How to Make Money with a Blog: The Complete Guide 2024

Some people think that blogging is just a hobby and that creating a blog is just about telling your life story on the internet. But if you are here, you know very well that this cliché is totally false and that it is possible to make a living with a simple blog. 💻

And yes, thanks to the internet, it is now possible to monetize your website and make aliving out of it or earn an additional income every month. The problem is that there are a lot of ways to make money with a blog. Some are inaccessible, too complicated or simply not adapted to your situation.

To help you, we’re going to show you all the strategies that work to make money with a blog. 💸

Create your blog

Blogging is not the fastest or most profitable way to make money. However, it is a method that works and will allow you to generate an online income in the long term. If you want to earn a regular additional income or replace your salary thanks to the internet, having a blog is the most reliable and sustainable solution. ⌚

Before seeing the monetization part, we will show you the advantages of creating a blog and how to design one for free. In addition, you will also see how to choose a theme on which to launch your site as well as several techniques to get your first visitors.

Why create a blog?

What interests you in this guide is surely the fact that you can making money online . But before that, you also need to know what the benefits and opportunities are of blogging. 💻

First of all, creating a blog is free or very low cost, accessible to everyone. Financially, all you need is a web host and a domain name(about 100€ per year for both). Then you can create content for free.

Once your articles are online, they will stay online for life. Therefore, you make the effort once to write an article, then it canbring youvisits and money for several years. For example, we have articles on our blog that were published a year ago and are still generating affiliate commissions today. 🤑

Finally, having a blog allows you to be totally free in your language, your expression and others. And yes, when you have a blog, you don’t depend on any other platform as it can be the case if you have a YouTube channel, a Twitter account or others.

You are the owner of your website and therefore no one can censor or delete your content. 💪

How to create a free blog?

If there is one stereotype that often comes up about create a website it is the fact that it represents an exorbitant cost. But this is also totally wrong. In fact, it is true that in the early days of the Internet, designing a site was very expensive and/or required a lot of knowledge. Today, anyone can create a website with very little budget and almost no computer knowledge.

In fact, there are even several ways to create a blog totally free. 👀

The first solution, which is both the best and the most known, is WordPress . If you don’t know WordPress, you should know that it is a content management system(CMS). In short, it is a tool that allows you to design a website. With this software, you will be able to create a website from A to Z, without the need to code.

WordPress is the most famous CMS, but also the most complete. You will find thousands of different themes(free and paid) to design a website easily. Next to that, there are also thousands of extensions to add a whole bunch of features to your blog. 💪

To get WordPress, however, you will need a web host. Hosting will allow you to connect your domain name to a server, so that it can be accessed online. A good web host costs about 100€ per year.(See our comparison of the best web hosts)

The second solution is Wix an online platform for creating websites. Thanks to Wix, you will be able to create a design, ergonomic and SEO optimized website for free. The platform also has premium offers, which will naturally be more functional and will allow you to create a better website. 💻

The last solution will be medium.com. Thanks to this platform, you will be able to create a website, or to put online a single blog post, under the domain of medium.com. It’s also totally free. On the other hand, Medium is more text-oriented than design-oriented.

In practice, it is used by many journalists and editors to publish articles on the Internet for free. However, you won’t be able to create web pages or a design site as it is possible to do with WordPress or Wix.

Choose a niche idea

You can create a blog on absolutely any theme, or have a generalist site designed that is not limited to a niche. However, we recommend that you start with a niche if you are new to blogging. Simply because founding a generalist site takes a lot more work, investment and skill. 😩

By focusing on a specific theme, you will get faster results and it will be easier to monetize your site. But then again, you can choose any niche, but not all are equally promising. The choice of the niche is essential to succeed and earn money in blogging.

Let’s look at how to find a niche for your blog. 🔍

To begin with, you should know that there is an eternal debate between choosing a “profitable” niche and a “passion” niche. Clearly, either you choose a bankable theme even if you don’t like it, or you choose a niche that you like.

In case you are passionate about copywriting, SEO, website creation and others, you can start on a profitable niche. This also works if you plan to invest in content creation for your site. However, if you do everything yourself(writing, SEO, etc.), it’s best to choose a niche that you like. This way, you’ll have an easier time creating articles. ✍️

We will show you some examples of niches that work and are profitable in blogging:

• Personal development 🏋️‍♀️
• CBD 🌿
• Personal finance and investment 🏦
• Digital Marketing 👨‍💻
• Online Business 🌐
• Travel ✈️
• House/garden 🏡
• Telecommuting 💻
• Gaming 🎮

For find a niche idea, you can also look at the sites that are already working and get inspired by them. To do this, you can browse the internet to find sites that work and are monetized. But it’s hard to find a profitable site among the thousands of existing blogs. 🌐

There are online platforms for selling websites. On these marketplaces, you can buy a monetized and already profitable site. Therefore, this is the perfect place to find a niche that works and start a blog on it.

Let’s take for example Flippa an American marketplace to buy websites, blogs, e-commerce and other. On this platform, you can find thousands of sites for sale. This is for all budgets(from $1000 to +1,000,000).💰

By adjusting the filters (profit per month, traffic, etc.), one can quickly find niche ideas on which to launch a blog. For example, we found a site that does laptop reviews. As you can see, the site generates tens of thousands of visits and $500 in commissions per month. If you start a site on this theme, you can expect to earn the same amount. 💸

Taking inspiration from sites that already work is a very good way to find a profitable niche, but also to project yourself andestimate the money you can earn.

Once you’ve found a niche idea, you need to check if it’s not too competitive. And yes, if a niche is making money, there are bound to be other bloggers who have thought of it before you, and may have already started on the niche. 👀

To see if a niche is competitive, simply search for its main keywords on Google to see if many thematic sites come up on the search results. If you want to learn how to determine the level of competition, weteach youin our free ebook “Affiliate & SEO“.

Get traffic

You may have the most beautiful website in the world, but if it doesn’t have traffic, you won’t make any money. Therefore, all your attention should be focused onbringing more people to your website. But the goal is not to attract traffic quickly and then let it slip away. No, the goal is tobring in traffic over the long term in order to earn a recurring income for several years. ⏳

There are different sources of traffic to attract readers to your site. We will introduce you to the most effective ones. Note that we will not talk about advertising(Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc.), because this method is paid and does not bring traffic in the long term.

The strategy we recommend to get regular, free and long term traffic is SEO. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is simply the fact ofoptimizing your website for search engines. Concretely, this method will allow you to gain visibility by being better referenced on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. 🔎

SEO is quite a technical skill, but one it is possible to optimize one’s site for SEO without having to be an expert. We have written many tutorials on our blog to learn how to attract free traffic to your site through SEO.

Soon, you will have to write quality articles on your site, in order to appear in the best search results. There are certain techniques to use in order for your articles to be optimized for search engines. By regularly publishing optimized content, you will be able to get good SEO and regular visitors to your blog within a few months. 👥

To attract traffic to your site, you can also write articles on other blogs. This is called “guest blogging“. In other words, you will write a guest post on another blog, and in exchange, the owner of the site in question will publish an article on your blog.

This way, you will be able to get some visibility from another blog and gain new readers. And it’s also a totally free method. Obviously, the more popular your site is, the easier it will be to find bloggers willing to trade articles. 🤝

Another technique to attract traffic easily is to create accounts on social networks. In fact, by posting content on a social network like Instagram, Twitter or even YouTube, you can attract additional traffic.

But you don’t necessarily need to create additional content dedicated solely to social networks. You can simply publish excerpts of your work, to encourage people to visit your website. For example, you can create summaries of your best articles and make a Thread on Twitter or a post on LinkedIn.

Thanks to some software, you can publish your content on several social networks at the same time. 🛠️

The different monetization strategies

Now you know how to create a website, find a niche and get traffic on your website. But this is only the first step. Once your site is up and running, the goal is to make money. So we’re going to show you and explain in detail several monetization strategies compatible with blogging.

Affiliation

We’ve already told you about affiliate marketing many times on our blog. Simply because we believe this strategy is the most effective monetization method. But if you don’t know what affiliation is yet, here is the definition. ⤵️

Quickly, affiliate marketing consists of a brand promoting its products to a publisher(website, YouTube channel and other content creators) in exchange for a fee.

In concrete terms, with affiliation, you will promote the products/services of a brand on your blog. In exchange, this company will pay you a commission, i.e. a percentage of the turnover made. Every time you bring a customer back to the brand, you get a commission.💰

It is possible to make affiliation with anything and everything. As long as the brand has an online store, you can affiliate with it.

Therefore, you can monetize your site, no matter what your theme is. The most used affiliate program is the Amazon partner program. Thanks to this affiliate program, you can recommend absolutely all the products available on Amazon. 📦

As you can imagine, you can use the Amazon affiliation no matter what your site is about(garden, home, pets, video games, sports, etc.). The commission rates are however quite low(between 3 and 10%), due to high expenses(delivery, cost of goods).

But it is also possible to make affiliation for digital products such as online training or coaching. In this case, you can expect to earn a higher salary. By doing affiliate marketing for infoproducts, you can earn up to 90% commission! 🤑

Advertising

On many websites, you may notice that advertisements are present. This can take the form of banners, pop-ups or ads directly integrated into the articles. As you can imagine, placing ads on your site is a way for a blogger to make money. 🤑

Again, it is very simple to add ads to your site to start making money. To do so, you just have to register with an advertising agency. She will take care of placing the ads and paying you the money every month.

There are many advertising agencies that can help you monetize your site. Some of them are specialized in a particular theme(casino, dating, home, etc.), but most of them are generalist agencies. So you can use them no matter what niche you’re working on. 👀

Here are some of the advertising agencies we recommend:

Google AdSense : This is the advertising network of Google. Very easy to set up, it allows you to generate income from your website. Everything is automatic. You will simply have to insert a code given by Google on your site and then, it is the advertising network that will place the ads. In our opinion, this is the easiest to use, but it is not the most profitable.

Ezoic: This advertising network is an alternative to Google AdSense. The particularity of Ezoic is that this advertising network will adapt itself to your theme and to your readers in order to propose more targeted ads. As a result, it is also an advertising network that pays its publishers more.

MediaVine: This ad network is designed by content creators to give bloggers a sustainable source of income through advertising. Here you can also add ads and earn money automatically. For many publishers, MediaVine is also much more cost-effective than Google AdSense.

L’adding advertisements on its site is the the easiest way to monetize. However, it is also the least profitable. Indeed, you need a minimum of visitors per month for the advertising to become really interesting. If you don’t have much traffic, it’s better to focus on a more profitable monetization method. 💸

In our opinion, you need at least 30,000 or even 40,000 monthly visitors for advertising to become profitable.

Link sales / Sponsored articles

As long as your site is well referenced and attracts regular readers, you can place ads on it to earn money. But when your site has a good e-reputation, it will not only interest the advertising agencies.

In fact, you can use this e-reputation to sell sponsored articles and offer visibility to other websites.

We’ll explain. 🤔

In fact, when your site has visibility, many pages and has regular traffic, it logically has a good e-reputation. This means that Google and other search engines trust your site, and will be more likely to highlight it. And if your site has a good e-reputation, you can transfer some of it to other sites. 🤝

If you place a link to another website, it will gain popularity with Google. This is called a backlink in English. Obviously, the more powerful and visited the site is, the more the backlink will bring to the blog that receives it. For example, if you receive a backlink from the site lemonde.fr, it will have much more impact than if it comes from a little known site.

Therefore, many sites will be interested in buying a backlink on your blog. If you have a visited site and with good SEO metrics, you can make quite a bit of money selling links. 🤑

In France, there are many netlinking platforms that bring together buyers and sellers of links. Through these platforms, you will be able to offer backlinks to your site, in exchange for a fee. Obviously, the more powerful your site is, the more money you can earn per sale.

On NextLevel.link, the number 1 platform in France, you can sell links on existing articles. This way, you only have to add your site, and buyers will be able to order a link on an existing page. A plugin takes care of placing the link and adding 200 words on the page in question directly on your site.

But you can also sell sponsored articles through other platforms. In this case, you will publish a new article on your site(written by the platform) and place a link to the client’s blog in it. 🌐

Selling links and/or sponsored articles can become an important source of income if you have a popular blog. But here again, the choice of the niche will play a role. If you have a site on certain selling themes(casino, CBD, banking/insurance, etc.), you can easily be profitable. 💸

Sale of infoproducts

Once you have traffic on your site, you can create a store to sell your own products. Some people will sell products in an e-commerce way. But you can also sell infoproducts via your blog, and that is much more profitable!

We’ll explain. 🤔

On your blog, you can add an online store to sell infoproducts. An infoproduct can be an ebook, a simple PDF, an e-learning or other. No matter what theme you work on, you will be able to create an infoproduct and sell it.

The advantage is that you address a qualified audience, which will allow you to have a good conversion rate. And yes, visitors who come to your blog are necessarily more interested in your theme than users who come to a store because of an ad.

Let’s take a concrete example. 📝

The site aideauxtd.com is a blog that gives advice to law students. On this site, you can find blog articles on how to optimize your revisions, but also tutorials and guides on how to write a decision sheet(common exercise in law studies), for example.

All these blog posts will bring qualified traffic to the sites. Indeed, the majority of the people who arrive on this type of page will be law students who wish to learn more or revise. This is the perfect target audience to sell infoproducts like review sheets or law courses. 👩‍⚖️

As you can see, this blog offers review sheets for sale on all types of law taught in college.

Selling infoproducts is probably the most profitable monetization strategy in blogging. But it is also a method that requires more work. You will have to create the product, manage the payment, the VAT collection and the customer service. If you are only aiming for passive income, this may not be the best strategy.

Create a newsletter

It’s a strategy that works with blogging, but also with other traffic sources(YouTube channel, TikTok or others). In other words, you will simply collect email addresses through your content. For each visitor who visits your website, you will offer him to subscribe to your newsletter. 📧

As soon as a user is in your email list, you can send him a newsletter on a regular basis. At first glance, this has nothing to do with monetization. But a newsletter is not necessarily just an information letter that you send to your users. It is also a communication channel to monetize its audience.

We’ll explain. 🤔

As soon as you have an email list, you can do email marketing. Email marketing is simply selling by email. And the good news is that it works with all the monetization strategies we’ve presented in this guide.

Indeed, you can send emails to promote affiliate offers. But you can also use your mail base to sell your own products. 📦

Or you can also create a paid newsletter. In fact, you can also ask people to subscribe to a newsletter, but this time, access will be paid. In exchange, visitors who sign up will receive bonuses, not available to ordinary visitors to your blog.

Let’s take a concrete example. 📝

If you have a blog on finance and investment for example, you can sell access to a paid newsletter. For example, you can send an email every month with financial advice, stocks to buy, sell or other. To obtain these tips, users must pay a monthly subscription fee.

This is a less common, but equally effective method of monetization. The big advantage is that you can sell subscriptions and therefore generate a much more regular income. Also, you won’t depend solely on the SEO traffic of your blog anymore. 💪

In conclusion

You now have all the tools you need to create a blog and earn money with your website. All the tips we’ve given you are easy to implement and require little or no financial investment. So, we really invite you to follow this guide if you want to earn a passive income through blogging. 💸

If you want to go further, we invite you to download our free ebook “Affiliation & SEO“. In this ebook, you will learn how to create a website and monetize it through affiliate marketing. As you have seen in this guide, it is surely the most reliable passive income that can be generated on the internet.

To be guided step by step in this method in order to drastically increase your chances of success, you should know that we also offer a complete training of about ten hours. In this course, you’re going to learn SEO, website creation and monetization in a much more advanced way. 👀

As a bonus, dozens ofinterviews with SEO and digital marketingexperts who will share their experiences with you in exclusive interviews. You will also have access to the support community, where you can learn from more experienced students, but also create work groups with other beginners.