Earn Money From Blogs: 10 Blogging Ideas That Make Money

Want to earn money from blogs? These blogging ideas that make money will show you how to write blogs and earn money from blog writing.

How do I start blogging and earning money? How can I earn money from writing blogs? How long does it take to make money blogging? These are some of the most common questions new bloggers ask.

If you want to earn money through blogging, you have to know what it takes to write money-making blogs. You’ll also need a number of ideas for blogging to make money with your own blog.

How much money do bloggers make?

There are many factors that can affect your blogging income, such as the subject matter of your blog, the size of your audience, and the effectiveness of your monetization strategies.

It really depends on your blogging business model, your blogging niche, how much traffic your blog gets, and how well it converts. You’ll find a list of ideas for blogs to make money below.

It’s also worth noting that it can take time for a blogger to build up their audience and start earning a significant income from their blog. Many professional and famous bloggers make hundreds of thousands of dollars from their blog(s), but it took them years to get there.

Overall, your ability to earn money by writing blogs varies widely from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Some bloggers make very little, while others make significant amounts.

Why do bloggers fail to earn money through blogging?

Blogging in the 2020s is highly competitive, so it’s hard to grow a blog and make money today. However, there is never a lack of opportunity.

With constant technological updates and new products being released, there are many opportunities to start a blog that is constantly opening up.

So why do most bloggers fail to earn from blog writing? Here are some reasons why most people who try to make money blogging fail.

Unrealistic expectations

They have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how much money they will make. When these expectations have not been met, the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging.

Keep in mind that, even if you’re a marketing genius or have a really great idea for a blog, you won’t become a successful blogger overnight.

Building the kind of traffic that will help you earn enough to make a living will, in all likelihood, take at least several months, or even years.

You need to keep the faith and stay committed to your blogging goals during this initial lean period. And if you have a day job, don’t give it up until you’re earning enough with your blog.

Lack of planning

The other trap many bloggers fall into has to do with a lack of planning when they decide to start earning money from blogging. Today, having a great idea or a wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get attention.

To earn money from blogging, you have to treat your blogs as a business the way successful and famous bloggers do. When you start writing blogs and earning money, you need to plan a regular posting schedule to ensure your blog is updated regularly.

You also create a business entity or brand for your blog and keep track of your income with the help of an accountant or accounting programs or personal tax prep software.

Ultimately, the key to success is to make a sound blogging business plan and update it as you learn more about the blogging business.

Failing to invest in yourself

Failing to invest in yourself is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make as a new and aspiring blogger. When you invest in yourself, you’re investing in your future and giving yourself the opportunity to grow and learn.

By failing to invest in yourself, you’re limiting your skill set and ensuring that you’ll never reach your full potential. In order to succeed in life, you need to be constantly growing and learning.

You need to be constantly pushing yourself to new levels and learn the secrets to blogging success from famous bloggers who have achieved what you hope to do.

How to start a blog and earn money

So how to start a blog and earn money? And how does a blog make money? It depends. Professional bloggers use many different blogging business models, but in general, to monetize your blog, you need to build targeted traffic that converts into sales.

The more traffic your blog gets, the more sales you can generate, and the more advertisers and affiliate programs will agree to pay you.

However, getting enough traffic in order to make a profit takes time and effort, and too many new bloggers spend all their time writing posts, and almost none on blog marketing and promotion.

You might think it’s important to post updates every day, to build traffic and keep readers and search engines returning to your blog. However, it does not matter how often you update your blog, if nobody’s reading your content!

To start earning money by writing blogs, focus on creating high-quality, SEO blog posts, and spend more time building links and relationships with other bloggers.

Ultimately, you want to have enough income to be able to outsource your blog content writing and promotion tasks and focus on increasing your blogger earnings.

#1. Choose a profitable blogging niche

A crucial first step to earning money through blogging or online businesses is picking a niche. A niche can be defined as any group that shares a common interest such as filmmaking, writing novels, soccer, or art and craft.

Here are some tips to help you choose a niche that is right for you:

Determine your interests and passions

Consider your true interests as well as the subjects you enjoy learning about and discussing. This can serve as a fantastic place to start when picking a niche.

Make a list of all the things that captivate your interest and that you’d like to become an expert on.

Consider your areas of expertise

Are there any in which you are particularly knowledgeable or experienced? This can include areas of interest related to your professional studies or subjects in which you have some expertise.

You’ll be able to impart your knowledge to others and comfortably offer professional consulting or coaching services, so this may be a good specialty for you.

Conduct market research

Once you’ve come up with a few viable niches, perform some market research to determine whether there is a market for that particular product or service.

Analyzing search trends, industry reports, and rival activity can all help you find the information you need to select the major themes to focus on and base your content on.

Research which blogs make the most money in your niche and subscribe to them to learn what works. Take into account elements including competition, trends, and prospects for expansion.

Validate your ideas

Once you’ve identified a few prospective niches, use these idea validation tips to see if there’s interest in your suggested niche by conducting surveys of your target audience online.

Be prepared to pivot if required

It’s crucial to avoid picking a niche that is too narrow and to be ready to pivot in the event that your niche becomes obsolete in the future.

Whether you’re creating an internet business venture or a blog, it’s crucial to pick a niche that is sustainable as well as profitable in the long term.

Make sure you choose a blogging niche and keywords that are profitable enough to help you generate sufficient blog earnings for the time and effort you’ll be spending on building traffic to your blog.

#2. Optimize your blog for search traffic

These SEO tips for bloggers are a step-by-step bloggers’ SEO checklist that will show you how to do SEO for beginners to increase your website rankings.

You can use SEMrush’s SEO toolkit to get a bird’s-eye view of your competitor’s SEO strategies, including main traffic sources, keywords, backlinks, and more.

You can also use SEMrush’s Content Marketing Toolkit to conduct topic research by giving you the full picture of what your audience needs.

This will help you find the best blog ideas that make money in your niche and learn what sort of products and services customers are willing to pay for.

According to the SEMrush blog, there are four main types of keywords that classify buyer intent:

Informational keywords to provide an answer to a specific question or general information.
Navigational keywords to find a specific site or page.
Commercial keywords to investigate brands or services.
Transactional keywords to complete an action or purchase.

In this video by Matt Diggity, you’ll learn the best ratio of informational to commercial content on your website to avoid Google penalties and boost your rankings.

#3. Learn how to boost blog conversions

In order to increase your blog earnings, you must learn how to convert blog visitors and readers into buyers. To do this, you need to learn how to improve conversions.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is one of the best-kept secrets for driving revenue for your business because it allows you to make more money from the traffic you already get without having to find new pockets of customers or spend money on advertising.

Your conversion rates tell you whether your site is actually generating revenue, and knowing your numbers can help you get more value out of the traffic you already have.

You can learn the science and art of successful conversion rate optimization in this professional course on How to Convert Visitors Into Buyers. It includes over 50 real-world examples to turn a website into a click-driving, sales-generating conversion machine.

You’ll discover what makes a website or landing page effective at driving action and how to use these strategies to help your business grow.

Learn how to calculate conversion rates, remove friction from your funnel, optimize your pages, perform A/B testing, and measure your results by the end of this course.

10 best blog ideas that make money

With the right kind of content in place, you can use the blog monetization strategies below to increase your blogging earnings and start making money from your blog.

#1. Earn money with affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is the fastest way to make money blogging. It is the process of selling other people’s products for a commission. You can start by looking for affiliate programs that meet your blog reader’s needs and complement your business.

Then you can link to these from your blog and get a commission on each sale through your affiliate link. Start by joining the Amazon affiliate program and incorporate Amazon links to your blog.

In the case of services such as web hosting or marketing software that require a subscription, you get paid a recurring income as long as your referral stays with the service. Here are some of the best-paying affiliate programs and networks you can join.

Learn how to earn affiliate commissions, increase affiliate marketing sales, and boost your affiliate marketing earnings with these super affiliate income tips.

You can learn how to build, launch, and make money with your first blog, including designing your blog, writing articles, building your email list, getting visitors to your blog, and making your first $1,000 and beyond, in the Launch Your Blog Biz program.

#2. Earn money with advertising

Once you have an established blog with a regular readership, it is relatively easy to increase your blogging earnings through advertising. Selling advertising directly to companies that want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog can be fairly lucrative.

You can reach out to businesses that sell products that your readers may be interested in. If you have chosen your blogging niche well, there will always be businesses that complement your blog niche and are willing to sponsor giveaways for competitions and promotions on your blog.

If you have excellent negotiation skills, a strong background in sales, and are experienced at pitching proposals, you can make a fair bit of money by renting blog space to interested companies.

The downside is that, even for bloggers who have spent months or years blogging, any money from advertising revenue may not add up to a large sum. Here are some advertising networks you can sign up with:

If your blog is in a niche with a demographic of interest to advertisers, you’ll be more likely to turn a profit than if it is on a fairly obscure subject that does not draw the kind of audience advertisers want to reach.

Many new bloggers make money blogging with Google’s AdSense program. This requires very little effort on your part. However, you may discover that you make less money through this method than you had hoped.

#3. Earn money with sponsored posts

Many bloggers and online influencers skip over sponsored posts. They either think it’s too hard, that it’s a waste of time, that they will turn followers away, or that their followers just won’t be interested.

However, if you’re not earning money through sponsored posts, then you are leaving money on the table. In my experience, sponsored posts are the easiest way to make money blogging – even easier and more lucrative than ads.

In the Making Sense of Sponsored Posts course, you’ll learn the following:

What are sponsored posts and how they work
Why sponsored posts are a fantastic source of blogging income
How to pitch brands
How to build trust and not lose followers
Required disclosures that you need to know about

By hosting sponsored posts you can earn money from blogging very quickly. You can sign up with the guest posting and content distribution platforms below to offer sponsored article placements on your blog.

While sponsored posts are a great way to make money while sharing the products and services you love with your audience, often bloggers will work for days to write a sponsored blog post and not get paid by the brand or face confusion over how payment will be received.

If you’re not using one of the guest post services above, you need to enter into a written Sponsored Posts Contract before you start partnering with brands. Without this legally binding contract, you’re out of luck if the brand decides to not pay you for your sponsored work on time or forgets to pay you at all.

#4. Offer freelance writing services

If you want to earn from blog writing without waiting months and years, then freelance writing is one of the best ways to start earning money by writing blogs.

You can use your blog as a platform to improve your writing skills and learn how to write money-earning blogs that readers love.

The Content Transformation System is a step-by-step mentoring program with a comprehensive roadmap that reveals the structures, abilities, and online strategy that underpin a flourishing digital firm.

It helps creatives completely avoid burnout, steadily build their own seven-figure online brand, and expand their business to whatever size they want it to be in just 90 days.

In the Write Your Way to Your First $1k™ course, you’ll learn the exact blueprint for setting up your freelance writing business and the exact tools and strategies you need to attract, land, and retain clients.

Becoming a freelance writer is a great strategy if you love to write blogs and earn money, and it’s one that famous bloggers like Jon Morrow teach and recommend.

Offer to start a company blog for clients

As blogging becomes a lucrative business, a lot of established companies are getting in on the action by building blogs that provide a friendly face for their organization.

Once you build your writer platform as a successful blogger, offering corporate blogging services and writing blogs for companies, is another excellent way to earn money from blogging.

Often, a company will employ an established blogger with a web content writing business to create a company blog designed specifically to appeal to that company’s customers and create positive associations with the brand in consumers’ minds.

More than one writer who never even dreamed that they could make money blogging has been approached to write a company blog, and offered quite a pretty penny for this kind of gig.

How to learn blog writing & earn money

In the Freelance Blogging in a Weekend course, you’ll learn how to earn money from blog writing, whether you’re writing for clients or for your own blog.

This step-by-step guide to blog writing for businesses is ideal for those who want to become freelance bloggers, write blogs for clients, and offer blogging services for small businesses.

You’ll learn about blogging as a marketing strategy, how to write conversational blog posts for easy reading, find blog topics that rank easily, generate the perfect headline and CTA for your clients, fix your writing for better engagement, and learn about freelance blogging rates.

In the Monetize Your Blog With Freelance Writing course, you’ll learn what you need to start making $2,000/month as a freelance writer and making money blogging by using your awesome skills as a writer.

#5. Start a YouTube channel

YouTube has become a very popular platform with billions of users, so it offers a great opportunity to reach a large audience. Creating videos can also be a fun and creative way to express yourself.

Unlike some other social media platforms, YouTube is not exclusively for personal use – there are also many opportunities for business and marketing uses.

For businesses, a YouTube channel can be used to promote products or services, share company news and announcements, or even provide Tutorials or How-To videos.

And because YouTube is so popular, there’s a good chance that your target audience is already using the platform, which makes it easier to monetize.

Some reasons why you might want to start a YouTube channel are that you’re passionate about a particular topic and want to share your knowledge with the world. Or perhaps you’re a talented musician or indie artist and want to share your work with others.

You don’t even need to be outgoing or charismatic to earn money on YouTube. You can create videos as an introvert without showing your face and become successful on YouTube.

For example, Matt Par started out on YouTube at the age of 14 and built 9 different YouTube niche channels, without even showing his face.

His Tube Mastery & Monetization course is a complete roadmap to take beginners all the way to make a full-time income and has just as much content for the veterans to scale their businesses and perfect their techniques.

#6. Start a lucrative side hustle

Writing is not the only business or job you can take on as a blogger. In addition to freelance writing, here are some lucrative side hustles you can start while building your blog:

As it can take a good amount of time to learn how to earn from writing blogs, having a well-paying side hustle can offer financial security while you build your blogging business and increase your income.

#7. Sell eBooks, courses & coaching

Selling information products, such as eBooks, online courses, or coaching programs, is another excellent way of earning money through blogging and taking your passive income to the next level.

You could compile some of your best blog posts into an eBook, along with some new and exclusive content, self-publish it on Amazon KDP and promote it through your blog.

Even if all your blog posts are freely available online, you’d be surprised how many people are willing to pay to have all the information easily and conveniently available in an eBook.

You can create and sell your own online courses or offer e-training in your virtual learning academy, and set up an affiliate program to let your affiliate partners do the marketing and selling for you.

This is the route that most professional and famous bloggers take once they have built up enough traffic and sufficient subscribers to help them test out various ideas and see what sort of topics their readers want to know more about.

Podia is the most creator-friendly community-building platform on the market because it allows you to sell your digital products, eBooks, and courses, host a community, and email your audience, all on one platform without using a bunch of platforms and tools.

- Get your free Podia plan to begin selling right away and only pay an 8% transaction fee on paid products sold.
- In this free guide from Podia, you’ll learn everything you need to know about how to create, sell, and profit from an online course.
- Get a free idea generation spreadsheet and learn three proven strategies for coming up with profitable ideas for your online course that people will actually pay for.

#8. Start a membership site

If you’re looking to start a membership site and sell access to premium blog content, you need to make sure your premium content is unique, interesting, useful, engaging, and worth paying for, as this will help convince people to buy access to it.

Promoting your content is key to letting people know it exists, and be sure to let people know where they can purchase access, and why they should do so. With a little effort, selling access to your blog content can be a great way to generate some extra income.

You’ll need to choose a pricing model and decide whether to charge per month, per post, or give away access for free in exchange for an email address. Once you’ve chosen your pricing model, here are some ways in which your audience can purchase access to your content.

Create a membership community

You can start a membership site or community through a free platform like Podia, the most creator-friendly membership platform on the market, with no transaction fees and an all-in-one website builder to sell courses, webinars, downloads, and community.

Podia eliminates the technical headaches of connecting a bunch of third-party apps to help you host a free or paid community, sell digital products, and email your audience, all on one platform.

Create a no-code mobile app for your community

You could even build your own mobile app with the no-code AppPresser membership mobile app builder, and give your paying audience access to your premium content while allowing them to access some content for free.

The AppPresser mobile app builder allows you to protect your content, lets users register and log in, and integrates your membership plugin so your app users see only what they’re allowed to see.

Use a WordPress membership site plugin

Alternatively, you could set up a membership site on your WordPress blog with a membership site plugin like MemberPress, which will help you accept credit cards securely, control who sees your content and sell digital downloads.

#9. Start an eCommerce store

Want to sell your own products through your blog? You can set up an eCommerce store on a subdomain and sell art online, or you can sell any other products from your blogs, such as craft products, pet products, and even dropshipping products.

You can even build and sell your own products such as WordPress themes, plugins, SaaS, and software products, and use your blog to sell them.

These eCommerce guides will show you how to start an eCommerce business with the best eCommerce platforms, solutions, and software.

You can also build online stores (almost) free and add eCommerce to your WordPress blog with WordPress eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce.

Include a link to your online shop in your blog navigation menu and create a sitemap for your online store. This will allow website visitors to browse through your product catalog and make purchases directly on your site.

If you don’t want to start an eCommerce store on your blog, you can also learn how to sell your products on Amazon with these tips, tools, and courses to help you start an Amazon FBA business, and use your blog to promote your Amazon store.

Here are some ways to sell eCommerce products from your blog and earn money:

Write product reviews

The first is by writing product reviews on your blog. You can write an honest review of the product with the benefits and drawbacks in comparison to other products of the same type and also include case studies, demos, and use cases.

Include product links in blog posts

You can include product links in your blog posts when you mention a product that you sell. This will allow readers to easily purchase the products that you’re writing about.

For example, if you’re writing a post about summer fashion trends, you could include a link to a bathing suit in the post so readers can click on it and purchase it.

This takes a bit more work, but it can be effective in driving traffic from your blog to your store.

Don’t forget eCommerce SEO

In order to sell eCommerce products from your blog, you need to have a good amount of website traffic coming to your site. The best way to do that is by improving your eCommerce SEO.

These eCommerce SEO best practices will help you improve SEO for eCommerce sites and boost your eCommerce website rankings.

#10. Grow your brick-and-mortar business

Do you have a brick-and-mortar business that you want to promote online? There’s no better way than a blog to help you do that. For starters, you can use your blog to share information about your brick-and-mortar business with potential customers.

A famous, and oft-quoted case study, is that of Marcus Sheridan, the owner of River Pools and Spas (RPS), a small business that sold swimming pools in Virginia and Maryland.

Sheridan built his company into one of the largest pool companies in the United States by using a blog to grow blog subscribers, increase site traffic, and generate leads, even during low-demand seasons.

In addition to educating customers about your products or services, you can use your company blog to share use cases, and product demos, and announce new developments, special sales, promotions, coupons, or discounts that you’re running.

You can even share customer testimonials or product reviews, images of customers using your products or services, and feature stories of happy customers on your blog. This is a great way to create social proof and show potential customers that you’re worth doing business with.

For example, if you have a dog bakery business, you can use your dog bakery blog to educate customers about why your products are better for their pets and feature your birthday cakes for dogs, along with photos and videos of birthday celebrations of your furry customers.

You can also announce new products and promotions, and even share homemade dog treat recipes. In addition, you can use your blog to connect with other businesses in your industry, create partnerships or collaborative marketing efforts, and engage with potential customers or vendors.

Now that you know about all of these ways to start earning an income from your blog, you need to remember that it’s not an overnight achievement. It takes time, effort, and a lot of traffic to start earning a significant amount of money from blogging.

You can uncover what it takes to earn money from blogs by learning the secrets of famous bloggers, and how they earn money through blogging and building their businesses online.

Blogging tips & tools

Priya Florence Shah

Priya Florence Shah is a bestselling author, an award-winning online publisher, and an online branding consultant. Download her free personal branding eBooks and check out Devi2Diva, her book on emotional self-care for women. In her spare time, Priya writes science-fiction novels and poetry and chills with her two-legged and four-legged kids.