Blogging As A Side Hustle: A Beginner’s Guide

If you’re trying to find a way to make a little extra money online, from a side hustle you can do from the comfort of your own home, you’re definitely not alone.

Side hustles have exploded in recent years. If you’re under the age of around forty, you’re actually in the minority if you don’t have one - 65% of Millennials and 68% of Generation Z have a side hustle, an incredibly high proportion.

Source: Finder’s Side Hustle Statistics 2024

But not all side hustles are created equal, and some are much harder to get started with than others. People often like the idea of blogging as it has a fairly low barrier to entry - there are tons of free blog hosting sites available, so all you have to do is pick a topic and start writing.

But how easy is it to make money from your blog? And what should you think about before diving in? Read on to find out everything you need to know as a beginner blogger.

A Short History Of Blogging

You probably already know that the word ‘blog’ is a shortening of the term ‘weblog’. The term started being used in the late 1990s, but the concept of an online journal or diary had been around for some time before that.

A blog was often referred to as a ‘personal home page’ when they first came into existence, in the early to mid-nineties, and it wasn’t until December in 1997 that the word ‘weblog’ was first used, by Jorn Barger (creator of the website Robot Wisdom), to describe a log of his internet activity. At the time it consisted of little more than links to other websites he’d visited.

From there, blogging exploded in popularity. At some point in 1999 ‘weblog’ was first shortened to ‘blog’, and soon after that ‘Blogger’ first launched, along with a number of other platforms that allowed the habitually online to chronicle their internet activities.

The 2000s were something of a golden age of blogging, with blogs on almost any conceivable subject being created. It also began to be possible to monetise your blog; BlogAds and Google’s Adsense were launched in the early noughties, opening up the possibility of sponsorship from major companies. Blogs were becoming businesses.

Live blogging soon followed, and in the mid-2000s video blogs, or vlogs, started to be created, with YouTube launching in 2005. You might be surprised to learn that YouTube began as a dating site, where people could upload short videos about themselves for prospective dates to view - but it soon turned to more general video content, and became enormously popular.

In the late 2000s, traditional blogging suffered a bit of a downturn, with attention turning more to video from written content. In more recent years, bloggers have had to adapt to stay relevant, and in many cases have become much more professional. Platforms such as Medium and Substack, which host thousands of blogs in varying formats, have allowed bloggers to continue to reach readers.

The advent of AI means that human bloggers now have automated competition, with ChatGPT capable of churning out essay-length texts almost instantly. Many writers are highly concerned about the impact AI will have on blogging. Currently, however, AI simply isn’t accurate enough to replace human bloggers - it may be able to create coherent text, but that doesn’t mean you can rely on any of it to be correct.

Who knows what will happen to blogging in the future? But for now, blogs and their human authors still hold an important place in cyberspace.

Blogging Success Stories

There’s an enormous number of blogs out there, and most of them don’t make their authors any money. But that doesn’t mean you should be disheartened! Profitable blogging requires good content and consistency, which the vast majority of bloggers don’t manage. If you achieve both, and have a bit of luck on your side, that could turn into huge success.

Take a look at a few examples of wildly successful blogs below.

• Just A Girl And Her Blog

Lifestyle and productivity bloggers Abby and Donnie Lawson manage to make upward of $40,000 a month from their blog. Their focus is especially on home and life organisation, and the blog makes its money through affiliate marketing and product promotion, as well as promoting their own products and services.

• Show Me The Yummy

As you might have guessed from the name, Show Me The Yummy is a successful food blog, featuring hundreds of recipes. One very useful page on this blog is their Income Reports section. Although the authors stopped posting their monthly income some time ago, you can clearly see how quickly their income grew in the first couple of years of their blog’s existence - great inspiration for budding food bloggers!

• The Blonde Abroad

The Blonde Abroad chronicles the solo travels of Kiersten Rich, who left the world of corporate finance to travel the world, blogging about her adventures. Admittedly, starting off as someone with enough money to quit your job and go travelling probably helps, but Rich certainly lived up to her name from blogging alone. By 2019, her blog was making her over a million dollars a year.

Types Of Paid Work For Blog Writers

When you think about blogging, you probably imagine yourself with your very own blog, on a subject you’re passionate about, ideally making money from it through affiliate marketing and paid ads.

And that’s definitely one of the most common ways to earn money from blogging, but it’s not the only option. If you enjoy writing long form blog content, but don’t want the hassle of running your own blog, you could offer your services as a freelance content writer. Plenty of companies have their own blogs as part of their marketing strategy, and they’ll often hire freelance bloggers to write new and interesting content for them.

Alternatively, some companies will even employ part time or full time content writers for their blogs. You won’t have the creative freedom of running your own blog, but if you can find a salaried job as a blog writer, you might well feel it’s worth the sacrifice.

How Do Blogs Make Money?

The vast majority of money made by blogging is from advertising, in one form or another, although occasionally a blog can be turned into a sellable product in its own right.

Below are the main methods of monetising a blog:

• Straightforward ads, usually in a sidebar, but they can also be at the top or bottom of the page, or interspersed with the text of a blog (though readers can be annoyed by more intrusive ads). When blogs first started to be monetised, services such as Google Adsense allowed the blog owner to include adverts. In return, the blog owner would receive a (very) small payment anytime a reader viewed or clicked an ad. This can still earn you quite a bit of money today, especially if your blog gains a wide audience.

• Affiliate marketing, which has largely taken over as the biggest earner for personal bloggers. It’s a simple enough concept - you include affiliate links from companies whose products or services you’ve agreed to promote, and every time someone makes a purchase through the link on your blog, you earn commission. Again, the bigger your audience, the more you can make from affiliate marketing.

• Product reviews. Depending on the particular subject of a blog, its author may well receive products from companies in exchange for a review. This doesn’t have to be a positive review, as a rule, and most bloggers add a disclaimer that they received the product for free, but are still offering their honest opinion. Nonetheless, if you make a habit of reviewing products negatively, you probably won’t receive many more of them.

• Direct selling of products. Once a blog starts to become popular, its author may decide to create and sell their own products, such as a book based on their blog or a course. For example, Allie Brosh, author of the blog/comic Hyperbole and a Half, went on to publish two books, the first of which was recommended by none other than Bill Gates in his book blog.

• Indirect marketing. For larger companies, who maintain a blog as a smaller part of their website, their blog may not be intended to make money directly, but to market whatever product or service the company is selling. In these cases, the blog will aim to offer useful, readable content that encourages readers to check out what else the company’s offering, thereby indirectly improving revenue for that company.

Types Of Blog

There are almost as many types of blog as there are conceivable subjects, but some are more popular than others. Before you start a blog, you’ll need to think about the type of blog you’d like to write, depending on your own interests and expertise.

Some of the most common types of blog are as follows:

• Travel

• Food

• Health and fitness

• Lifestyle

• Personal finance

• Sports

• Political

• Music

• And so on, and so on

How Do I Get Started?

Choose a niche and a name

First of all, you’ll need to decide on a niche for your blog. This might be as simple as deciding to write a food blog, if you’re a keen cook, but it can pay to be more specific - for example, you could focus on vegetarian food, or on recipes for inexperienced cooks. Or if you’d like to start a travel blog, you could plan out a particular sort of travel in advance - you might decide to walk the coasts of Ireland, perhaps, or tour France’s vineyards.

Once you’ve got your niche, you’ll need a catchy name. If you don’t have any good ideas, you can use a free business name generator, such as Namelix, and even a logo generator as well (try out Logo’s free generator), to give your budding blog a professional finish.

Research the competition

You need to know what you’re up against! Look up other blogs in your chosen niche to see what they’re doing right, and what you think you could do better. You can’t take content directly from their blog, of course, but you can certainly get inspiration from them.

Perform keyword research

If you want your blog to be a success, you need to provide content that readers are looking for. Keyword research, which you can perform using free tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner, or other dedicated paid tools, is the best way to find out what people are searching for in topics surrounding your blog’s niche. Once you’ve got this information, you can start coming up with blog posts to meet the needs of those people, and crafting compelling titles to draw in readers.

Set up your website and organise hosting

You don’t have to spend a lot on a website, but you definitely need somewhere for your blog to exist online. Many platforms include a free option, although you may well decide it’s worth taking out a paid option for the additional features it includes. Some of the most popular options are:

• WordPress. One of the best known services, WordPress has both free and paid options, and allows for extensive customisation, so you can have complete control over your website.

• Wix. One of the most beginner friendly platforms, Wix also has a free option, with straightforward tools to build your site. It has fewer customisation options, however, and its free service has limited functionality.

• Squarespace. If you’ve spent any time on YouTube, you’ve probably seen ads for Squarespace. It doesn’t offer a free plan, but combines ease-of-use with sleek, professional-looking design and a wide range of features.

• Blogger. One of the first blogging platforms, and also one of the easiest for beginners to get the hang of. However, it’s much more limited when it comes to customisation, and if you want to branch out into e-commerce, you won’t be able to do so via Blogger.

Build your audience

You won’t make any money from your blog unless people are reading it. So, you need to focus on building up your audience. Your keyword research will have allowed you to identify the topics people are keen to read about, and posting about those topics will help your readership grow as you get going.

You should also consider starting a newsletter, to encourage readers to keep coming back as you post new articles, and you can promote your blog via your social media channels.

Establish yourself as an authority

People need to trust that you know what you’re talking about. There are a lot of blogs with low quality content, and readers (and search engines) have learnt to be sceptical when they come across an unfamiliar blog.

Ensure the articles you write are well-researched and of high quality, without unnecessary filler to artificially increase the word count, and readers will come to trust you as an authority in your niche.

You can also work with other sites to help promote your blog, such as by writing a guest post for another, larger blog, or by inviting other bloggers to write guest posts for yours. By attracting each other’s readers to check out your own blogs, you both win!

Start to monetise your blog

Once you’ve started to build up your blog’s audience and reputation, you should be able to start to monetise your blog. The very easiest option is to use Google’s Adsense, or another similar service, to allow you to earn passive income from visitors to your blog.

However, other means of monetisation can be more profitable. Consider affiliate marketing and writing product reviews to increase your earnings from your blog. You can even consider offering paid subscriptions, with subscribers able to access additional exclusive content.

And if it’s a success…

If your blog gets big enough, you can sell your own products directly. It’s common for successful bloggers to produce an e-book or, if they have skills or expertise they can share, to offer courses to customers.

Advantages Of Blogging As A Side Hustle

• You can work from home (or anywhere else!). For a lot of people, this is what they’re chiefly looking for from a side hustle. So long as you’ve got access to a laptop - or even just a smartphone, depending on the platform you use - you can update your blog from wherever you like.

• You can work whenever you like. Blogging fits comfortably around your schedule, so whenever you’ve got a chunk of time available, you can use it for your side hustle. You can even schedule posts to be published at a later date or time, so there’s no need to worry about having to be online at the most advantageous time for a post to go live.

• You can write about what you love. If you’re passionate about something, you can channel it into your blog. Readers will appreciate your enthusiasm for your subject, and you won’t have to pour time and effort into something you’re not really interested in.

• There’s next to no barrier to entry. So long as you can write engagingly about your chosen subject, you’ve got everything you need to start a blog.

• There’s a chance of making it big. Most blogs don’t make their authors a fortune, and you certainly shouldn’t rely on it, but it does happen. If you’re driven by the possibility of wild success, blogging could be just the side hustle for you.

Disadvantages Of Blogging As A Side Hustle

• You could invest a significant amount of time and effort without ever seeing a return. Because you need to build up an audience before you start to earn from your blog, you could pour yourself into your blog for weeks on end without making any money at all.

• It’s quite a commitment. You can’t be a successful blogger without regular posts, to keep readers returning. That means you’ll need to devote a certain amount of time every week to creating new posts, regardless of whatever else is going on in your life.

• Even if you do make money, it might not be much. You’re paid per view with ad services like Adsense, and not very highly. You can use their revenue calculator to get an idea of how much you can expect to make, depending on your category and region, but until your monthly views start hitting six figures at least, you’ll be making very little from ads on your blog.

What About Tax And Accounting?

If you make any significant amount of money from your blog, you’ll have to keep records of your earnings. In the UK, you’re legally obliged to submit a yearly tax return if you make over £1000 from self-employment. So, if you have any level of success, you’ll need to keep this in mind, and set aside some of your earnings to pay any tax you owe at the end of the financial year.

It shouldn’t be too complicated to submit a tax return yourself, as your income and outgoings will be quite straightforward. Still, if you’re lucky enough to become very successful, you can always employ an accountant to handle the financial stuff for you.

Are There Any Good Alternatives To Blogging As A Side Hustle?

If you’re a keen writer, but you aren’t sure if blogging is for you, there are a couple of other possibilities for side hustles that can make use of your skills.

• Self-publishing. If you like the idea of writing full length novels, you could consider self-publishing your work. Romance and fantasy are the most successful genres in the self-published world, though you can have a go at publishing in any genre at all. Amazon makes it incredibly easy to create, format and publish your own book - it’s marketing that’s the tough part.

• Copywriting. If you’d prefer to write more direct marketing material, you could consider copywriting as a side hustle. Most copywriters work on a freelance basis, which allows you to get paid directly for your work, but it usually takes some time to build a portfolio and start to make any significant money from your writing.

• Social media influencing. If the idea of building a brand and affiliate marketing appeals to you, but the idea of long form writing doesn’t, you could consider social media influencing. Successful influencers can earn incredible amounts from their accounts - but, as with bloggers, your chances of making it big are pretty small.

Summary

Blogging is definitely one of the easier options to get into if you’re considering starting a side hustle. If you’ve got a passion for a particular topic, you’ve got all you need to get going - and you never know, you might end up being one of the next big blogging success stories.

It does require time and commitment, though, so if you’d rather have a slightly easier time of it, it might be worth looking at other good side hustles. You could try out audio transcription, pet-sitting, crafting - or even take up Matched Betting.