If you have been wondering how to start a monetized blog and make money faster than most bloggers, I can tell you a secret: it is all about your blogging strategy!
When I started my blog, I had no clue how to make money from it. I only knew that I wanted to write about the side hustle I was experimenting with myself.
However, I didn’t know which specific products I would like to promote to my readers.
Almost a year after starting my blog, I decided to take a blogging course and a Pinterest course to learn proven blogging strategies and get results from Pinterest traffic (which has become my main traffic source over the past few years).
In this blog post, I will show you how I would start a monetized blog if I were starting today.
Everything here comes from my own experience and hard-learned lessons!
So if you are just starting your blogging journey or you haven’t yet seen the results you are after, then this blog post is for you!
How to Start a Monetized Blog in 2026
Step1 – Pick a profitable affiliate marketing niche that you actually love!
This is sooo important!
Selecting a profitable affiliate marketing niche is one thing. However, if you have no clue about this niche or it doesn’t interest you at all, I am telling you – you will make no money whatsoever!
Blogging is hard work (and don’t believe anyone tells you otherwise).
Being disciplined and writing a blog post on the day you dedicated to writing, no matter if you feel like it or not, is not easy. You need to be able to focus and produce content that is worth the time of your readers. If AI wrote it, nobody will read past the first paragraph (and yes, your readers can tell).
That is why finding a topic that interests you is crucial to your blog’s success!
If you love the niche you write about, you will also experiment with tools and products in your niche and share your feedback. This is one of the best ways to earn money as an affiliate marketer.
Step 2 – Find relevant & profitable affiliate products you can promote
Don’t start to write a single word before you have your monetization plan figured out. This means, planning 3-4 products you can promote as an affiliate and whose commission is actually profitable.
These products should come from companies that are well established in the market and have run their affiliate program for at least a few years.
Some products and companies are new to the market and can offer good commissions at the start. However, after a year or 2, they may disappear or close their affiliate program, even though you’ve spent months writing content about their product, creating Pinterest pins, doing research, and more.
So choose your main affiliate products wisely, and make sure each sale can make you at least $20 – $30.
Step 3 – How to Create a Blog
Click here to set up your hosting for only $1.99 a month + get your domain for free. This is the cheapest and most beginner-friendly way to start a blog.
Click here to follow my step-by-step guide to start a WordPress blog with Bluehost.
Bluehost will install WordPress automatically, so you don’t need to have any technical knowledge or experience.
By following the guide, you will also be able to get your domain for free for the first year of your blog, so you can get your blog up and running and start making money from your blog before you have more expenses.
Step 4 – Plan out your Blog Content
One of the most important SEO factors for your blog is establishing topical authority in your niche.
When Google see that you have covered a topic in every way possible, it will start ranking your blog posts higher in search results than another blog that targeted the same keyword but only wrote a few blog posts in that niche.
How many blog posts do you need to gain topical authority? This depends on how broad and competitive is; it could be about 50 blog posts in your niche, but some competitive niches might require more than that.
Here are the 5 types of posts you should cover to build authority in your niche:
- How-to posts (for example: How to Start a Blog with AI)
- Best of posts (Best blogging courses to monetize a blog)
- [number] tips / ways to (47+ Pinterest Tips and Tricks for Bloggers)
- [number] ideas (397 Lifestyle Blog Name Ideas)
- Answer specific questions (Is Blogging Still Profitable?)
Use this AI prompt to build topical authority and plan your content calendar:
Head over to Claude and copy and paste this prompt below that I’m using myself.
Don’t forget to replace the bolded text with the details of your niche:
“You are an experienced SEO specialist and a content writer.
My blog is about [Starting a blogging business], and my target audience is [people who want to start blogging as a side hustle and make money blogging].
I want you to help me build topical authority in the [make money blogging] niche by generating 5 content pillars and 5-7 SEO-friendly topic ideas within each of these content pillars.
The goal of these content pillars is to build authority in this niche so these posts will rank well on Google.
Create a table with these 4 columns:
Sub-niche, topic idea, related keyword, an engaging title
Make sure to include the following post types in every sub-niche:
How To posts
Best of posts
[number] tips/ways to
[number] ideas
Answer specific questions
The goal is to make money with affiliate marketing promoting these products: [_____, ______,________]”.
Step 5 – Find the best keyword for each of your blog post topics
Once you get a table of topic and keyword ideas, your job is to go through these topics and see which ones you want to pursue and if you need to do more research.
You’ll need to validate the keyword ideas you get from Claude. Getting these keyword ideas from Claude is a good start, but it is necessary to take these and use a keyword tool to validate the search volume and find the best keywords to target in terms of SEO.
I use the Semrush keyword tool, and you can get a free trial with this link.
Also check my full guide: How to find keywords for blog posts.
Step 6 – Create your content calendar
My advice is to set up a posting schedule that actually works for you.
Sure, I can tell you what the best publishing schedule can be, but at the end of the day, if you can’t keep up with it, it will only make you feel guilty and frustrated!
The best blogging schedule would be posting 2-3 new blog posts a week. However, if you can only do one a week, that’s fine as long as you keep going and don’t skip weeks.
The difference is going to be how fast you can start earning money with your blog. It’s as simple as that.
More blog posts every week will start building your topical authority in Google’s eyes (which means more posts ranking on Google) and will attract more traffic from Pinterest.
Pinterest likes new content on their platform, and as long as you keep publishing new pins and link to new URLs, Pinterest will push your content more to more viewers.
Step 7 – Write SEO optimized blog posts
Use an SEO optimization tool for writing your content.
I use NeuronWriter for years (and you can read my full review about it here), and it makes the process so much easier. I write all my blog posts in NeuronWriter, and it suggests relevant terms and keywords to include so my posts rank higher on Google.
This is only one example of the features I’m using in this tool, you can read how I use NeuronWriter for SEO here.
Long gone are the times when you had to go through each of your competitors’ blog posts and research their keywords and titles to find relevant terms to include in your post!
Step 8 – Apply for your chosen affiliate programs
What do affiliate programs look for when reviewing your affiliate application?
First, they look for bloggers writing in their niche and targeting the same audience they want to reach.
Second, they will look at how much traffic you have. The more competitive the affiliate program, the harder it will be to get accepted. But don’t worry, if you got rejected, keep building your blog, and you can always reapply. I’ve had so many affiliate programs turn me down at first and accept me a year later!
Step 9 – Start an Email List
Once you start publishing regularly on your blog, it is time to start an email list.
Yes, as fast as you can. Don’t tell yourself, “I have no time, and I have nothing to sell anyway.” I can honestly say that this is my biggest blogging mistake. I couldn’t decide which lead magnet to create, instead of just starting anything, it really doesn’t matter!!
To get myself off the fence, I took this email marketing course that taught me how to start an email list with free printables, and this is such an awesome idea to get started with an email list as fast as you can.
Click here to check out all the lessons included in the Perfecting Email course.
Step 10 – Analyze Your Affiliate Data
It is simple, actually. When you start getting more than 100 clicks on one specific affiliate offer, it’s important to find out what this product’s conversion rate is, because you don’t want to put all this effort into driving traffic and clicks when you get nothing in return.
For example, I recently saw one of my new affiliate offers got almost 500 clicks in about 2 months – but not a single sale! This was my sign to remove most of their banners and replace them with a different offer.
Step 11 – Drive Traffic from Pinterest From Day 1!
The best social media platform to drive traffic to your blog is Pinterest.
Pinterest is like a search engine where your pins can stay on search results for years and still bring traffic to your blog.
At the beginning of my blog, I was getting traffic from Pinterest and Google evenly. However, when AI overviews started appearing in Google search, Pinterest became my number 1 traffic source, and it is still my winning method for driving traffic to my content.
If you haven’t started Pinterest yet, or you don’t see the results you were hoping for from your Pinterest account, check out my favorite Pinterest course and my review of this course.
3 Most Popular Monetization Strategies
1) Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the most beginner-friendly type of blog monetization because you can literally start earning on day 1 when you publish your first blog post.
However, the truth is that to make significant income with affiliate marketing, you will need to learn affiliate marketing strategies, how to work with affiliate companies, which affiliate products will be most profitable in your niche and more.
From all the affiliate marketing courses I’ve taken over the years, Michelle’s affiliate marketing course is my absolute favorite because it is designed especially for bloggers and it is so practical! This course helped me make more than $3500 in the first year of my blog.
2) Sponsored Posts
This will only come later, once you attract enough traffic and brands start reaching out.
Brands will only start noticing you if they keep seeing you on Google or on social media and your content is getting traction. This is why it takes time to build your blog and get enough traffic in a niche that brands are willing to pay you for.
If you want to fast-track your way to success with sponsored posts, I highly recommend checking out this sponsored posts course, which lays out the whole strategy of how to get sponsored posts for your blog and how to negotiate with brands.
3) Ads
Ads on your blog are the most passive way to monetize.
Before starting to work with any ads company, you would need to consider one important thing:
When you place ads on your website, the ads can compete with your affiliate banners. So it depends on whether your affiliate offers are high-ticket or not.
If the affiliate company pays you a $50 commission per purchase, then you might not want to have your traffic click on external ads and leave your site for good.
What not to do when starting a new blog…
1) Don’t start the day by looking at your affiliate dashboards.
Looking at your dashboards every morning is a waste of time and will drain your energy and motivation. Instead, do something useful like writing a new post or scheduling your new pins.
2) Don’t rely on keyword research you did 6 months ago.
Find new keyword opportunities weekly. If you get to rank a post on Google fast or have a viral pin, your affiliate commissions can get to a few thousand dollars a month just from this single post.
3) Don’t rely on Google to bring you traffic.
SEO is great and important and you will get traffic from Google if you keep optimizing your posts.
But if you want to grow fast, then Pinterest is your best social media platform for blog traffic. Traffic is crucial to make money from a blog, so don’t wait for Google to rank your posts, instead, promote your blog yourself!
Monetize Your Blog – Your First Step
If you want to start a blog and make money blogging, your most important step is to find a profitable niche and plan out the ways to make money with your blog! If you are not sure which niche to choose and how to find great affiliate products to promote, I highly recommend checking out the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course – it has helped me a lot and turned my blog into a profitable business!
Remember that it will take time to figure it all out, and that’s ok. Blogging takes time and effort, but when you start getting these emails, ‘You earned a commission!’ it will be so worth it!
This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through one of my links at no extra cost to you! Thank you for supporting the Busy Mom Side Hustle blog. For more information, visit my disclaimer page.
