How to Make Money Blogging for Beginners (10 Success Stories of Bloggers)

There are thousands of ways to make money online, but blogging is one of the most preferred and proven methods to generate income.

If you are blogging for money (that you should be—eventually) and have not yet discovered the actual ways to see money coming into your account, then you need some real ways that you can copy and incorporate into your blogging strategy.

Choosing the right blog niche is just as important. Your niche directly impacts your earnings. Researching trending and evergreen niches can attract loyal readers and introduce affiliate programs, sponsorships, and tailored ad opportunities. Aligning content with your audience’s interests maximizes your blog’s revenue potential.

Have you ever searched on the web for “how to make money online for beginners”?

You will most likely end up with some copy-pasted ideas, but the real problem with those ideas is they fail to show the actionable strategies that can make you money.

With this thought, I have approached 10 bloggers and asked them to share their success stories about how they have made their first $100 from blogging. 

Starting Your WordPress Blog

But before heading straight to these success stories, I highly recommend you start your WordPress blog (if you have not started yet).

Starting a blog will normally cost you only $60-$80 for a year. Yes, my agency profiles in high-scale builds—and our average client invests nearly $100K in a build over time. But one of the reasons I keep backing WordPress up is the ease of starting out with no budget and scaling with sweat and tears to the point when it makes sense to hire people to help you out—and invest in a proper build, continuously.

And blogging is the bread and butter of Inbound Marketing—attracting customers without intrusive ads and cold calling. Providing educational content and solving business pain points is a great way to build trust and develop your reputation as an expert (whereas business would follow.)

And since there are different ways to monetize content over time, here are some practical stories you can replicate and build upon.

1. Amira Law – A Self Guru

I’m a lawyer, blogger, and business coach from Florida. I blog at “ASelfGuru.com” where I teach you how to protect your online business legally along with the business skills you need to become your own boss.

I started blogging on a whim and launched my blog in 7 days while working full-time as a lawyer.

I made my first $1000 during my first month of blogging and made a total of $3700 in just two months of blogging with only 13 blog posts published at the time, 55 subscribers, and $0 spent on advertising my products.

Here are the three ways I made money blogging from my new blog:

1) Selling My Own Digital Products.

You can see the complete list of all the legal templates and The Legal Bundle  I sell for your website is my best-selling product. These are the 3 legal pages every blogger and entrepreneur needs on their website to comply with the law and protect their online business legally. Plus it comes with a huge discount and 9 bonuses!

2)  Sponsored Post. This is the second way I made money on my new blog.

3)  Affiliate Marketing. You can access all the affiliate programs that made me money during my first month of blogging.

I also have my own high-paying affiliate program that’s free to join for all bloggers and entrepreneurs, and it generates passive income for me every month.

At the time of writing this, I’ve made more than $16,000 from my new blog in about 5 months, as you can see below:

Note: If you are a blogger then you must know the value of the legal pages (i.e. Privacy policy, Disclaimer, Terms of services). If you are unsure what to write on those pages then I highly recommend you go for the legal pages bundle.

These legal pages are crafted by a professional lawyer Amira herself so you can blindly trust the templates of the pages.

2. Ankit Singla – Master Blogging

I recently started my new blog MasterBlogging and wanted to generate some affiliate sales.

Most of the revenue I generate online comes through Affiliate Marketing.

And this case is no different.

So what did I do?

I published a blog post on “How to start a blog” where I am promoting SiteGround web-hosting.

With my Facebook Ads and Viral Marketing strategies, I was able to get huge eyeballs on my content almost in no time.

Let’s first see my Facebook Ad:

Now, here is the traffic report in Google Analytics for this page:

And finally, here are my affiliate sales stats:

Although the sales are still under approval process all I want to say is if you have a working funnel, you can easily make $100 within a month even with a new blog.

  • Start your blog on Siteground in less than 20 minutes.

3. Emily- from Easy Blog Emily

You really have to try different methods, some out of your comfort zone.

When you’re starting out blogging, you don’t know which way of making money will best suit you or your audience.

I was trying to push affiliate marketing and although I made a small amount, I actually made far more through coaching. It was completely new to me and not something I thought I could do, but I loved it and know it’s a good source of income.

And I still use affiliate links there’s nothing wrong with having multiple income streams when it comes to blogging!

4. Drew DuBoff – From DrewDuBoff.com

I actually made my first $100 before I officially declared my blog was launched. It was affiliate income, but not in the traditional sense of links being put on my blog or in an email funnel.

I’m in a lot of blogging-related Facebook groups and I was able to supply my affiliate link for someone in need. The products that got me my first $100 were selling A Self Guru’s Legal Bundle and Simplifying DIY Design’s Complete Bloggers Template Toolkit

Moving forward, the goal is to generate affiliate income more passively.

I’ve also made thousands of dollars in freelance services, which was revenue I generated before my affiliate income. The different jobs I do are virtual assisting, SEO editing, and proofreading/editing.

Here’s evidence of my affiliate income and of the revenue in general.

5. Elizabeth – From Curvedlines.co

How did I make my first $100 from blogging?

That’s a really good question, and I wish I had a more exciting rip-roaring answer than I do. But I have to admit making my first $100 was unintentional, a total accident.

Note: This is a perfect example for those who are always in search of “How I make money online for free”.

My first $61 came from an affiliate sale from a legal page bundle found on my resource page. I was learning how to place affiliate links and asked for feedback from our learning community to double-check and make sure I was doing it right.

That is when someone in our group bought the legal pages. That sale was completely unexpected; I am very thankful for that person, it opened my eyes to the kindness of the blogging community and the benefits of solving a problem.

My second affiliate income came from Grammarly; they offered new affiliates an incentive if they wrote a review about them within the first two weeks of being accepted. So I did and made my next $25.

My third $98 came as a total fluke.

A friend wanted to take a class, but the class wasn’t accepting students right then, so I asked if they would make an exception, they did, but with the understanding that they would not accept an affiliate link.

I said ok because I was just solving a problem for a friend. Then about an hour later I received a message that they would pay me the affiliate commission.

“Wow, THANK YOU, YOU ROCK!!”

I love bloggers they are kind-hearted people who try and do the right thing for the right reasons at the very right time. I’ve been blogging now for all most five months.

6. Michelle – The Perfectly Imperfect Mummy

I’m Michelle, aka known as The Perfectly Imperfect Mummy and I am a SAHM mummy to two sets of twins.

I began blogging in May this year and spent the first six months concentrating on my content aiming for quality and consistency. I have since become an admin on the Facebook page ASelfGuru – Biz Blog Community & love interacting with other bloggers. I have also been lucky enough to guest post for some amazing bloggers and have some amazing bloggers guest post on my blog.

Only in the last month have I been researching monetizing my blog. I started on Pinterest and have read mammoth amounts of pins on the topic and have also spoken to other bloggers and asked a lot of questions.

Recently I have been earning money from sponsored posts.

I’m paid £15 per post which equates to $26 AUD. I have done two of these posts earning $52.00. Leading up to Black Friday, I posted consistently the sales my affiliates were running on social media & I secured a $64.20 commission.

To date, I have earned a grand total of $116.20.

Moving forward my plan is to increase marketing, continue pinning, boost visits to my website & hopefully drive affiliate sales. I will also continue with sponsored posts.

7. Arfa Nazeer – From She Means Blogging

Just before I tell you how I make my first $100, here is a fact.

Blogging is no quick rich scheme or no one has any magic formula that new bloggers can use to make money from the beginning.

But, if you have a monetization plan even before your blog launch, and you have a money-making roadmap then you will be able to earn money quickly. As soon as you have a strategy and a plan to follow, you will start making money. As simple as that.

Here’s how I made my first $100 from my blog.

Well, I made my first $100 from affiliate marketing and freelancing.

Just after a month, one of my friends reached out to me and asked how did you come up with a self-hosted blog? Is it easy, or complicated?

She was looking for a process from someone who has already done that. During those days, I was working on a detailed guide on starting a blog and as soon as I finished it, I sent her a link.

She used my affiliate link and I made the first $50.

The other thing I was doing those days was finding freelance clients.

I used to treat my blog as a side business and freelancing as my main source of income. Because I already had experience working with freelance clients.

So, this is how I made my first blogging income.

Tip: Use your blog as a portfolio to earn income in the beginning stages. Just think of what service you could offer for free. It could be writing, image designing, virtual assistant, or WordPress management.

8. Janice Wald – From Mostly Blogging

When I was a new blogger, I wanted to make money blogging.

I had concerns WordPress.com frowned on monetization so I moved to WordPress.org.

I have a blog coaching business.

I use a pricing table plugin to display my prices.

My friend Charles had a friend who was critical of his blog. Charles hired me for one hour, which, as you can see from the link, is $100 per hour.

However, Charles, my client, did not want to tell me what to do to improve his blog.

He wanted his critical friend to tell me. As a new blogger, I found this “three-way arrangement” a little awkward, but I did what his friend said, and both Charles and his friend were happy.

Charles has since passed on, but I’ll never forget that’s the way I made my first $100. as a new blogger.

9. Sumit Sao – Founder of Blogging Lift

I am Sumit Sao Founder of “BloggingLift.com”.

After 3 unsuccessful blogs, Finally, I started this blog and start making money from it within 5 months.

There are two main sources of my earnings:

  1. Affiliate Marketing and
  2. Sponsored Product.

But most of the revenue comes from Affiliate Marketing.

I have added screenshots below to show you some of my earnings from Affiliate marketing.

I know you also want to make money from Affiliate Marketing.

That’s why I’m going to share some affiliate marketing tips with you:

1. Find Low KD and Low Search Volume Keywords:  If you’ll use the long tail keyword which has low keyword difficulty and low search volume then you can easily rank for that keyword. You’ll get less but targeted traffic. It means more conversion and more sales.

2. Popular Blog Post: Use Google Analytics and find your popular blog posts and add your affiliate links to them.

3. Sticky Sidebar: Add a banner image of the product you are promoting on your blog in the sidebar and make it sticky.

4. Build Your Mailing List: Money is on your list. Try to build your email list using a FREE tool like MailChimp.

5. Build Trust: This is the last but the most important tip for you. You should build trust first then sell products.

Don’t know how to build trust? It’s very easy, Help other people related to your niche on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to build some authority as a blogger.

I hope you’ll use all these tips and start making money from your blog.

And follow this tutorial to get set up your blog on WordPress.

10. John Banks – Writer and co-creator of DigitalContentPlanet.com

My first blog was a satirical news website that I created with my business partner.

The plan was to make a viral-style site like Viral Nova etc that was very popular a few years back. We had no idea really how to compete in this market but knew that having tons of followers on social media really helped.

The competitor’s sites had millions of followers but we thought if we could just tap into this field and get a small slice of the action that would be a start.

We created loads of viral-style news articles and the type of posts that get curated on sites like Buzz Feed etc.

The main idea was to create posts that get shared on Facebook etc. We had a budget and so we started to experiment with ads. After a while, we cracked the Facebook ads formula and we started to generate money from Adsense, Content. Ad and Sunfrog T-Shirt sales.

One of our successful posts was a post on Fishing that really took off. The targeting for this post can be seen below:

Our budget allowed us to reach a decent size amount of people each day and this post generated a ton of shares.

Adsense does not allow images to be shown of earnings but I can tell you this post generated revenue well into the four figures. We were also able to generate an income from selling T-Shirts as affiliates which we placed in the post from a store called SunFrog.

These shirt sales also topped four figures that month as you can see from the screenshot below.

Pro tip: If you are looking to make money from Adsense the key is PAGEVIEWS. If you can split your blog posts up into more than one page you will see an increase in your revenue.

Make Money Blogging Ideas and Takeaways

  1. There are not certain types of blogs that make money instead you can make money from any niche depending on the market demands. To help you here is the list of 100+ profitable blogging niches.
  2. You can even make money without a blog with affiliate marketing and Freelancing. Like many of these bloggers have done.
  3. You can create your own product and sell it online.
  4. You can choose to write content for other bloggers and website owners. I’m also writing for many small business and marketing firms. Shoot me an email if you want me to write for your blog.
  5. You can make money online from Ads but this method demands a lot of traffic and page views to make a decent amount of money.
  6. If you are technically sound at optimizing WordPress then you can offer these skills to make side income online.

Wrapping Up

I’ve had multiple “firsts” in my revenue generation journey from content. I’ve got:

  • Hundreds of guest post requests paying $100 a piece (for other sites I own).
  • Sales of my Amazon book
  • Loads of advisory and consulting calls 
  • Some light affiliate income (it’s not my core focus but even half a dozen links go a long way)
  • Paid speaking engagements
  • Invitations for training technical courses for large corporations
  • Lots of clients work for my agency (thanks to my educational content)

So I have tried to hand over real ways to make money by blogging for beginners. Now I hope that you are motivated and also going to hit your first $100 threshold soon.

Over to you, let us know how you are making money online, how you have completed your first $100 threshold, what was the method you have used and how long does it take to make $100 from your blog?

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