How to Start a Blog and Make Money in 2024: A Comprehensive Guide

You might have seen bloggers and YouTubers bragging about earning thousands and thousands of dollars with blogging. 

So, is this really true, or is it a viral myth? 

Making money from blogging sounds like just living in a dream. Yes, you can make blogging a full-time job or keep it a side hustle and earn lots of money. However, blogging is not as easy as it sounds. It requires proper planning, time, and dedication.

So, how to make money from a blog? With the right strategies and guidance, you can easily start blogging and earn money, even as a beginner. 

Blogging is a rewarding and lucrative career option that opens up several exciting opportunities. Apart from earning part-time or full-time income, you can also connect with like-minded people and establish your brand or yourself as a credible expert in your field online through ethical blogging. 

Don’t know how to start a blog? 

No worries; we’re here to help you! Today, in this guide, we’ll be sharing critical strategies on: how do we earn money from blogging and how to build your audience, to grow successfully.  

But before we get into the steps of blogging and earning money, let’s discuss the most commonly asked question. 

How much money can you make blogging?

Blogging has high potential – Well-established blogging websites with 10,000 to 100,000 monthly page views often earn between $200 and $10,000 per month. 

Apart from this, the sponsored articles and blog posts cost around $25 to $750 per post. However, these numbers can change depending on the size of your target audience, genre, and individual sponsorship agreement. 

For example, top bloggers like Ryan Robinson, who regularly posts about blogging, are making about $30,000 monthly. Another is Adam Enfroy, who started blogging in 2019 as a side hustle after two years of constant hard work and is now generating more than $1.5 million.   

Let’s look at the stats of the top 9 successful bloggers in 2024: 

After looking at the above statistics, you now know that blogging is a great platform to generate a wide range of income. 

So, what are they doing that generates this much money? 

Scroll down! 

How to Start A Blog and Make Money?

High-quality, engaging blogs are crucial to attracting organic traffic to the site. But is that enough? 

For money blogging, you have to make sure that your content is relevant to the readers and reaches the right audience. This step helps you build a loyal following, which will give you daily page views and can also become potential leads. 

How to monetize a blog? 

Whether you just started your blog journey or have been doing it for quite some time, here are some impactful ways to make money blogging: 

1. Choose a profitable niche.

The first, and probably most crucial, step is to figure out what you want to write about. Yes, selecting a particular niche is quite important. There are endless niches and topics out there, so you have to decide and narrow down what your blogging website is about. Here comes finding the particular niche that you’re interested in.  

A niche could be anything from travel, finance, fashion, digital marketing, or technology. If you start creating blogs on random topics and in no specific niche, it can confuse your audience. Your focus should be on creating high-quality, engaging content in a general niche with broad topics that help to build loyal readers. This way, they’ll know exactly what they’re visiting for, and they’ll surely get their answers there.  

So, how do you select the niche? 

For this, first, you have to think about what I should write about, and with that mindset, ask yourself these three basic questions: 

1. What are my interests/passionate about?
2. Which topics are profitable?

Let’s understand this in detail. 

Blogging isn’t all about earning money, but it should showcase your interests too! 

You can’t write blogs on topics you’re not interested in for a long time. So, always pick a topic on which you’re passionate about blogging. This way, you can invest and put more effort into something in the long term. 

From selecting a completely new industry or topic to something you’ve got years of experience in or have connections in a particular field, the choice is yours!  

The next thing is to check which niches or topics are trending, as some blog niches can earn more money than others. Furthermore, you can double your profits by exploring the sales opportunities in the same area. For example, you’re blogging about vegan and healthy diet recipes, so you can promote affiliate links related to top kitchen appliances or sell ad space to culinary brands in your content. 

Here are a list of different types of blogs that are proved to be profitable in 2024: 

2. Create, design, and optimize your blog

Now that you’ve selected your blog niche, it’s time to start creating content. As you begin, keep in mind that the research and planning behind your articles can influence your blog’s financial success just as much as the writing itself. After deciding on the blog niche, it’s time to work on the main part of blogging, which is the content! 

👉 Create High-quality Content

Producing content doesn’t mean just writing and publishing blogs – Your content should be high-quality and engaging that informs, entertains, and solves problems for your readers. This helps your website become a credible and authentic source, making them come back for more. 

So, what type of content should you produce? 

Low-quality content with errors, poor grammar, or a lack of depth will drive readers away. Here is what you should do: 

• Tailor your content to your audience’s needs, interests, and pain points.
• Create content with valuable insights, actionable advice, and CTA’s that benefit your readers. 
• Use tools like headline analyzers, blog topic generating ideas, and keyword research tools.  
• Make sure your blogs are accurate, credible, and up-to-date.
• Create a clear and concise overall voice and writing style that resonates well with your site’s visitors. 
• Use clear formatting, headings, and bullet points for easy navigation.

The same thing goes for your blogging website’s design and formatting. Keep a crisp, clear, and easy-to-read format to attract users. Also, focus on visuals and user-friendly interface.  

👉 Schedule your posts

To get organic and constant traffic, it’s vital to publish blogs on a regular basis. Depending on your niche, search for trending topics and post your blogs on a specific day/time. HubSpot suggests bloggers post fresh content at least one to four times a week. 

Note: After just starting your first blogging website, don’t put all your focus on creating content in large amounts. Posting blogs is important, but if they’re not providing relevant and useful information to your visitors, it is of no use. 

Here comes the editorial calendar or content planner tools. With the help of these tools, you can easily plan, organize, and publish content at a scheduled time. 

👉 Optimize for SEO

Your blogging website makes more profit when it comes to the top ranking pages on the search engine results pages (SERPs); for that, you have to work on SEO. 

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is basically the process of optimizing your website, which includes improving ranking and visibility. The higher the blogging website ranks for relevant searches, the more organic traffic you’ll attract, which ultimately results in more money! 

So, how to optimize your blog? 

• In-depth Keyword Research: 

Conduct thorough keyword research with search volume using tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and SEMrush Keyword Magic to identify trending and relevant keywords for your niche. Use these keywords strategically in your blog posts, titles, and meta descriptions to catch people’s and Google’s attention.

• Content Promotion:

Content promotion is all about getting your audience to see the great content you’ve created. It’s the bridge between your hard work and impactful results. Content Promotion helps you to get Reach new audiences, Boost engagement, Achieve your goals.

• Analytics and Tracking:

Use website analytics tools like Google Analytics to track your blog’s performance. Monitor carefully key metrics like traffic sources, user engagement, and keyword rankings. Later, use this data to improve your strategies and get better results. 

• Technical SEO

Technical SEO is all about optimizing the technical aspects of your website to improve its ranking in search results. It basically involves making your website crawlable and understandable by search engines like Google.

Technical SEO focuses on the behind-the-scenes workings of your site that affect search engine visibility. It ensures search engines can easily find, understand, and index your website’s content.

• Key aspects of technical SEO: Crawlability, Indexation, Website Speed, Mobile-friendliness, Website Speed
• Importance of Technical SEO: Visibility in Search Engines, Higher Ranking Potential, Improved User Experience

3. Physical or digital product offerings

The way to earn money blogging is by selling physical or digital products on your website. For physical products, you can put the product’s direct links or AD banners between your content. For example, if you’re a fashion blogger, you can sell fashion merchandise like T-shirts, tote bags, or jewelry with your blog’s logo.

However, compared to physical products, digital products are more in trend these days as they don’t require the hassle of packing and shipping. Digital services or products are inexpensive and can be easily accessed or downloaded by your customers.

The best digital products for a blogging website usually depend on your niche and target audience, but here are some common products that work for most niches: 

• Printable: You can design and sell printables like planners, calendars, worksheets, or activity sheets related to your niche.
• Online courses: You can create online courses and share your knowledge with your readers. The course can be anything from detailed information to a step-by-step instruction manual. This could generate valuable revenue from your blogging website. 
• E-books and Guides: Compile your knowledge and insights into downloadable e-books or comprehensive guides related to your niche in PDF form. These guides can offer solutions to common problems your readers face.

4. Ads Monetization

As a new blogger, it might be a bit tricky to make money, but here comes on-site advertising – which is probably the most traditional yet easiest way to make income from your blogs. There are numerous companies that are willing to pay a good amount of money to bloggers for advertising. You can use the empty or unused space for advertising in exchange for a fee. 

There are two methods for paid advertising on your site:

1. Negotiating Directly with Brands (The High-Effort, High-Reward Approach):

You can directly approach companies in your niche with attractive offers and get the deal. Even though the potential payoff here is significant, it is still quite time-consuming and requires more effort. 

2. Partnering with an Ad Network (The Hands-Off Option):

The other, more easy, accessible, and hands-off approach is to use advertising networks like Google AdSense, Mediavine, and Raptive (formerly AdThrive). These Ad networks can claim space on your blogs, and you’ll get paid. 

Google AdSense pays per 1,000 impressions (CPM), with the average CPM for display ads falling around the $1.25 mark. So, you also have to work to drive more organic traffic to your blogs. However, you have to follow a guideline to qualify the Ad network advertising (Google AdSense), such as:  

• Your blogs should be unique, original, and informative. 
• An organized navigation bar.
• Your website should have key static pages, like a contact page and a privacy policy page.

5. Affiliate Marketing Links 

Remember when we talked about how much money successful bloggers earn? Yes, the data shows that all bloggers use affiliate marketing as part of their monetization strategy. 

So, why is everyone going with affiliate marketing? 

Today, affiliate marketing is considered an easy and reliable source of passive income for bloggers. 

Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing marketing strategy where bloggers can earn commissions by adding links to other company’s products or services to their blogs. So, whenever any of your readers click on the link to buy the product/service, you’ll get a certain amount of money. 

This is one of the most popular methods among bloggers and content creators to earn money online. 

These affiliate marketing statistics show that the average affiliate marketer is earning $8,038 per month in 2024. There are legitimate and well-known bloggers who are actually generating a whopping 6-figure monthly income just by doing affiliate marketing. 

However, that’s not applicable to all bloggers. It takes time and effort to achieve this level of financial success by affiliating products or services. 

From $10/pm to $20,355/pm in under 24 months – sounds exciting, right? 

Actually, there are affiliate marketing income categories that depend on the number of blog posts, page views, and age of the blog. On average, it goes something like this: 

• Beginner – $0 to $1000/pm
• Intermediate – $1000 to $10,000/pm
• Advanced – 10k to $100k/pm
• Super affiliate – $100k+/pm

Today, there are several affiliate marketing programs available on the market that can connect you with different products or companies, such as:

• CJ Affiliate
• ShareASale
• Amazon Associates
• Clickbank

Whether you’re writing professional or personal blogs, you can try different platforms to see what works best for your site and business.

6. Build an email list for Email marketing

To make constant earnings from your blogs, you need readers who are loyal and value your suggestions/recommendations.

Here comes the email marketing! 

If you have a blogging website but don’t have an email list, it’s time to make one! 

An email list and a newsletter will help you reach out to your audience directly to share your relevant and latest content and also build connections. However, avoid spamming or over-sending – decide and schedule a day to send newsletters.  

You can also create sign-up opportunities on your site’s home page or at the end of the post. 

• The founder of Work Brighter, Brittany Berger, shared his experience with email marketing: “Email marketing is by far the most lucrative sales channel for me. I don’t even really try to sell directly from other channels anymore, instead directing people from social media, collaborations, and SEO to my email list.” 
• Another example is the blogger Lily Ugbaja, who owns the FindingBalance.Mom website. She started her blogging journey because she wanted to stay home with her child but also wanted to do something that she was passionate about while earning money. 

In just two weeks, she started earning money, and in just a month, her earrings reached about $100, even with monthly page views of less than 1000, and all this happened because of the email list.  

She explains, “I used emails to promote my products and relevant affiliate products with tripwires and Facebook groups. You add lead magnets to your site so people sign up after reading your article. Instead of a success page, you share a one-time offer—a low-end product at a super discounted rate, $7 in my case.”

You can also monetize your email with a small monthly subscription fee. This will provide your readers with access to premium content. 

7. Brand Partnerships

Along with affiliate marketing and selling your services or products, you can also approach different brands or businesses related to your blog niche for collaboration. Make sure to keep your media kit ready before you start pitching them. 

From reviewing a brand’s product to explaining the benefits, there are many ways to mention or incorporate a brand’s or business’s name in your regular blogs.

The brand partnership offers an array of benefits, from expanding your site’s reach to a wider audience and enhancing online visibility, to improving your credibility and boosting your overall income. 

8. Produce a Podcast or Webinar

Still confused about how to generate income from blogging? 

Here is the easy way – start your podcast! 

As per recent data, over 100 million US citizens are expected to listen to podcasts in 2024. 

These stats show that podcasts have become more popular than ever! 

The best thing is that, as a blogger, you can benefit from it. You can target the content related to your blog niche and create various types of creative content. Try a variety of content formats, from how-to videos on your site to personal experiences or reviews. This way, you can promote and establish yourself as an expert in the industry. It also helps your content reach a wider audience, and more and more people will be able to discover your blogs. 

You can record tutorials or yourself explaining recent trends and release a series of multiple episodes on any streaming platform, like Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 

Here, you can plan your podcast content strategically, like initially offering everything for free to drive organic traffic to your blogs. However, after some time, provide this content or premium content for an additional cost to generate more revenue. 

Podcasts hold immense power for driving brand action! 

Studies reveal that around 70% of highly engaged listeners visit a brand’s website after hearing about their products through podcast sponsorships. Furthermore, 67% of listeners discuss the product with friends, creating a powerful word-of-mouth effect. 

These statistics showcase the undeniable appeal of podcast sponsorships for brands aiming to significantly broaden their reach and spark real conversations around their offerings. This will also increase the chances of expanding the reach of your blogs. 

According to this podcast revenue calculator, bloggers can add up to $16,000 per year in revenue with the help of podcasts if they have: 

• Four new episodes are released every month
• 10,000 episode downloads 
• Two advertisements (one pre-roll) 

The only drawback of podcasts is that they can be time-consuming and costly. It’s because building a connection with a new audience takes consistent effort, but the rewards are lasting. Also, you have to invest in high-quality microphones and editing software to produce professional podcasts. 

Ready to turn your blog into a business?

Starting your own blogging website is an exciting and fun way to fulfill your passion along with monetary profits. You can easily connect with others and create your own community. However, for successful money blogging, you have to select the right niche, write top-notch content, build a loyal audience, and explore monetization options. Also, keep in mind that money blogging is a linear process that takes effort and time. That’s why you should also focus on email marketing, paid promotion, and SEO optimization to get organic traffic to your website. 

FAQs

What is a blog?

A blog or weblog is a website or a section of a website where an individual or organization regularly posts content in the form of texts, multimedia, and videos. Blogs are like online journals, produced on the latest topics and trends and updated frequently. These blogs are interactive and can have formal, informal, or mixed tones with a conversational style. 

How long should blog posts be?

A blog should be around 1500 – 2500 words to rank well in the SERPs. Also, it should be optimized for SEO, including relevant keywords and various subsections to attract a wider audience.  

How do beginner bloggers make money?

As a new blogger, start with affiliate marketing, brand partnerships, and sponsored posts. This way, you can earn commissions while recommending products to your blogs. Another way is to run ads on your website or blogs – here, you’ll get paid when your readers click on them.   

How can I make $100 a month blogging?

Begin by selecting a profitable niche that aligns with your interests. Focus on building an engaged email list and promoting products as an affiliate. Your earnings can grow significantly from $100 to $1000 or more as your audience trusts and buys through your recommendations.