media following, and other stats that would be appealing to advertisers. Then, send your media kit to companies you’d like to work with.
But remember, bloggers in the United States must comply with the FTC’s Endorsement Guidelines by letting readers know loud and clear that a blog post is sponsored. So, make sure to include a message like “This post is Sponsored by XYZ company” at the beginning of the blog post.
Now, let’s take a look at another way you can make money from your blog.
- Get Paid for Writing Reviews
Getting paid for writing reviews is similar to accepting sponsored guest blog posts.
With paid reviews, you can try out a product, write a review about it on your blog, and then get paid!
Of course, you want to write reviews for products that are relevant to your blog niche and your audience. For instance, if you blog about SEO, reviewing SEO software and apps makes more sense than reviewing travel gears.
At Reliable Blogger, we write reviews and comparisons about software that would be helpful to bloggers, like this Bluehost review.
- Turn Your Blog Into a Membership Website
Your most loyal readers will be more willing to pay to read more of your blog content because it’s just that valuable to them.
When you turn your blog into a membership website, it’s like locking your blog content behind a door; only people that have a paid subscription have access to it.
Users can pay a one-time fee to get access, or you can charge users a monthly subscription so that you can get recurring revenue from your blog. As you can see, selling memberships is a great way to make money blogging.
Using the best membership plugins, you can easily turn your blog into a membership website in no time.
We recommend MemberPress, an all-in-one membership plugin.
MemberPress is easy to set up, offers powerful access rules that let you decide exactly what blog pages or posts users can see, lets you create beautiful pricing pages, and more.
- Write an Ebook
Selling ebooks is another great way to make money blogging and it’s a great source of passive income.
Passive income is income that requires little to no effort to earn and maintain. When you write an ebook, you only have to write it once. Then, you can sell that ebook over and over again to your readers.
But, if you want your ebook to sell, it needs to be good.
Most importantly, the topic of your ebook needs to be interesting to your target audience.
For example, if you have a blog post on SEO that does really well, turn that into a more detailed ebook for your blog readers.
Next, let’s find out what other types of digital products you can sell on your blog.
- Sell Other Digital Products
Aside from ebooks, you can also monetize your blog by selling digital products like printables, WordPress themes, video tutorials, audio recordings like music or podcast episodes, and the list goes on. If you have a skill and the digital product is useful to your audience, sell it!
To sell digital products on your website, you can use Easy Digital Downloads.
Easy Digital Downloads is a plugin that makes selling digital products a breeze. It includes features like a shopping cart, discount codes, customer management, and more.
- Offer Online Courses
If you have something valuable to teach your audience, you can turn your expertise into online courses that your blog readers can pay for.
You don’t even need to be an “expert” to teach an online course. As long as you have some knowledge in a topic that you can share with your readers, you can sell online courses on your blog.
For instance, if you blog about creating websites, you can sell video website building lessons to your audience.
You can create your course in a downloadable PDF bundle or you can use a learning management system (LMS) plugin.
We recommend using MemberPress to create your online course. As we mentioned before, MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin. And MemberPress comes with built-in features to easily create, manage, and sell online courses.
By creating online courses, you can help people, become an authority in your industry, and make money.
- Host a Paid Webinar
Hosting a webinar is a great way to promote your blog content, showcase your expertise, and sell your products. It’s an effective strategy used by many bloggers and marketers.
A webinar is like a live video training session or online course with a question-and-answer period at the end. So, it’s a good way to interact with your audience as well.
You can use free webinars to promote your existing products or services if you’ve already monetized your blog using another method.
To promote your webinar and get more signups, create a webinar landing page. You can easily create one using SeedProd, the #1 drag and drop landing page builder for WordPress.
SeedProd offers a number of webinar landing page templates to get you started and they’re easily customizable.
- Make Money with Coaching
Do you have valuable skills and the ability to teach them to others?
Then you should consider monetizing your blog by starting a coaching service.
Coaching is all about giving paying clients 1-on-1 advice and tips. For instance, a blogging coach can give their clients advice on how to get more traffic or build their email list faster.
Your blog niche will determine the type of coaching you can offer. For example, if you have a fashion blog, you could offer coaching and consultations to help your audience develop their personal style.
You can coach people over the phone, or by email, video chat, or instant messaging.
- Start Freelancing to Earn Money
Using your blog to promote yourself as a freelancer is another popular way to make money passive income online.
With freelancing, you don’t have to spend time or money creating a product ahead of time to sell; you simply offer your services.
As a blogger, you can offer freelance writing services to businesses. Blogging is how many freelance writers get their start.
Are you great at graphic design? You can offer freelance services to startups that need logo design or infographics.
You can also get freelance jobs for social media managing, content marketing, web design, and much more.
You can use freelancing platforms like Upwork to find freelance work. But, there’s a lot of competition on Upwork and they take a percentage of your earnings.
So, we recommend using your website to promote your freelance services. First, create a contact form on your website so that potential clients can reach you. You can easily create one with WPForms.
With WPForms, you can add a contact form to your website in minutes. Plus, you can collect payments and signatures from freelance clients right from your form!
- Accept Donations
If your blog readers love your content, sometimes they’ll just give you money if you ask for it.
When you’re providing entertaining and useful content to people for free, there’s nothing wrong with asking for donations. Even popular websites like Wikipedia ask for donations from their users.
To collect donations from your readers, you can add a PayPal donate button to your blog.
Pro Tip: There’s one more thing you should do if you want to make money from your blog—build an email list.
Email marketing will help you:
- Boost affiliate marketing revenue
- Drive more signups for your online course
- Generate sales of your ebook
- Get more webinar registrations
- And more
With email marketing, you can promote whatever you’re selling directly to your audience. The people that subscribe to your email list are the ones most interested in what you have to say, making them the people most likely to sign up for your course or buy your ebook.
How to Make Money Blogging in 2025: Recap
1) Start Affiliate Marketing
2) Advertise on Your Blog with Google AdSense
3) Sell Ad Space Directly
4) Accept Sponsored Blog Posts
5) Get Paid for Writing Reviews
6) Turn Your Blog Into a Membership Website
7) Write an Ebook
8) Sell Other Digital Products
9) Offer Online Courses
10) Host a Paid Webinar
11) Make Money with Coaching
12) Start Freelancing to Earn Money
13) Accept Donations
How to Make Money Blogging: FAQs
Still have more questions about how to make money blogging?
Here are some popular questions our readers ask us about how to make money blogging:
Which Blogging Platform is Best for Earning Money?
Choosing the best blogging platform is an important step if you want to make your blog profitable.
Many blogging beginners are tempted to choose a free blogging platform like WordPress.com to save money. Then, they often ask us how to monetize a WordPress blog. Unfortunately, with a free WordPress blog, you can’t monetize your blog or website.
That’s why we recommend using WordPress.org when blogging for profit. With a WordPress.org blog, you have full control over your website, which means you can monetize your blog in any way you choose.
How Much Does a Blogger Earn Per Month?
The amount of money you make as a blogger depends on a lot of factors: the blog monetization tactics you use, what niche you’re in, whether you have high quality content or not, how much work you put into it, and more.
Blogging isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, and it can take a lot of time and effort before you can make a substantial passive income from your blog.
How Do Beginner Blogs Make Money?
People that are just starting a blog for the first time often wonder how to make money blogging as beginners. So, when should you start to monetize your blog? And how will you make money when you’re a new blogger?
The best part about blogging is that anyone can start blogging and make money.
You don’t need to be a popular pro blogger with lots of website traffic to make money, all you need is a few blog readers. Of course, your revenue will start out small but as your blog grows; your revenue grows with it.
For many of the methods above, the more website traffic you have, the more money you make.
In the meantime, you can still make money from your blog even if you don’t have much website traffic. Offering services as a freelance blogger or writer is one of the best ways to get started, since you only need a few clients to make money.
Which Types of Blogs are Most Popular?
According to data, the most profitable blogging niches are credit cards, finance, loans, mortgages, and a few others. But for most people, trying to start a blog in one of those niches won’t work out.
Instead, you should choose a blogging niche that has the potential to be profitable, and is also a topic that you’re passionate about.
When you’re passionate about the topic, you’ll be more motivated to keep working on your blog. Plus, your passion will shine through your writing, which will help blog readers connect with you.
The blog monetization methods listed above will work for almost any niche, so there’s no reason to force yourself to write on boring topics.
What’s a Simple Example of How to Make Money Blogging?
If you run a DIY baking blog, companies that sell cookware are likely going to be one of your top supporters when it comes to making money blogging.
You’ll have a solid idea of who your target audience is (at-home bakers) and exactly what they’re hoping to accomplish (looking to improve their skills, get easy baking recipes, learn more about cooking in general). On the flip side, this also means that you can confidently communicate with sponsors about who’s consuming your blog content—and more importantly—why they’re likely to buy the advertiser’s product.
Is It Important to Write Consistently in Order to Make Money Blogging?
The short answer is yes; you’ll need to publish high quality content with some regularity if you hope to make money blogging in a long-term, sustainable fashion.
Let’s say you’ve got a little bit of traffic coming in to a few blog posts that are beginning to rank well in the search engines.
But once you’re here, it’s easy to think, “Well now that I rank #1 for this topic, I’ll just settle in there and reap the rewards.”
Trust us, we’ve been there. But as we’ve covered already, if it were that easy to make money blogging, then just about everyone would be a rich blogger by now.
Once you’re starting to get a little content success and begin ranking, you’ll slowly get more and more traffic every week, it can be easy to think it’s alright to sit back and relax. And while blogs can sometimes be argued as solely passive income, ultimately if you want to make money blogging in a scalable long-term fashion, you have to be very proactive about getting those income streams into place… which takes a lot of real work.
If you want to make money blogging in a scalable long-term way, you have to be very proactive. That means writing a lot.
The most successful, highest trafficked blogs post multiple articles each week—if not many every day. So if you’re wondering, do people still read blogs? The answer is a resounding yes.
And while you may not be striving to be the next Buzzfeed, if you want to make money blogging, you should aim for ramping up to a point where you’re posting at least two to three high quality, sizable word count articles (in excess of 1,500 words) each month. That leaves time to spend promoting your content too.
Not only does publishing regular blog content generate more traffic, it brings returning readers. And those are the people that’ll help you over the long-term.
Moreover, it also shows your advertisers that you’re active and involved with your blog readers.
Is SEO Important to Make Money from a Blog?
It’s really; really easy to write a lot on topics you care deeply about.
And it’s important that your blog becomes a place to share about things that are powerful to you, of course. But even more important is nailing your blog SEO.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can send even the most experienced professional marketers into a tailspin, but SEO is paramount to making money blogging.
Why? Because major search engines like Google can send you a practically unlimited amount of free, organic traffic—if you create content that’s worthy of ranking high in search results.
Now, we’re not going to do a deep dive into SEO in today’s guide about how to make money blogging, but I will tell you this—it’s crucial to always do keyword research, have a specific keyword phrase in mind for each blog post you’re writing, and to always do your homework up front in order to make sure that keyword phrase is something people are actually searching for online.
Ensuring that you’re following blog SEO best practices will not only help grow your blog, it will make you stand out as a leading industry professional if you can rank high in search results for competitive terms.
Plus, your audience will place more trust in you, as will your advertisers.
How Do You Build a Community of Engaged Readers to Monetize?
The most important thing is to focus your efforts on not just bringing in new readers, but on establishing real, tangible relationships with as many of them as possible.
Having an online community—whether it’s a forum on your blog, email list, a Facebook group, Twitter community or otherwise—can do absolute wonders for your blog. And ultimately, they’re going to be the ones that help you learn how to make money blogging in a way that’s a mutual win-win for both them and you.
Develop real relationships with your blog readers. Learn about their likes and dislikes, why they read your first article, how they discovered you, and why they keep coming back for more. Connect with them as humans, not anonymous readers on a screen. The investment will be worth taking a few minutes out to chat over email or on the phone every now and then.
In blogging, your community is everything. Build real relationships with your readers and you can’t go wrong. When you have a community, you not only have a deep rooted support system, you also have some very important relationships.
It may turn out that one of your readers is an advertiser that wants to promote their products on your blog. It may be a podcaster who wants to feature you on their next episode with 2,500 listeners with a spot for your blog pitch.
When you get a feel for your audience, and get to know them intimately, you can start asking them for support. You’d be surprised what you can get from a strong community of like-minded readers.
How Many Readers Do You Need in Order to Make Money Blogging?
Well, the answer to that question depends on how you’re making money from your blog and what your conversion rate is for each channel.
Of course, you’re not going to know your conversion rates right now, but once you start selling a product, pitching your freelance services, launching an online course, or reaching out to advertisers for blog sponsorships, you can calculate your conversion rates pretty quickly.
Here’s a quick example expanding on what your conversion rate could be when selling your own product—an online course—from your blog.
Let’s say you have 1,000 monthly readers. If 2% of those readers turn into paying customers for your online course, that’s 20 buyers. If your product is $10, that’s only $200. However, if your course runs $100, then you’ve just made your first $2,000.
Now, you can also look at this in a much more simple way.
• Fewer readers = less sales
• More readers = more sales
At the same time though, you can work on tweaks to get your conversion rate higher over time, and you can play with your pricing to increase average customer value as well. Sometimes math can actually be fun.
Of course, you need two key pieces of data in order to make these estimates:
• Unique Pageviews
• Conversions
To view the number of Unique Pageviews on your blog, dive into your Google Analytics Dashboard, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
If you’re strictly using your website as a blog, then you should see your top blog posts listed clearly with their corresponding number of pageviews.
You can set a date range (like the past day, week or month) and see your pageview count update. That’s how many people are reading your blog.
To get your conversion rate when talking about a direct product sale to a reader of your blog, simply take the number of product sales and divide that by the number of pageviews you’re seeing on your blog for a given date range—that’ll give you the percentage of readers that became customers.
Alternatively, to get a sense of how well your website is doing in the pursuit to make money blogging, you can take your total blog income for a given date range, and divide that by the amount of income you generated in that same period—that’ll give you the average value for each individual reader of your blog.
How Do I Start a Profitable Blog?
Starting a blog and making money sounds awesome, right? But if you’re new to the world of blogging, you might be thinking “Where do I even begin?”
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!
Check out our step-by-step guide on how to start a profitable blog. This guide will walk you through the process of starting a new blog, including:
- How to set up your new WordPress blog
- How to optimize your blog for SEO
- How to monetize your blog
- How to write your first blog post
And more
Start Monetizing Your Blog Today
That’s it! If you’ve been wondering how to grow your own blog from scratch, these proven and profitable monetization techniques will help you.
So, now that you know how to monetize your blog, pick 1 or 2 of these techniques and start making money with your blog today!
And with a little hard work, what starts off as a side hustle may turn into a full-time income!