How To Start A Blog And Make Money In 2025

March 3, 2025March 3, 2025 admin

I know starting a blog seems like an easy side hustle, but there’s a lot of work to it, and people often get in over their heads when trying to figure out how to start a blog. Many are also looking for a backup content home after the temporary TikTok shutdown nearly wiped out massive income for influencers there.
Blog and blogging are terms that get thrown out a lot without much context. It started out as a kind of online diary, which eventually led to the development of powerful CMS platforms like WordPress. It evolved to incorporate video blogging, called vlogging, and most personal websites or personal brands.
Today, blogging usually means frequently updated content published on a website, but it can sometimes also refer to content on another platform such as social media or a publishing platform. I’m focusing primarily on website-based blogging but will cover some of the differences with other platforms as well.

Table of Contents

5 Steps To Start and Monetize a Blog

Blogging is a lot of hard work. Even doing what you love takes time and effort. While blogs are relatively inexpensive to start monetarily, your time investment can be significant. Taking the time to create a plan early helps avoid pitfalls that cost even more time and could damage community-building.

1. Pick a Niche

There’s a big difference between casting a wide net and throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks. Even if you have multiple areas of expertise, each blog needs a focus. You might later wind up creating a family of blogs, but each needs to appeal to a definable audience and brands if you want to try for sponsorships.

Why You Should Start a Blog A great blog requires a great topic, but it also requires staying motivated. Examining your motivation to blog can help prevent it from becoming a slog later on if you’re only in it for the money. Building a fun side hustle or a full-time income blogging are far from the only reasons to start a blog.
Common reasons to start blogging include:

Having a creative outlet
Feeling connected to others by sharing experiences
Trying to influence public opinion
establishing one’s personal brand to promote previous work Teaching a skill or hobby to others
Creating a record of events—a digital diary of sorts
Practicing writing for an audience
Knowledge and Passion for the Blog Topic
If your blog niche is fueled by personal knowledge and passion for the topic, you generally have a better chance of building a community and creating a successful blog. You don’t have to be perfect at any of it, but the authenticity and passion shine through and connect with audiences.

Tabletop role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons

Gaming culture Remember that every topic has subtopics to help you differentiate yourself, and sometimes topics merge. Travel, for instance, could be divided into adventure travel, travel for people over 50, and family travel. There are also great options for combining topics, such as Tank Tolman, who combined fitness, cosplay and a love of geek culture into a Viking persona that spreads love and positivity while teaching fitness.

Competition

Regardless of why you started blogging, when it comes time to try and make a little cash from it, you’ll need to know your competition. Find out how many other bloggers are writing about your subject, what kind of content they produce, and the design of their websites. Also, find out if there are any well-known bloggers with whom you must compete. Niches with less competition are sometimes easier to break into, build a community and monetize.

2. Plan Monetization

The monetization plan you choose, that is, how you hope to make money from your blog, will determine the content you make and where you publish your content. Because of that, it’s a good idea to at least roughly plan monetization methods before starting your blog.
How To Make Money With Your Blog
There are a lot of different business models for blogging and vlogging. Some work almost exclusively from built-in social media ad programs that depend on traffic levels, others build exclusive sponsorship relationships with a specific brand and still others use their blogs to sell subscriptions to gated content such as fitness tutorials.
Which features you’ll need from your blogging platform will depend on what type of monetization you want to use. Ads and affiliate links are the simplest, but gated content and sales of any sort require payment processors and checkout e-commerce features.
Common monetization methods include:
Affiliate links and ads
Ads
Social media built-in monetization features
Brand sponsorships
Subscriptions for specific apps Gated content
Digital product sales such as printables and e-books
Subscriber-only newsletters
Direct merchandise (merch) sales, often branded
Blog Monetization Platforms
For bloggers, monetization platforms save a lot of effort and give you access to brands and audiences who might not give you the time of day otherwise. The two biggest categories are ad networks and affiliates.
Ad network programs such as Google AdSense allow you to sign up to have ads placed on your website. Ads are placed based on your traffic and topic. However, while easy to set up, low-traffic websites attract the lowest-quality ads. Ads such as “one weird trick” or “new law for drivers in (viewer state)” bid pennies for ad placements and are used to fill in anywhere there’s a cheap unused spot.
Affiliate advertising gives you more control over your ads. While you can go directly to a brand to set up an affiliate relationship, most affiliate advertising is handled by affiliate aggregators. These affiliate platforms manage affiliate programs for hundreds of brands and getting started usually just requires filling out a bit of “about you” data and applying to the brands you are interested in.
Two of the biggest affiliate groups are CJ (formerly Commission Junction) and ShareASale.
I’ve personally used both and never had any issues with payouts.

3. Get Your Blog Online

The bare basics of how to get a blog online is create content and upload it to a platform. However, as with most things worth doing, there’s a lot of nuance and surrounding steps involved in getting those two main items done.

Pick a Platform

Where your blog will call home is important. You can supplement content elsewhere, but you need a primary spot online to act as a hub and host the bulk of your monetization efforts.
The main choices for where your blog will live are social media, a video platform such as YouTube, a third-party publishing platform such as Medium or a stand-alone hosted blog website. Each one has pros and cons, and different ones work better for different goals and styles.

Whichever platform type you choose, whether it’s one of the reigning best blogging platforms, a budget-saving free blog system or an underdog, match the features as closely to your specific needs as possible.
For example, if you want to offer on-demand gated video workout tutorials, you’ll need to look at a website builder, CMS or a video platform with that option. Likewise, monetizing by brand sponsorship may work on social media, but you can’t place Google ads as you could on your own website.
For a website blog, you’ll need a hosting package. Many prefer a website builder with blogging features, such as Wix offers, because it is hosting and blogging all for one cost. However, WordPress is still the reigning blogging champ and offers more flexibility in hosting and customization. Just keep in mind you’ll need separate WordPress hosting.

Register a Domain Name

Whether you set up a full blog website or work through a third-party platform, registering a custom domain name helps your personal brand recognition and credibility. It also protects the name from being taken by someone else, even if you don’t have a stand-alone website yet. For a blog website, you’ll absolutely need to register a custom domain name as part of setting up hosting.
Many of the best website hosts offer first-year free domain names, but renewal costs may be inflated. All reputable hosts allow you (on packages allowing a custom domain name) to point a domain name you register with a third-party domain registrar without needing to actually transfer the domain to the host.

Customize Your Blog

Regardless of platform, customize the look as much as possible. For social media and other third-party platforms that are often limited to a few color choices, you can include your profile text and an image or two. For a full-fledged hosted blog, your choices are nearly limitless.

Start by picking what pages to include. Supporting pages like about us, contact us, legally required disclaimer pages, gated content, promotional free digital download samples, and, of course, your blog can and typically do exist on blogs. Next, you’ll choose a theme that supports the pages you want to use and customize the look of your theme. Make your blog posts reflect you and your blog topic well by changing their layouts, colors, images, fonts, and even the order in which they are arranged. As part of customizing your theme, you’ll connect any plugins or activate specific features you need, such as e-commerce features for an online merch store or paywalls for gated content.

With regard to legal announcements, remember that being online doesn’t free you from laws; it often makes you subject to more regulations, such as international laws enforced due to treaties. For assistance meeting legal requirements or a referral to a lawyer who can assist, check with your local Small Business Administration office.