Are you someone who loves to write and share your ideas, thoughts and feelings with others?

Are you someone who wants to make their own money?

How about a way to do both?

Blogging could be the answer to all of these questions.

I still see people online asking 'is it really possible to make money blogging?', or whether you can really make money blogging at all, which always surprises me. Making a living from your own website is far more normal now than it used to be, and I've even been featured in national press sharing exactly how much I made from mine.

Can Lifestyle Blogs Make Money?

When I first started blogging, I didn't know that anyone could make money from it, certainly not little old me with my teeny tiny lifestyle blog. I knew there were some famous bloggers making money, but I assumed it was all big brand collaborations and product placements, the kind of thing only possible with huge follower numbers.

I tried ads on my site early on and made a whopping £5 a month at most, which told me you needed to be hugely popular to make an actual living from ads alone. These days ads bring in around £100 a month, still a small slice of my overall income, but proof that even that side of things grows over time. I know other online publishers who make a genuine full-time living purely from ads on their sites, it's just never been my main focus.

Since then I've built this into a full-time career, and realised your aim doesn't have to be fame to make a living from it. As an introvert who doesn't love attention, that was never the plan. I just love writing and running a website, and wanted to make that my job.

Back in 2016, I discovered other bloggers sharing their income publicly, and realised there were people just like me making money from their blogs. I learned that the types of blogs that make money can be anything, and you don't have to be famous or well known. My intention was never to be an influencer, so I had to find a way of making money online that was different.

Some niches naturally do better than others. Finance and travel are two of the strongest, since there's genuine reader demand and brands actively want to be featured there. Finance isn't necessarily easy though, it's a hugely competitive niche, so it won't suit everyone.

Health is trickier too, since Google holds it to a much higher standard because bad advice can genuinely harm someone.

Whatever niche you choose, what matters most is writing from real personal experience. Google increasingly rewards content that clearly comes from someone who has actually lived what they're writing about, rather than generic advice pieced together from other sources, so your own story and numbers are one of your biggest assets, not just a nice-to-have.

I went full steam ahead implementing everything I was learning, determined to monetise my website. By the end of 2016 I was consistently earning a full-time income from it, and in early 2017 I finally left my last employed job role for good. I've since launched two more websites, scaled my online marketing business, and became the primary earner for our family by 2019.

So yes, lifestyle blogs can make money. If you're wondering how much bloggers actually make in the UK, mine grew from £26,000 in my first full self-employed year, with my first blog and website as my money-making focus in 2017, up to £99,000 in 2025.

How Do Lifestyle Bloggers Make Money?

There are lots of ways to make money blogging, and once I discovered I could, I started taking my blog far more seriously. I'd already been blogging for a few years by that point, so I had a bit of a head start, but I'd made a lot of SEO mistakes early on, like writing short posts that Google barely crawled, let alone ranked.

At that time I started researching which website metrics actually mattered and how to improve them, and how to actually get a blog seen on Google in the first place. Things like Moz domain authority, website visitor numbers and social stats mattered most back then, so that's what I focused on, and working on them meant I was able to start applying for brand collaborations and paid opportunities. There are all sorts of other metrics people use to measure a website's success too, such as DR by Ahrefs, Semrush's Authority Score, and Majestic's Trust Flow.

My focus has shifted since, and nowadays I focus more on SEO and selling digital marketing services. Things in the SEO and online publishing world are always changing, so it's always worth keeping up to date on the latest changes to stay visible on search engines.

People all over the world blog about things they know a lot about, wonder about, or just want to talk about. But if you're serious about it, there are genuine ways to turn that into income, and I go into more detail on the income streams themselves in how do bloggers make money?

Here Are 10 Ways Bloggers Can Make Money

1. Write sponsored blog posts
2. Accept pre-written paid blog posts
3. Host brand giveaways
4. Charge for your time and social shares when reviewing items
5. Join an ad network
6. Use affiliate links and banners
7. Charge for social media ads
8. Charge brands to use your images
9. Write content and blog posts for brands and businesses
10. Offer blogger outreach services

Some blog owners will use one method, others a few, and some all 10, or even more.

Read about these in more detail here: 10 ways to make money blogging.

My blogging category and income reports are one place you can start exploring the possibilities of making money with your blog. I share tips, advice and my own real experience. I do this because if other bloggers hadn't shared their own numbers and stories, I'd never have known I could turn my hobby into a career, so I shared mine.

I used to write monthly income reports too, but I've since deleted those and just kept the historic annual ones, which still give a good picture of how things have grown over the years.

There are blogger and publisher platforms too that connect website owners with advertising opportunities. You can find one such platform in my  Collaborator review.

How Do I Start a Blog and Make Money?

Before getting your thoughts and ideas out there, you need to set up a blog and build an effective website. There are plenty of web design companies who can help if you're a total technophobe, but most lifestyle bloggers set up their own site using an online platform.

WordPress is probably the most recommended option in the blogging community, and you can start for free to see if it's right for you before spending any money. Some of my websites are hosted with WordPress, and each cost me around £36 a year when I started, which is barely anything. These days I spend around £240 a year on each of my WordPress websites, as they've grown and my needs have changed.

This Lylia Rose website is built with Create, and costs me around £200 a year now. I own 10 domains in total across my websites, each costing somewhere between £5 and £15 a year. I started this site as an ecommerce store originally, so the blog itself is fairly basic, but that just goes to show you really can make money blogging on pretty much any platform, even without all the extras that a self-hosted WordPress setup can offer.

If you want to be a professional blogger, this post covers everything I think you need: Everything you need to stay organised and productive as a professional blogger.

How Long Does It Take to Make Money Blogging?

Blogging takes time. You're not going to get hundreds of followers or website traffic overnight, and you'll need patience while you keep putting content out. Don't be put off by looking at other people's blogs either, everyone has their own style, and you'll keep learning and growing as you go.

Making money from your blog also takes time and patience. The best way to learn the ropes is to read other bloggers' stories and see what actually worked for them, which is exactly what I did, and what plenty of others did too, as well as watching YouTube videos, throwing myself into the blogging community, learning what SEO actually is, and reading and watching interviews with larger online publishers to see how they monetised and pick up their tips.

It's also worth being aware that not all advice online is good, or accurate. Some is just people's opinions, and there are plenty of bloggers sharing advice who don't even make a full-time income themselves, or haven't sustained one for years.

That's why it's worth getting information from a variety of sources and working out what's actually legit. Much of it will come through trial and error too, alongside following the latest best practice guidelines for content from wherever you want to be found, such as Google.

As your content grows and you share it, you'll start to be found, and brands will begin to reach out to you directly.

Don't rely on that alone, though. I still spend hours every week searching for paid blog work and putting myself out there, and coming up with business strategies to make money as an online publisher, and to maintain and sustain that income. I've shared some of my own tactics in 6 secrets to make more money from your blog.

The honest answer to how long it takes to make money blogging is: how long is a piece of string?

It's different for every blogger. On my first blog it wasn't even my original aim, and I started making money after a few years, then quickly built that up to a full-time income within the first year of taking it seriously.

On my other two websites, it took a couple of months to land the first paid opportunity on one, and around a year on the other. Even now, one of them makes a far smaller amount each month than the others.

It all depends on your numbers, whether you appeal to brands, and how quickly you're able to scale up and grow. There are a lot of moving parts, and it also depends on how you want to monetise your website, since each method on the list above needs a different approach and strategy, and some will pay off faster than others. Not to put you off, but you're also competing with millions of other websites, so results are never guaranteed.

But it is genuinely possible to make money from a blog within your first year, it just might not be enough to hand in your notice right away.

Is Blogging Success Guaranteed?

It's also worth being honest that not everyone who starts a blog goes on to make money from it. I've been blogging since 2013, and in that time I've known plenty of people start a website, then quit, never quite work out how to get traffic, or never get round to monetising it at all. Making money from a blog isn't automatic, it needs to be treated like an actual business.

If you want to turn it into a full-time business, then you need to treat it like one from the start. It's a risk, and it might not be successful, just like any new business. The time it takes to become profitable isn't guaranteed either, it could happen quickly, slowly, or not at all.

Income is also incredibly varied between different bloggers, and even between different sites run by the same person. I have a few websites myself, and the income each one brings in annually is very different, not every site I've started has been a roaring success.

It just goes to show there's no exact roadmap to follow, and sometimes you never really know why one site takes off and another doesn't. It's just the nature of websites, SEO and the constantly changing AI landscape.

Final Thoughts

So, is it really possible to make money blogging? Yes, but it takes real effort, patience, and treating it like the business it is.

I've tried a lot of methods myself over the years and write about them all, so have a look through if you want to make money as a blogger, or explore my 60 ways to make money online if you'd rather try a different method. Good luck with your blogging journey.