Last Updated on May 13, 2021 by Alex Birkett
I’ll admit it.
“Make money blogging” sounds like a topic well suited for a YouTube ad featuring a rented mansion and Lamborghini.
But clearly it’s possible to monetize a blog. In fact, I monetize my blog! I also run an agency that literally works to help companies drive revenue with blogging. Every company who runs a blog has an explicit or implicit desire to do so (otherwise, why would they blog?!).
Of course, you don’t have to monetize your blog. You can just write for yourself or your friends. That’s totally fine, too.
But if you are interested in making money from your writing, then read on. This is mostly going to cover the perspective of a solo blogger, but you’re also going to learn a lot if you work in-house as a content marketer. This article is fundamentally about content marketing strategy and how to center it around revenue.
This article will cover how to monetize a blog in two parts: first, building a blog worth monetizing, and second, actual tangible monetization tactics to help you drive active or passive income.
Editor’s note: this post comes from my personal experience building a content agency as well as monetizing this blog you’re reading now. I’ve also helped build content marketing channels at three different companies. And I’m not going to sell you a get rich quick course.
How to Monetize a Blog? First, Build a Blog Worth Monetizing
First thing’s first: you need to have a blog worth reading, and not just worth reading, but something that can actually be monetized.
8 Steps to Building a Blog You Can Monetize
If I were to start a blog from scratch, here are the steps I would go through:
- Pick the right topic
- Map out potential monetization pathways
- Choose a content strategy
- Choose a content distribution channel
- Write high quality content at scale
- Promote your content
- Map out conversion points in your content
- Measure, optimize frequently
1. Pick the right topic
Picking a topic is probably the most important thing you can do.
Some topics will languish in obscurity, while others will be so competitive that you’ll never be able to stand out from the fray. Then there’s the sweet spot: a topic that is lucrative, yet relatively untapped.
Ideally, you also want to blog about something you actually know and care about. Otherwise people will see through you, your content will suck and competitors will outrank you easily, and you’ll get bored and quit the project when it’s not making progress.
So write about stuff you know and like, not just because it’s ethical, but because it’s effective.
This, by the way, was Tim Soulo’s answer when I asked him what he’d do if he were starting a new blog from scratch today. It’s just too hard and too long term to do anything you’re not actually interested in.
Luckily, your interests will almost certainly map to a topic that is monetizable. You just need to do some soul searching and initial research.
The best topics to monetize:
- Have rising popularity
- Currently have companies or affiliates making money in it
- Have significant search volume
- Have communities that formed around the topic, either analog or digital
You can find topic trends using Google Trends or Exploding Topics. The Hustle’s “Trends” newsletter is another great curated way to do this.
The Trends newsletter is how we found “kava” was a rising trend. We launched cupofkava.com to take advantage of that (though actually got bored since it wasn’t a niche we cared about – see? This advice isn’t just theoretical!)
Even better if the topic you write about is a niche that serves high income audiences. Selling expensive things, more often than not, is going to be a better bang for your buck than selling cheap things. That’s not always the case, but I tend to like B2B and luxury niches more than mass market niches.
Just think, if you want to monetize a blog through affiliate marketing, what’s easier: selling B2B software at a 30% cut or selling javasok sleeves at a 30% cut? The former is going to kick you back 100s of dollars a month per sale in many cases whereas the latter only costs like $5 total, so your cut is going to be minuscule and you have to make up for it with volume.
For example, look at bloggers like Ryan Robinson, who monetizes through affiliate marketing as well as consulting and courses. The affiliate products (as well as consulting) he sells are high ticket items, so even one purchase is worth quite a bit of money:
2. Map out potential monetization pathways
While you don’t need to perfectly plan out your monetization strategy, you should loosely know how you’ll make money before you begin.
“Plans are nothing,” as Eisenhower said. “But planning is everything.”
- Are you starting a blog as an acquisition channel for a SaaS or ecommerce company?
- Can you dropship products or monetize with affiliate links?
- Can you build a course, digital products, or a membership community around the topic?
Again, you don’t need to know this in advance perfectly, and you can always change and adapt this vision over time. But if you have *no* idea how it will make money, it’s going to be much harder.
For example, I knew when I started my personal blog that I could monetize through the freelance writing I was doing at the time. That monetization strategy has changed over time. Now I monetize with affiliate marketing as well as a course and my agency. Each of these serves a different audience and has a different payout (affiliate is super low touch, course is $1k, and my agency costs $10k a month). But this has adapted over time and as my life has changed.
At the start, however, I knew I could pull clients from my content.
If you want to write about kava, then you know, to an extent, you won’t be selling coaching or consulting. More likely, you’ll need to develop an ecommerce site, drop ship, or use affiliate links. Perhaps you could build a community around kava enthusiasts.
Just brainstorming some of this in advance will not only help you determine the feasibility of your topic, but it will help you choose which content strategy and distribution plan to use.
3. Choose a content strategy
The number one cause of death of most blogs is a lack of strategy.
Sure, content quality matters, as does how you distribute and promote your content. But if you don’t have a plan in place, you’ll likely end up wasting a ton of time and money producing content that never produces ROI.
Why?
The reason is simple: there’s a ton of content out there already.
Apparently 7.5 million blog posts are published every day. Many of these will also languish in obscurity, but a nontrivial number of those blog posts will be published by well known brands and websites with a high domain rating. This means that, all things equal, those websites will crowd you out, outrank you, and keep you in oblivion.
Content strategy is hard. It depends so much on what your natural strengths are as a founder, what resources you have available, the strength of your website, and the industry you’re blogging in.
I’m going to link out to my ultimate guide on content strategy, because there’s no way I can do it justice in this small section here. I will, however, summarize two strategies that tend to work quite well for small websites:
The Wal-Mart Content Strategy
The Wal-Mart Content Strategy is a high scale approach deliberately aimed at competitive niches.
Instead of looking up the keyword search volume of a topic and writing about the most popular (highest volume) keywords first, you deliberately ignore the high traffic keywords because they’re a) competitive and b) typically not very high intent.
Instead, you take a broad approach, writing about every single low difficulty and low volume term you can.
Eventually, this traffic adds up (as well as being more specific and long tail, and thus high intent, traffic). When the traffic adds up, you have an audience. When you have an audience, you can leverage that to compete for some of the higher traffic terms.
This approach flips the typical prioritization model on its head, and I love it. You *do* need to go publish super frequently to make this pay off, however, as each low traffic topic is unlikely to make or break your traffic goals.
The Barbell Content Strategy
The Barbell Content Strategy is a riff on a financial portfolio allocation method popularized by Nassim Taleb.
To both cap your downside as well as participate in unpredictable upside, you have two baskets of assets sitting at the extreme of the volatility distribution (nothing in the middle). You want a large percentage of very safe and predictable assets and a small basket of extremely volatile assets.
In the context of content marketing and blogging, the two baskets might look like this:
- 80% Product Led Content – terms that are likely to drive both predictable search traffic and predictable conversions
- 20% Buzzworthy Content – creative topics that don’t have search volume, but may generate a ton of social traffic or backlinks.
The benefit of this strategy is you pay the bills with your Product Led Content while supporting your domain authority and audience growth with Buzzworthy Content. It’s a way to not only get the best of both worlds, but have each world contribute to the other through synergy.
If you’re interested in learning more about content strategy, my agency has a huge course all about this (mostly centered around the Barbell approach that we use for our clients).
4. Choose a content distribution channel
Your content strategy should inherently include a distribution strategy. For example, both the Wal-Mart Strategy and the Barbell Strategy above rely mostly on search engine optimization to get eyes on your content.
This isn’t the only channel that could work, though. You can distribute content through any social network, email newsletters, etc.
For example, Upworthy’s content strategy is what I call the “hit factory strategy.” it’s similar to Hollywood movies, in that each individual movie’s success is hard to predict and unlikely to be an outstanding success, but 1 out of every 10 movies is a massive blockbuster and pays for the rest.
In essence, it’s a strategy that is optimized for vitality (which is notoriously hard to predict). Virality, by its nature, is best facilitated with social networks.
This doesn’t work for every industry or type of content. But if you’re in health & wellness, for example, perhaps going viral on Twitter is the play. Or it could be creating infographics that are pinned thousands of times on Pinterest.
Whatever the case, you want to think about “where the fish are” and how you can reach them with content promotion. Otherwise it’s going to be difficult to get initial traction.
5. Write high quality content at scale
Got your topic picked, content plan in place, and a promotion strategy? Now it’s time to write!
Writing is hard. It takes time and practice.
I think blogging is most successful when you personally write your own content, at least at the start. Your voice is going to be a big differentiator, and hiring anonymous freelancers and ghost writers is going to be less effective in most niches. Unless you’ve got a strong link building component built in, but I’ll cover that in the “promote your content section.”
So in the beginning at least, write yourself, put your name on it, and write as much as you can.
Set aside a time during the day when you have to write and pick a quota for word count. I do an hour in the morning and write 1000 words a day minimum, still to this day. I also never hire ghost writers to do content under my name on my blog. It’s important you hear my voice when you’re on alexbirkett.com.
I have recently started hiring writers to help me scale content, however.
I’ve been able to do that for three reasons:
- I have a high enough domain rating
- I have very clear monetization paths
- I know exactly how to hire, vet, onboard, and train writers to produce near perfect content with little back and forth.
Unless you can do those things, I recommend writing yourself, at least until you’ve hit the initial traction stage (a few thousand visitors a month, usually).
6. Promote your content
Promoting your content is going to depend on your content strategy and promotion plan.
90% of content strategies and clients I work on rely on link building. Therefore, I’m trying to set a link quota each month, and I have a variety of trusty tactics I use to get those high quality links. A few of those include:
- Guest posting
- Original research + blogger outreach
- Reciprocity and community link building
For our clients, we typically deliver anywhere from 2 to 12 links per month in their industry. For my personal website, I try to get 5 links per month. I try to aim links at the highest value posts, as well.
An easy way to get links, depending on your niche, is to sign up for HARO. You can get quote requests from lazy journalists and throw a backlink in.
Otherwise, I have to say, link building is a slog. It’s not easy, but it’s super valuable. Here’s a full guide on how to do it.
Link building is important because the higher the authority of your website, the easier it is to rank content (and links are the main signifier of website authority). The easier it is to rank content, the more predictable your traffic and revenue channels.
It’s like a flywheel effect. The bigger you are, the easier it is to rank stuff. So get started link building as early as possible.
Other popular forms of content promotion includes social media and virality optimization. A new and effective way to promote content is to do community building and community content promotion. Basically, find a Slack group, LinkedIn Group, Facebook group…whatever…join it and become a genuinely valuable contributing member.
Eventually, you’ll build up the trust to share your content there and the people will love it and amplify it (unless it sucks – so write good content).
7. Map out conversion points in your content
Finally, we’re going to pick where and when to trigger monetization points in your content.
For the vast majority of blogs, your best bet is to get people to sign up for your email list or newsletter. It’s just too hard to drive direct purchases, unless you’re just dropping affiliate links (in which case, just drop as many as you can in relevant places).
“The money is in the list,” they say. Email is powerful because it’s an owned channel and you’ve got permission to send messages. You can build up trust over time, segment your list by behavior and lead quality, and sell different products depending on different buyer’s journey stages (customer lifecycle optimization).
The *how* of implementing these points is tricky, which is why I’ve written an entire guide on how to capture email leads. Some easy low hanging fruit, though:
- Create lead magnets / content upgrades that are related to your topic. Gate them and require an email.
- Use exit intent popups to trigger email capture forms
- Use a sidebar popup form to sign up for your list
- Use in-content forms to unlock a premium section of the content
- Have a “subscribe” page that is easily found on the top navigation bar.
There’s a whole art and science to collecting email leads called conversion rate optimization. You want to use data to inform how you get people to convert and run experiments if you’re able to.
Before you do any of this, though, focus on getting tons of traffic (probably 10s of thousands before you start testing different offers at scale).
8. Measure, optimize frequently
As I mentioned, when you get to a certain scale, you want to be optimizing continuously. The only way to do that is to properly instrument your data and measure the right things as you grow.
I’ve written a whole post on content marketing analytics. Here’s the shortest possible summary:
- Use Google Analytics
- Set up goals
- Ask good business questions and use analytics to help you come up with hypotheses or answers
It’s better than gut feel or guessing!
18 Ways to Monetize a Blog
Alright, now that we’ve covered the fundamentals of how to monetize a blog (starting with how to build the blog part of it), let’s cover the things you can sell.
Realistically, you’re only limited by your own creativity when it comes to using a blog to make money.
However, there are clearly some more popular and effective ways than others.
Here are 18 popular ways to monetize a blog:
- Start a real business, you slacker
- Dropshipping
- Affiliate links
- Sell courses
- Sell ebooks and other digital products
- Sell actual physical products (start an ecommerce store)
- Offer coaching and consulting sessions
- Start an agency
- Partner with other agencies
- Build a newsletter
- Build a community
- Organize events
- Take sponsored posts
- Accept donations
- Create premium content behind a paid gate
- Start a podcast
- Create paid directories
- Sell ad space
1. Start a real business, you slacker
*Scratch the record*
Stop looking for get rich quick schemes and make something people want. Add value to the world, charge for it, and you’ll make money.
Then just create a blog that builds awareness and a funnel for those products.
It’s easier than ever to start a business, and we still need more innovation and entrepreneurs. Instead of trying to “make passive income” or “make money in your pajamas” or whatever, put on Edison’s overalls and do something worth doing.
*rant over*
2. Dropshipping
Dropshipping is when the seller accepts customer orders but does not keep goods sold in stock. In many ways, it’s similar to affiliate marketing in that, you’re basically a top marketing layer for someone actually making the products you’re selling. Your job, as the blogger, is to get attention and sell things. You don’t have to make those things, you just partner with someone who does.
The only real difference between drop shipping and affiliate marketing is that you can’t set the price with affiliate. So you get slightly more control when you dropship products.
Here’s a huge guide on how to find dropshipping suppliers from Shopify.
3. Affiliate links
Selling affiliate products is almost certainly the easier monetization model to understand. You sell other people’s products to your audience using a unique link to identify and attribute the sale to you.
Most people do this through email marketing or through SEO, but you can also monetize with affiliate using YouTube, Clubhouse, podcasts, or basically any form where you’re speaking to an audience.
It’s basically like paid word-of-mouth. Affiliate marketing, then, tends to be most effective if you’ve built a ton of trust with your audience and people genuinely want to hear your recommendations.
This would make someone like Tim Ferriss or Oprah or Joe Rogan the affiliate marketing king. Anything they mention on their podcast is going to have a crazy spike in sales.
Once you know where to look, you can find affiliate links all over the internet. For example, just search “best [product name]” and click on a few listicles. Here’s an article that ranks for “best cms software” where every link on the page is an affiliate link:
Sometimes bloggers will have specific resource sections on their website where they recommend their favorite products. Nomadic Matt, for instance, has a section where he recommends his favorite credits cards and other travel resources:
Sure enough, each link here is an affiliate link for the given credit card he recommends:
Anyway, affiliate is probably the lowest friction way to get started with blog monetization.
You just sign up for the affiliate program for the product you want to recommend, and then you use their unique link when you mention the product. Amazon Associates is probably the most popular program, though they’ve recently slashed their affiliate payout rates, so it’s harder to make a real amount of money through Amazon now.
I use affiliate links on this site. I’ve also monetized cupofkava.com using affiliate links. Tons of my friends are affiliate bloggers and some have even added on affiliate sites to real products/SaaS companies to increase their revenue with no downside.
One tip: recommend products genuinely. It’s difficult to build up trust, and trust is the most impactful dimension when it comes to conversion.
4. Sell courses
I said I didn’t have a course to sell you, but I do have a course, and I do monetize it (mostly indirectly) through my blog.
It’s about content strategy.
Obviously if you’re coming to read my blog or listen to my podcast, where I talk about content strategy, a course to follow up and dive deeper is a good product.
Online courses get a bad rap due to bullshit info-marketers, but if you have genuine and specific knowledge (and you almost certainly do), you can create a course.
I will warn you, however: it takes a massive amount of time and energy. We poured our hearts into our course and just the content creation portion of it took several months to put together.
Now, however, we have a ton of content we can use in different forms and in different places (for example, we’ve taken small sections of our lessons and repurposed them into lead nurturing flows, mini-email courses, and blog posts).
But don’t launch an online course thinking it will be easy money. It’s hard work, and it’s a highly competitive space.
5. Sell ebooks and other digital products
Ebooks are almost always used as a free lead magnet, something that you can gate and use to collect an email address.
However, in some cases, you can use ebooks, templates, videos, or other premium content as an actual blog monetization method.
For example, Kaleigh Moore is a freelance writer and sells templates to help writers and editors work better together, templates to help you write better, and templates to help you become a better freelancer:
Nomadic Matt also sells digital guidebooks on different travel locations:
6. Sell actual physical products (start an ecommerce store)
Due to the ease of self publishing, you could also just as easily sell physical copies of your book. Nomadic Matt also has a few physical books he wrote for sale in his blog store:
There’s also the option – albeit, a difficult one – to start a tried and true, direct to consumer ecommerce business. Make your own products!
Like Pique Tea. They sell tea:
But they also have a blog.
The thing is, you’re unlikely to solely grow an ecommerce store through a blog. But most ecommerce stores underrate content in the marketing mix. Therefore, if you know how to drive traffic and conversions with content *and* you have a real product that people love, you’ll be in a really good place.
7. Offer coaching and consulting sessions
When I first started my blog, I initially just offered freelance writing services and 1 hour consults. I still do offer limited 1 hour consulting sessions:
This is one of the easiest things you can do, especially if you’re a solo blogger or a subject matter expert.
If you run a dog blog, offer consulting sessions on how to train your dog. If you run a content marketing blog, start doing consulting for companies trying to learn about content marketing.
Another famous move is to grow your blog and then simply teach people how to grow a blog. Meta, but effective (example from my friend Ryan Robinson):
8. Start an agency
Next step up from solo consulting and training is to start an agency. An agency is a great revenue stream and is a great way to scale out your own individual subject matter expertise. Of course, it requires a totally different skill set than just the domain expertise.
If you run an agency, you have to learn how to do sales, how to do client management, how to hire and train employees, how to upsell and expand your accounts, etc.
It’s a lot of work, but honestly, it’s super fun (I run a content marketing agency myself).
A good way to determine if this is a viable revenue stream for you is if you’re getting too many consulting requests to handle on your own. Once you hit that breaking point, it’s time to partner up or hire people to help you run your services. When that happens, you’re technically an agency.
My agency, by the way, is now the primary way I monetize my own blog.
9. Partner with other agencies
If you don’t want to start your own agency and go through the hassle of the paperwork and the client relationships, you can just partner with other agencies and refer people out to them.
This is sort of like a hybrid model between building an agency and doing affiliate.
Shocker, I also monetize my blog this way. Here’s how:
While I have a content marketing agency, most people follow me for my articles on A/B testing and analytics. This means I get tons of requests for consulting with conversion rate optimization, experimentation strategy, or data. Instead of just turning them down, I’ve partnered with an agency in each niche, and they give me a 30% kickback if they close the referral I send to them.
Because these deal sizes tend to be quite high ($5k-$15k), the kickback is pretty sweet.
Here’s the real key: I only partner with agencies I absolutely trust 100%. Otherwise I’m playing with fire regarding my own reputation, and that’s something that I just won’t do. If I hear from someone that my referral sucked, I’ll immediately chop them and get a different agency in my roster.
10. Build a newsletter
Newsletters are a popular way to make money online now, but really, paid newsletters have been an effective way to make money for a long, long time (one might even call them a “newspaper” or a “magazine”).
This is a massive topic, mostly because of high profile exits for newsletters like The Hustle to HubSpot, and because of Substack’s success (and controversy).
Suffice to say, newsletters rock. Since you’re producing content already, the “conversion” is obvious: sign up to get more content. Once people are getting more content for free, you create a premium version of your offering and gate that only to paying members. Some small percentage will subscribe to the premium offering.
So the name of the game here is twofold:
- Grow a massive top of funnel with free content
- Build trust and provide truly great content
Those are the only real ways a newsletter can work. If you don’t do the former, the numbers will never work out in your favor (a very small percentage of people will become paid subscribers for content no matter what industry you’re in, so you need a lot of overall people). If you don’t do the latter, no one will pay for your content.
Great examples of paid newsletter businesses:
11. Build a community
The next step up from a newsletter is a paid membership community. This is the holy grail of blog monetization, and indeed, many blog platforms are baking in this functionality nowadays (e.g. if you have a WordPress blog there are a ton of plugins you can use to create membership sites).
If you can get people to sign up for a community, you’ve done something incredible. A community is a flywheel if you can keep it well moderated. Essentially, your cost of blog content goes down as your community members begin to create their own user generated content.
It’s also a subscription, so you get nice predictable revenue, unlike Amazon affiliate marketing or even ecommerce sales (which tends to exhibit strong seasonality).
Nomadic Matt runs a community for travelers and travel bloggers:
Traffic Think Tank is a community for SEOs and content marketers:
While creating and organizing a community will never be *easy*, it is definitely the best time ever to try. The tools available make it so easy to set up and maintain, at least from a technical standpoint. Hell, I know personally many communities that are just printing money by selling access to private Slack groups.
You just need to find or build a tribe of tightly connected individuals in a given niche. Product Marketing Alliance is a good example of this:
12. Organize events
Online communities organize tribes digitally, but there can also be a lot of money to be made in organizing people physically through conferences and meetups.
This is how The Hustle initially made money, launching Hustle Con conference:
Product Marketing Alliance also monetizes through physical and virtual summits and events:
13. Take sponsored posts
I get a million requested for sponsorships and sponsored content on alexbirkett.com. I’ve never taken one and I never will:
But if you’re ever struck with the realization that, “hey, I don’t give a shit about my readers or putting out good content, and I’d really like to monetize my blog using the least lucrative way to do it,” then you should look into taking sponsored content.
If you go down this route, good luck. Your blog is now on a slow path to obscurity.
I’ve never seen a piece of valuable content that needed payment to get placed. If someone is paying to place their content, you can guarantee it’s total dogshit and doesn’t belong anywhere outside their personal diary.
But if you want to do this, you do you.
14. Accept donations
I rather like the idea of taking donations. I donate to a few Patreon accounts and I consider my Substack payments a sort of form of donation to writers I like.
I also donate from time to time to creators I really like, such as Sam Harris or WaitButWhy (who solicits donations on his website):
It used to be cool to have a button that said something like “buy me a coffee,” and the option to give a quick $5 donation.
This is obviously not going to make you rich unless you have a genuinely huge audience. But if you’re producing amazing content, it’s cool to give people the option to say thanks.
This is basically the whole Wikipedia model, no?
15. Create premium content behind a paid gate
Instead of creating a site to sell online courses or community membership site or even a newsletter, you could simply gate content on an a la carte basis and allow for quick ecommerce style payments.
Imagine you write about Google Analytics. Most of your content is probably 101 level, perhaps you dabble in intermediate content like setting up custom dimensions or using the DataLayer with Google Tag Manager.
But every once in a while, you have a piece of truly valuable content. Perhaps it’s a tutorial on how to do something very specific or an interactive webinar.
In this case, why not through a $10 gate on the content? I’ve not personally experimented with this, but it could be a great way to drive additional revenue. It probably won’t be your full-time income and only way you monetize, but it’s a pretty frictionless way to add additional options to support you.
16. Start a podcast
I’m going to be honest, if you want to make a lot of money and you’re a first time blogger, a podcast is probably not the best way to do it.
I have a podcast. It’s got some listeners, but not many. You know why I do it?
- I get to talk to cool people and learn things
- The people who listen are high value and part of our target audience
- I can use the insights from podcasts to repurpose into blog posts and eventually a book
- I can use podcasts as an account based marketing channel
But I’m literally never going to make money from sponsorships or ad networks. Some, like Tim Ferriss and Sam Harris, are making a massive amount of money from podcasts that once were just startups. But you probably won’t.
Still, don’t let that deter if you really want to start a podcast. There are tons of benefits outside of making money.
17. Create paid directories
A great way to monetize a given blog is to become the de facto source or directory for people seeking resources.
The most obvious way to do this is to start a job board. ProBlogger did it. CXL did it. You can do it! It’s hard to hire. Make it easier for people to find and advertise jobs, and you’ll make money.
You can also do this with agencies, like Credo, who lists the best agencies in each vertical:
Curation is a major value add if you do it with integrity and high standards. Just don’t become a pay-to-play extortion site like Yelp or Capterra.
18. Sell ad space
Finally, the absolute worst option if you want to get rich: sell ad space!
Google Adsense and display ads. This used to be the most popular way to make money blogging. However, in 2021, no one clicks on display ads. So unless you write click bait content and have millions of visitors, you’re probably going to make peanuts.
If it doesn’t hurt your UX too badly, you can add it on as an additional revenue stream. But it’s probably not going to let you quit your day job.
Conclusion
Making money blogging is actually pretty easy. If you write high quality content, tap into your target audience, and have at least one or two ways to monetize your expertise, you can make a good side income or even a stable full-time income.
On the extreme, I know bloggers making millions per year. This is not super common so don’t let them sell you hopes and dreams.
The most likely winning scenario: pick a topic you care about with a sizable community, start small and build up a little audience, and monetize with highly active methods (consulting, courses, etc.).
As you build a broader and bigger audience, then stuff like community, affiliate, ecommerce, and ads can start to pay off.
But honestly, it’s easier to be a small giant when it comes to blogging.
Whatever you choose, good luck! And let me know if you want help, because I’ve got courses, an agency, and some affiliate links I can send you 😉