Tips How to Make Money Blogging for Beginners

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.

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 many 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. Often 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 many 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.