When it comes to making money online, blogging is one of the most established routes, even if there’s no clear business model for it. If you have an idea for a blog you want to run, there are various ways to monetize it. But does it really work?

Be prepared to treat it as work

First of all, if you plan on making money via blogging, do not expect that you’re going to get a free ride through things. It’s not enough to solely write a few hundred words every week (or every day) and expect to get paid. A lot of your work is going to be hunting down and keeping affiliate opportunities and constantly coming up with new content to engage your audience. Treat it like a business and be prepared to put in work as if it were any other.

Know how to manage a good website

Your website, on which you host your blog, is going to be the product that you’re offering the masses. In some cases, you’re using it to sell directly to the audience, whether that means offering e-books, webinars, or something else. In other cases, it means you’re working with marketing companies. Either way, your blog acts as their the product or the advertisement. Invest the time and care it needs, using premium themes, the best managed WordPress hosting, and bespoke design elements. It needs to be able to stand out in both design and content.

Have a realistic expectation of your earnings

How much can you really expect to make from blogging? Is it possible to make a living? The short answer is, yes. But how much? One survey saw that 17% of all bloggers could sustain their family and lifestyle on a blog alone. That’s one in five, which might not sound like great odds but, again, you have to consider how much work really has to go into blogging for it to make money in the first place. Most people who aren’t too serious about using it to make money simply won’t.

Keep your growth strategies in mind

So, in order to make sure you’re one of the 1-in-5, you have to always be looking for ways to monetize your blog in a way that doesn’t scare off the audience, and you have to be looking at how to keep growing that audience. Email marketing, social media engagement, search engine optimization, taking advantage of guest blogging and contribution activities, there are lots of ways you can be actively marketing your blog to a wide audience. The bigger your readership, the more able you will to make money from your blog.

So, in short, yes, it can very much be worth it to start a blog that’s designed to make money from either your readership or marketing firms and brands that you get paid to represent. But it’s only for those who are serious about putting the work in. Otherwise, you shouldn’t expect much more than a nice tip from it, here and there.