How To Start A Blog And Make Money In 2025

BONUS: USE PINTEREST TO DRIVE HIGH VOLUME ORGANIC TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG – FIND OUT HOW HERE

This blog post is for any female small business owner who is interested in starting a blog to make more money.

Introduction

Is blogging still a viable content marketing strategy in 2025?

I hear more than a few people showing up online to tell us blogging is dead.

I think some of those people have had blogs that were reliant on Google traffic, and with recent Google updates they saw their metrics drop off the edge of a cliff.

However, even with Google’s core updates, blogging is far from dead, and in fact, is thriving.

Please block out all the negative noise about blogging – you can still start and grow a hugely successful blog with the right strategy, and a good dose of consistency.

In this post I’ll share some tips to help get you on the road to having a great blog that makes you money in 2025.

What You Should Blog About

There are a couple of considerations here.

Firstly, it is better to blog about a topic you’re passionate about, because you’re going to have to be disciplined and patient enough to stay on your blogging journey for the longer haul, to see the monetary success you desire. Writing about a topic you are passionate about will help you stay on track.

Second is to consider the topic(s) that will be most helpful to your audience, so that your blog provides a great user experience for those people.

Your goal is to produce high-quality content for your blog readers, to encourage them to keep returning to your blog to read more of your posts.

Third is to blog about a topic that has content your chosen search engines will like (I’ll talk more about this later in this post).

Identifying Your Blog Niche And Target Audience

You should have a clear identity with your blog.

Whilst there are plenty of lifestyle blogs out there that cover a wide range of content, my feelings are that early on in your blogging journey, it is better to have a clear blogging niche where you write for a specific audience, and around specific topics.

An example of some clear niches are, you might have a blog where you create vegan friendly family recipes for busy mums. Or you might blog about crochet for beginners.

In both of these examples, the topics are clearly defined, and the audience those topics are serving is also clear.

By identifying your niche and target audience, you can then start to really drill down into the right topics to blog about for your chosen niche and audience, providing clearer and more valuable blog content as a result.

Choosing A Memorable Blog Name

Whilst it’s not the be all and end all of great blogging strategy, it is a good idea to choose a good, memorable blog name.

If you plan to be visible elsewhere online (Pinterst, social, website etc.) it’s also a good idea to make sure the blog name you choose is the same and available across all of your channels, so that you’re creating consistency across your brand.

Be mindful that you may be limited to a certain character count for your name in different spaces. Some social media platforms for example limit the number of characters in your name, as do platforms like Etsy.

If you want to check whether a name will be available to use not only on your blog, but across your platforms, you can use a platform called namechkr.com. Just drop your intended name in its search bar and it will show you all the spaces that name is available. It’s free to do this.

Once you’ve decided on a name for your blog, you can then start to look at setting up your blog.

This is where people often make the wrong choices, or get confused about how and where to start their blogging journey.

Opting For A User-Friendly Blogging Platform

Where should you have your blog? There are plenty of options available, but you need to understand the pros and cons of various options.

There are website platforms like Wix, and ecommerce platforms like Shopify that have blogs integrated in them. There are standalone blog platforms like WordPress.com and blogger. There are blogs in-built into all in one platforms like Kartra.

There is also a self hosted blog platform with WordPress.org, where you require a ‘host’ for that blog.

It can be confusing deciding which space is best for your blog. However, there are some considerations here that will help you make the right decision for your blogging platform.

The single biggest consideration for your blog platform is whether you want ad revenue on your blog.

Ad revenue is where a third party ad agency (like Mediavine, Raptive and SheMedia) has the ability to place ads in your blog posts. Any time you get visitors to your blog, you then earn a small commission from the ads that the third party ad agency has placed on it. Reading this blog you’re likely to see some ads as you scroll through – these are third party ads with Mediavine.

Before you rule out ad revenue on your blog (which many people do), consider this.

Your business and blog ultimately exists to make you money. As an entrepreneur you have to be savvy about making the most of any opportunity to create revenue streams for your business. If you are able to earn a small commission from ads that are placed in your blog posts by ad agencies, why would you not take that opportunity?

I have ladies in my community who have incredibly successful blogs, and they’re earning five figure sums a year just from ad revenue on their blog posts.

If ad revenue on a blog is appealing to you, then your blog platform of choice MUST be a self hosted WordPress.org blog. You cannot have a blog anywhere else if you want ad revenue on that blog.

If you’re not interested in having ad revenue on your blog, then you have more options. You can choose the blog tool on your site if you are with Wix or Shopify for example, or you can choose a WordPress.com blog or a blog within an all in one provider such as Kartra. There’s plenty of choice, but you must understand that going to any blog platform other than WordPress.org will stop you being able to have ad revenue on your blog (and this includes WordPress.com).

Personally I would suggest opting for WordPress.org for your blogging platform. It is the industry standard for blogging, has been around many years, is stable, and gives you the option of ad revenue any time in the future should you wish to go that route.

Selecting A Reliable Web Hosting Service

If you’re going to have a WordPress.org blog you’ll need to choose a host. There are many web hosting services to choose from. A search for ‘wordpress.org hosting services’ will show you many.

These are the platforms that will host your WordPress.org blog. I use Hostinger – their hosting plan is a little more expensive, but I find them stable and they have good customers service.

Many of the WordPress hosting platforms walk you through the set up of your blog, making it an easier process for you, and there are lots of hosts that have budget friendly hosting plans, especially for the first year.

Hostinger walks you through the set up of your WordPress.org blog, and they make it pretty easy if you’re tech challenged.

Custom Domains

It’s always worth investing in a custom domain for your blog. Doing so makes you look more professional.

Many of the WordPress.org hosts offer the opportunity to purchase a custom domain as part of your blog set up within their platform. I’ve done this myself with Hostinger, and have not had any issues doing so.

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Learn How To Use Pinterest To Drive Volume Organic Traffic To Your Blog – Click The Image Below To Find Out More

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Customising Your Blog’s Design

This is important. With a WordPress.org blog, you need to make sure you choose a quality theme for your blog.

Many people make the mistake of using drag and drop template builders like Divi and Elemental. These builders can significantly slow down your site.

There are also plenty of premium themes you can pay for, but you don’t need them to have a great looking blog.

I had to remove Divi from my WordPress blog some time ago. It was a big job, and not one I could manage safely on my own. I ended up having to pay for help with that transition.

There are some great free blog themes you can use, and I have moved to a theme called Kadence which is a nice theme, and stable.

Many of the ladies in my community also use the same theme. Kadence has a user-friendly interface, it’s not overly difficult to use, and it’s one of the safe blog themes to use.

Kadence is also a free theme (they do have paid versions, but I use the free version, and it’s perfectly adequate for a good blog).

You want speed and safety with your theme. Kadence takes care of this.

Using Essential Plugins For Functionality

It’s easy to go overboard with plugins on your site.

Plugins give you the ability to have add ons (like social sharing buttons, or pinnable images for Pinterest), as well as metrics. However, the more plugins you use, the greater potential there is for conflict on your site, and slowing down loading times.

Only go with the plugins you really need, and keep those plugins up to date.

There are many plugins to choose from, and you can go to the plugins area of your WordPress dashboard and search for any plugins you need.

I’ll create a future blog post about the plugins I use, and I’ll come back here and update this blog with a link to that post when it goes live. Keep checking back!

Drafting An Editorial Calendar For Content Planning

This is an important part of your blogging journey, and your content strategy.

It’s essential to have some idea about how often you can send a new blog post live.

Successful bloggers stay consistent with their blog strategy, and this will be core to your success as a blogger.

I speak to many business owners who, at the start of their blogging journey, decide they’re going to get, for example, two new blog posts out a week.

If you have other core responsibilities in your business (like social content creation, producing products and services, email marketing etc.,) and you’re a solopreneur, it will be nigh on impossible to get multiple good blog posts live each week.

It’s better to have a realistic content plan in place for your blog, and to create high-quality content, rather than overloading yourself with too many blogs each week where you could then end up with blog posts that are weak, and not good enough to get traction online.

At one point I was trying to get one new blog post live each week. It became completely overwhelming.

Now I stay consistent getting two blogs done every month. This gives me the time and space to research my blog topics thoroughly (more on that in a moment), and to write well put together posts that will keep Google, Pinterest, and my ad agency (Mediavine), happy.

So choose a blogging schedule you know you can stick to.

The second important point is right up front, start writing your blog posts with great user intent.

What does this mean?

If you start writing blog posts that are random topics you decide on, without any research, the chances are those posts will not achieve the level of success they could achieve, if they were written for a certain user intent.

A good example of this, is that I write ALL my blog posts for Pinterest user intent.

This means I spend time inside Pinterest researching the topics my ideal audience are searching for in the platform, and I write for those topics that are good fit for my niche.

This post, for example, started with research inside Pinterest.

I typed in the search term ‘blogging’ into Pinterest’s search bar, and Pinterest gave me a number of keywords people are searching for inside the platform, including ‘How To Start A Blog And Make Money In 2024’.

I went on to research that keyword inside a piece of software called PinClicks.

PinClicks gives the ability to see how well pins related to a topic are performing inside Pinterest.

When I searched for the topic “How To Start A Blog And Make Money In 2024” inside PinClicks, there were pins that were performing exceptionally well for this keyword.

That gave me the information I needed to be able to write a blog titled “How To Start A Blog And Make Money In 2025” (I chose 2025 on the end of the post title, as I wrote this post towards the end of 2024).

I know this blog topic will be good for Pinterest traffic. And I know the pins I create for this blog post have the potential to perform well on Pinterest.

You can also write blog posts for Google traffic, although in my opinion it’s harder to rank on Google than on Pinterest these days.

Platforms like keysearch.co give you the ability to search for and rank topics in your niche that you can write blogs around that may do well on Google.

When doing this, you’re looking for low competition keywords to write about when you start your blogging journey.

This means if you use keysearch, and you type in the topic ‘How To Grow On Pinterest’, key search will show you how competitive that keyword is.

You can see in the image below a list of other blogs that have written about the topic “How To Grow On Pinterest”.

What Im looking at is the DA score for each of the urls listed.

This is the overall domain authority score given, and the higher the score the more authority that blog has, and the more likely their blog content will show on the first page of Google.

If you have just started blogging your DA will be low.

The point of using key search to look for good blogging topics for Google, is to find those topics where at least some of the blogs that are listed have a DA equal to or less than yours.

So if the DA of my own blog is 20, and from the picture above, I can see that there is a blog ranking on Google with a DA of 17, I have a chance of competing for a first page slot on Google, if my blog post is better for Google than the blog post with the DA of 17.

If all of the blog posts in that image had a DA of 30 or above and my own DA was 20, it would be difficult to rank on Google for that topic until my DA increased.

This is why I personally believe that when you start a blog, it’s much better to write for Pinterest to begin. It’s a much more even playing field over on Pinterest.

Over time as you get more traffic to your site from Pinterest, and your DA starts to climb, you’ll have more chance of being able to rank on Google. This takes time, effort and consistency.

Focusing On Quality Content For Your Posts

Once you’ve done your research, and you know the blog topics you’re going to write about, it’s time to create quality content for your blog.

There are plenty of ways to create quality blog content. Listicles, how to’s, stories, education, inspo and more can make up great blogs.

Most importantly, whatever way you choose to write your blogs, they need to be of value to the end user. If they aren’t people will bounce off quickly.

There’s no one way to write a great blog. There are platforms that can help, particularly if you want to write for Google.

Platforms like frase.io and rankiq give you the ability to research and write blog posts for Google, with keywords you can add to those posts to help them rank.

I’ve used both these platforms, and they are both good. They’ll cost you a bit of money. Frase is cheaper than rankiq, but they can both really help you write the content for your blogs more easily, and help you use keywords within your posts (without keyword stuffing which is a no no), to give your blogs a chance to rank on Google.

Keep your blog content easy to absorb. Have short sentences and paragraphs. Use great visuals where you can to support the written content, make use of bullet points so that people can read and absorb key points easily

Driving Traffic To Your Blog

Pinterest

You cannot expect to send a blog post live, and sit and wait for the traffic to come.

You will not build a successful blog this way.

It is essential to have strategy in place to drive traffic to your blog, and there are various ways you can do this.

Without doubt, one of the best, if not the best way to drive organic traffic to your blog is through Pinterest.

I would say that 90-95% of the organic traffic I get to my blog posts comes from Pinterest. It’s a superb platform for organic traffic, hands down beating social and Google right now.

However, you need to understand how to use Pinterest the right way to get outbound clicks to your blog, from the platform.

You should spend time in Pinterest doing research to find blog post ideas to write about that are Pinterest friendly topics for your blog.

Doing this will help you drive organic traffic from Pinterest to your blog more easily.

Over time, if you stay consistent on Pinterest you can expect to achieve thousands of organic outbound clicks each month, and to sustain that level of traffic over many years.

There’s really no other platform that can achieve this level of unpaid traffic for you (with the exception of Google, if you’re able to rank your blog posts there), but truly Pinterest is the number one platform for organic blog traffic.

Using Pinterest to drive traffic to my own blog is the reason I was able to get ad revenue on my blog 9 months into writing Pinterest friendly blogs, and driving traffic to my blog from Pinterest.

Pinterest requires key strategy – too much to teach here. However I have a number of resources that can help you learn everything you need to know about Pinterest, including blog posts (listed at the end of this blog), a free guide, and a budget friendly Masterclass. Just click those pink links for more information about either.

You also have the ability to promote your blog in other places, and if your goal is to get ad revenue on your blog, it’s essential that you do this.

Let’s look at some of those ways below.

Social Media

Whenever you send a new blog post live, you should promote that post through your social media channels, to let people know you have new material available to read.

You should also have links in your social profiles, to enable people to get to your blog easily.

I would also highly recommend having some strategy for your social spaces to share ‘snippets’ of your content from blog posts. You can then push people to read your blog for deeper insight, through your call to actions.

In places like Instagram, you can share blog post snippets to your stories and link to your blog posts.

You can also drop posts on Facebook pages or in Facebook groups and add links there.

Your goal is to push as much traffic as you can to your blog posts, and this is especially important if you want or have ad revenue on a blog, because every piece of traffic that lands on your blog = ad revenue for you.

Website

If you have a website that’s a standalone site away from your WordPress blog, you can add information about your blog to that site, including dropping some of your blog header images on your home page, with links that go straight to those blog posts.

Email Marketing

Every time you send a blog live, it’s worthy of an email newsletter to push your list subscribers to your posts. Remember – every piece of traffic landing on your blog posts is more ad revenue for you.

In addition, you can send email marketing information to your subscribers to talk about the topics you share on your blog, and to direct them to relevant posts to read.

Marketplace Platforms

If you have a marketplace platform like Etsy, you can encourage your Etsy shoppers to go to your blog.

You can do this by having a scannable QR code in your Etsy banner, and you can mention the url of your blog landing page in your about you and your shop announcement sections in your Etsy store.

You can even add scannable QR codes to product packaging, or inside digital assets you sell.

The key goal is to get as much traffic to your blog as possible, so that you can then start to both monetise your blog, use it as a means to grow your subscriber list, and showcase more of your products and services inside your blog.

Having A Monetising Strategy For Your Blog

Once you have traffic flowing to your blog, you can start to look at monetising that blog, so that it earns revenue for your business.

There are a number of ways you can do this (including ad revenue already mentioned), and yes – you can earn a good amount of money from blogging. I have ladies in my community earning high five figure sums each year from their blogs.

Affiliate Marketing

Many bloggers start their blog monetisation journey through affiliate marketing programmes.

This simply means finding reputable products and services that are relevant to the blogs you’re wiriting about, and promoting those products/services through an affiliation link in your blog.

Any time anyone clicks your affiliation link and makes a purchase, you earn some commission from that.

If you’re using affiliate links in your blogs, it is essential that you make it clear to your readers that the links are affiliate links by having a disclaimer that says so. Have clear disclosure around this.

There are many affiliate programs out there, and for sure there will be ones that fit well with your niche.

Do your research to find the best affiliate programs to promote, and be sure to have tested what you’re promoting before you start recommending it to others.

Your affiliate link products/services need to be good and reputable, and you need to have some experience of what it is you’re promoting.

Ad Revenue

Once you have enough traffic to your blog, you have the ability to have ad revenue on that blog. This means third party advertisers will show their ads on your blog posts.

Some bloggers feel this takes away from the blog readers experience.

However, I have ladies in my community who have ad revenue on their blogs (as do I), and those ladies are earning anywhere from hundreds to thousands of pounds a month in ad revenue.

That passive income stabilises their businesses.

Your goal as a business is to make money. Ad revenue can be one way to do that.

If you’re going to go the ad revenue route, it’s worth waiting and applying to a good ad revenue agency. This is an agency who will place adverts on your blog on behalf of advertisers. When any traffic goes to your blog and have sight of those ads – you get a small commission for every piece of traffic.

There are a number of good agencies including SheMedia, Raptive and Mediavine. These are the cream of the crop, and they require a certain level of page views per month to accept you in to their programmes. Mediavine have recently introduced a lower tier level, and I would suggest this would be a great starting point for you if you want ad revenue on your blog.

I would not use Google Adsense, or smaller ad agencies like Ezoic. They are not the cream of the crop, they’re difficult to set up, and they can be overly complicated to use and manage.

As already mentioned, Mediavine have introduced a lower tier introductory level ad revenue opportunity, where you can apply to have their ads on your site.

This lower tier is called GROW by Mediavine. It’s free to sign up to, the process to get GROW on your WordPress.org site is very easy, and you don’t have to wait to hit 40,000 monthly views of your blog to get in (which is the level many of the good ad agencies require you to meet).

In fact, I got into GROW by Mediavine at just over 2000 monthly page views on my blog. I immediately started earning small amounts of ad revenue from my blog.

I would highly recommend this as your starting point for ad revenue, if you wish to go this route. In my personal experience it’s better to hold out for a better quality ad agency like Mediavine, than jumping in to the lesser ad platforms too quickly.

Any passive income you can introduce to your blog, is going to be of benefit to your business success longer term.

Products And Services

You can and should promote your own products and services in your blog.

This can be done by having appropriate products relevant to each blog post that you share about that you can link inside each blog post.

You can also utilise a right hand column on your blog posts, where your core products and services are showcased.

You can use a plugin like Surecart to build out a shop on your WordPress blog, or, if you have a standalone website for your store, or an ecommerce platform like Shopify, or an Etsy store, you can have your product images displayed on your blog over in the right hand column, with clickable links to those products.

Digital Products

I highly recommend you giving thought to digital products you can sell in your business – no matter the niche you’re in.

Digital products give you the ability to create once and sell on repeat, providing easier revenue streams for your business.

You can sell digital products from a shoppable plugin like Surecart, or again, have those digital products on your website, ecommerce store or Etsy platform, and link to them from your blog posts and in the right hand column of your blog.

I make good money selling the right digital products in my business over on Etsy, and I link to those products through my blog posts.

Capturing Leads From Your Blog

You can and should use your blog to capture leads, to grow your email list.

There are many reasons why a mailing list is a hugely important asset to your business, not least of all because you’re bringing people deeper in to your business when you build your list.

Your email list also gives you extra opportunity to sell to your list subscribers, increasing revenue to your brand.

There are many ways to grow your list through your blog, including having links to opt-ins, or opt-in forms, embedded inside your blog posts, so you can capture email addresses through those opt-ins to get people on your list.

You will need a good email marketing provider to be able to build your email list.

Many of the ladies in my community use either kit (formerly Convertkit), Mailchimp or Mailerlite. These can be integrated with your WordPress platform.

I have a standalone website on Kartra, and that platform includes an email marketing tool, so every time I link to a freebie my blog readers can get from me, it goes to a sign up form over on Kartra.

The most important thing is to have strategy to make sure you’re promoting an opt-in in every single blog post you send live, so that you’re building your list by capturing the email addresses of as many of your readers as possible.

This is one part of your business strategy you should not ignore. List building and email marketing is key to your growth and success.

Analysing Performance Metrics Regularly

Keeping an eye on your blog metrics can help inform you about what’s working and what’s not.

In particular, it’s worth noting over time which of your blog posts are performing the best, and whether certain topics you write about are more popular than others.

This can give you valuable feedback about what to write more blogs about.

You can also keep an eye on your traffic sources, to see where you’re getting most of your blog traffic from.

Again, this can then inform you about where to push harder to promote your blog (for example if you’re seeing a lot of traffic coming from your social channels, double down on your blog promotion there).

You can use Google Site Kit on your blog to monitor traffic, but I prefer to use a different plugin for my metrics, and at the moment I use MonsterInsights free plugin to monitor my traffic.

You can also set up Google Analytics for your blog, although for beginners this can sometimes seem quite daunting. However, it is possible to do, and you may well find some beginner videos over on Youtube that walk you through this process.

Google analytics will give you deeper metrics about the overall success of your blog.

Using Search Engine Optimization In Blog Posts

Whilst I’ve mentioned writing your posts for Google SEO, or good Pinterest user intent, there’s also a further step to take when you create your blogs.

You should have an SEO plugin on your blog to help you add your meta data to the blog.

This may sound complicated, but is easier than it sounds.

There are plugins like RankMath and Yoast that can be used for this purpose.

I highly recommend sticking with Yoast – it’s a safe option for SEO for your blog. RankMath may slow your site down.

When you install the Yoast SEO plugin (free version), you’ll find that when you write your blogs using WordPress and Kadence, that at the bottom of the blog will be your Yoast SEO settings. Within that area you are able to add the right meta data for every blog post. It’s important you do this to help Google understand and index your posts properly.

Engaging With Your Audience For Feedback

It might take time for people who read your blog posts to start to drop comments and leave you feedback, but when they do start to do this, you should always respond and engage.

This helps to put a human behind your blog, and will help you build connections with the audience reading your blog posts.

This can be a great step towards building deeper know like and trust with your blog readers.

You can find comments for all of your blog posts in the WordPress dashboard area, under the comments section.

Updating And Refreshing Content Periodically

A core part of good blogging strategy is having a schedule to update blog posts periodically.

This can help you make sure the content in your blogs is up to date, and gives you the opportunity to add any new information/angles to your blog posts.

Doing this stops older blog posts from becoming stale.

At least once a year you should revisit older blogs to go through updates and refreshes of those posts.

Conclusion And Next Steps

I’ve covered a lot of basic but solid blogging stratgey here in this post.

Take all of the tips shared, and implement them for your blogging strategy.

Be sure to check back in with this blog, as I’ll create more and more posts about blogging for beginners.

You’ll already find some of my other blogging-related posts under the ‘related articles’ area below – you may find those posts useful.

You have every opportunity to build a wildly successful blog using the right strategies, and to monetise that blog over time, to help bring more revenue to your business.

If you have any questions about blogging – feel free to drop them in comments. I’ll always be more than happy to help any way I can.

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Bonus Material

How To Use Pinterest The Right Way To Drive High Volume Organic Traffic To Your Blog