How to Make Money Blogging in 2025 (Expert Guide) (2026)

Trying to make the most of make money blogging expert? You are in the right place. Below we break it down in plain English, with practical tips you can actually use.

Key Takeaways

• How to Make Money Blogging in 2025 (Expert Guide) Making money as a blogger can be a difficult, frustrating journey -- especially for the un...
• Here's everything you need to about choosing a blog topic, setting up your blog, and making your first four-figures.
• Written by Jeff Proctor Last Updated: December 26, 2024 Reviewed by Megan Robinson, CMC® Home Online Business Blogging Some of the links on...

How to Make Money Blogging in 2025 (Expert Guide)

Making money as a blogger can be a difficult, frustrating journey -- especially for the unprepared. Here's everything you need to about choosing a blog topic, setting up your blog, and making your first four-figures.

Written by Jeff Proctor Last Updated: December 26, 2024 Reviewed by Megan Robinson, CMC®

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3. Blogging

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Five years ago, if you’d told me I’d be sitting here today making a living blogging, I would’ve laughed in your face.

Actually, I probably would’ve said, “What the heck is a blog? And how can you make money blogging?”

Five years ago, I was working as an investment analyst at a financial planning firm. I went to work every day from 9 to 5, dreaded Mondays, and looked forward to weekends that never lasted long enough.

There were a few things I appreciated about my job at the time. Consistent paychecks, health insurance, and some of my coworkers.

But for the most part, I was not a fan of the 9-to-5 life. And by that, I mean:

• Feeling underappreciated and like my work didn’t matter
• Not having control over my income
• Having to ask permission to take time off
• Office politics (the worst)

Starting a business seemed like the answer to all my problems. But I never would’ve guessed that business would be a blog. What started as our little blog is now a seven-figure online business.

In This Guide hide Our Blogging Story The Top 4 Ways to Make Money Blogging 1. Advertising 2. Affiliate Marketing 3. Digital Products 4. Services How to Make Money Blogging: A Guide to Your First $1,000 Step 1: Choose a blog niche Step 2: Set up your blog (if you haven’t already) Step 3: Create helpful content Step 4: Pick ONE social media network and OWN it Step 5: Begin monetizing your blog FAQs How much money can you make blogging? How long does it take to make money blogging? What types of blogs make money? What is the fastest way to make money blogging for beginners?

Our Blogging Story

First off, we (my business partner Ben and I) didn’t get into blogging intentionally. We sort of fell into blogging by accident.

We started our business in 2014. Originally, it began as an investment membership site: people would pay us for detailed stock market analysis and specific insight about where they should invest their money.

Needless to say (since you’re reading this article), that idea failed miserably. In fact, in our first 18 months of existence, we made $29.00.

Obviously, our original idea wasn’t working, so we needed a plan B.

That’s when we stumbled onto blogging. We quickly realized that other people were making thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars per month from their blogs. Our first idea failed, and I wasn’t about to go crawling back to the full-time job I had just quit a year earlier, so we gave it a go.

Blogging was slow-moving for us at first, but we kept reading, learning from others, and testing strategy after strategy until, finally, we figured it out:

Note: This is an old graphic. Today, our websites generate over $100,000 per month. But this perfectly captures the roller coaster ride that was our first couple of years in business.

That first little hint of success was all the motivation we needed to keep going. From there, we were able to grow our income each month. (Well, most months.)

If we’d had a guide like this when we first started our business, we probably could’ve skipped the first year and a half of pure stress, confusion, and turmoil and gotten where we are now in a fraction of the time. 

We had no idea how to make money blogging when we first started out. Fortunately, we made a lot of mistakes on our blogging journey so you don’t have to. Before we dive into how to monetize your blog, you need to know…

The Top 4 Ways to Make Money Blogging

Some ways to make money blogging are simply easier and faster, while other revenue streams take more time and effort to build.

As a blogger, you have numerous monetization options to choose from, and you don’t have to choose just one. In fact, it’s wise to have multiple revenue streams. That way, if something happens and one revenue stream drops, you still have other monetization methods in place.

However, we recommend focusing on just one or two in the beginning. Build up one revenue stream before moving on to the next.

There’s no one “right” way to make money blogging. The revenue streams you choose will depend on your audience and blog topic. Let’s take a look at some of the best, most common ways to make money blogging.

1. Advertising

When most people think of starting a blog, this is the first revenue stream that comes to mind. Frequently, it’s not the most lucrative, but it is one of the easiest ways to get started. There are multiple ways to make money with advertising on your blog.

Display Ads

You know, when you visit a site and see ads for cars or clothes or something you were just looking at on Amazon?

Those are display ads. Each time you click one of those ads, the website earns a little bit of money, which is why they call it pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

You can see how Erin from Erin Lives Whole uses display ads to monetize her recipe content.

We typically don’t recommend display ads as a way to make money blogging for a few reasons:

1. It makes for a poorer user experience. How numerous times have you been to a site and could barely scroll through the page without an ad popping up every two seconds?
2. It is totally dependent on your traffic. And you need a significant amount of traffic (tens of thousands of visitors per month) to make any significant income with display ads.
3. It takes users away from your site. You may get $0.80 for someone clicking on your ad, but now they’re on someone else’s site buying their things and making them money.

The easiest PPC method to get started with is Google AdSense. However, to make any kind of decent money with display ads, you’ll need quite a bit of traffic. And by the time you get that much traffic, you’ll make more money going with an ad management company like Mediavine (minimum of 25,000 monthly impressions to join) or AdThrive (minimum of 100,000 monthly pageviews to join).

All in all, display ads aren’t the best way to make money with a blog. There are numerous better ways to make money blogging than sending people away from your site.

However, it’s also not the only form of advertising.

Sponsored Cont

Final Thoughts

Before you check out, double-check make money blogging expert against current offers and any coupons you can stack. Small habits like this add up to real savings over a year.

Originally published at dollarsprout.com.