Straight answer: most blogs earn nothing or close to it, a working blog with steady traffic and a few income streams typically brings in £200 to £3,000 a month, and only a small slice of bloggers, the ones who treat it as a business with products and services behind it, get past £10,000 a month. There is no fixed number because blogging isn’t one job, it’s a distribution channel, and what you earn depends entirely on what you’re distributing.
Next step on this topic: How to Earn Money Online With Little to No Investment (2026 Guide).
The numbers nobody wants to give you straight
I’ve been asked “how much can I make blogging” more times than I can count, usually by someone who’s read a post promising £10,000 a month from a laptop on a beach. So let me give you actual bands, based on what I’ve seen from my own blog and from years of watching other bloggers’ P&Ls, not screenshots.
- New blog, under 12 months old: £0 to £50 a month. Most new blogs earn literally nothing for the first six to nine months.
- Established hobby blog, 5,000 to 20,000 monthly visitors: £100 to £600 a month, mostly from display ads and small affiliate commissions.
- Solid niche blog, 20,000 to 80,000 visitors: £500 to £3,000 a month, once you’ve added affiliate deals or your own low-ticket product.
- Blog with a business behind it (services, courses, coaching, consulting): £3,000 to £30,000+ a month, where the blog is the front door and the money is made elsewhere.
- Top 1%, big niche, huge email list, multiple products: six figures a year and up, but this is a genuine minority, not the average case.
Here’s the uncomfortable bit almost nobody says plainly: the number one predictor of blogging income isn’t writing quality, it isn’t consistency, and it isn’t even traffic. It’s whether the niche has buyers in it. A parenting blog with 200,000 monthly readers can earn less than a boring B2B software blog with 8,000 readers, because software buyers have budgets and parenting readers mostly don’t. Passion doesn’t pay, purchasing power does.
What I earned, and when
When I started building an audience online, blogging was part of a bigger picture that included speaking, social media and consulting, but the blog itself took a long time to earn anything meaningful on its own. I remember the exact month I first cracked £100 in a single month from a blog, it took roughly 14 months of weekly posting before that happened, and it came from a mix of a small AdSense payout and one affiliate sale for a piece of software I’d used and recommended.
For the next couple of years the blog itself rarely earned more than a few hundred pounds a month directly. What it did instead was bring in clients. Someone would read a post, trust what I’d said, and email asking about consulting or speaking. That’s the pattern I still see with clients today: the blog is the credibility engine, and the real money sits in the service or product it points to. If you’re building a blog purely to sell ad space, you’re leaving most of the value on the table.
The income streams, and what each one really pays
Display advertising
This is the passive dream people picture, and it does work, eventually. Ad networks pay an RPM, revenue per thousand pageviews. A small blog on a basic network might earn £3 to £8 RPM. Once you hit around 50,000 sessions a month you can usually apply to a premium network, and RPMs there commonly run £15 to £35 depending on niche and season (finance and home improvement pay far more than general lifestyle content). Do the maths: 60,000 monthly sessions at £20 RPM is roughly £1,200 a month, which sounds decent until you realise most blogs never reach 60,000 sessions.
Affiliate marketing
You recommend a product, you get a cut of the sale, typically 3 to 10 percent for physical products and 20 to 50 percent for digital products or software. This is where niche matters most. A software or finance affiliate post can earn £30 to £200 per referral. A general Amazon affiliate link on a lifestyle post might earn you 40 pence. Same effort, wildly different payout, purely because of what’s being sold.
Sponsored posts
Brands pay a flat fee to feature in a post. Rates scale with traffic and authority, small blogs might get £50 to £150 per post, established ones with real domain authority can charge £500 to £2,000. This income is lumpy and depends on relationships, not just numbers.
Your own products or services
This is where the real money tends to sit. A course, a template, a coaching offer, a done-for-you service. The blog builds trust, the product converts that trust into revenue, and margins are far better than ads or affiliates because you’re not splitting the sale with anyone. This is also where the ceiling disappears, ad income caps out with your traffic, product income doesn’t.
How long it takes to earn anything
Give this an honest timeline, because the “make money blogging fast” content out there is mostly wrong.
- Months 1 to 3: £0. You’re building content, nobody’s found you yet.
- Months 4 to 9: First trickle of traffic from search, maybe your first affiliate sale, still likely £0 to £30 a month.
- Months 10 to 18: If you’ve been consistent and picked a niche with buyers in it, you might hit £200 to £800 a month.
- Year 2 to 3: This is where blogs either plateau around a few hundred pounds a month or break through to £2,000+ because a product or service got layered on top.
If you need income sooner than that timeline allows, blogging alone is the wrong tool for the job right now, and I’d rather tell you that than sell you a dream. If you want faster cash flow while a blog builds in the background, something like working as a virtual assistant from home pays within weeks, not years, because you’re trading time for a client’s money directly rather than waiting for an audience to form.
What moves the number up
Traffic matters, but not as much as people think. Here’s what shifts blogging income:
- An email list. A blog with 2,000 engaged subscribers will out-earn one with 50,000 pageviews and no list, because you can sell to a list directly instead of hoping an algorithm sends the right person past your affiliate link.
- Search intent, not search volume. A post that ranks for “best accounting software for freelancers” earns more per visitor than one ranking for “how to be more organised”, because the first reader is close to buying and the second is just browsing.
- One good product beats ten mediocre affiliate links. I’ve watched bloggers spend a year chasing affiliate deals that pay pennies when a £47 template of their own, sold to the same traffic, would have paid better in a single month.
- Consistency over volume. Posting once a week for two years beats posting daily for three months and quitting. Google rewards blogs that are still there.
The part most blogging guides skip
Most blogging income advice treats a blog like a lottery ticket, post enough and eventually you win big. The truth is blunter: blogging is a content marketing skill applied to your own asset instead of someone else’s, and it earns roughly what content marketing has always earned, which is to say, unevenly and slowly, with most of the reward going to people who treat it as a business channel rather than a diary. If you’re not willing to build an email list, test a product, or eventually add a service behind the content, you’ll likely sit in the £0 to £500 a month band indefinitely, no matter how good your writing is. That’s not pessimism, it’s just what the P&Ls show.
This is also why I tell people blogging rarely counts as passive income, whatever the thumbnails say. It’s front-loaded, unpaid labour for a long stretch, and the “passive” part only kicks in years later, if it kicks in at all. If you want a clearer picture of what earns money with little ongoing effort versus what just looks that way, this breakdown of passive income ideas that need money versus time is worth reading before you sink a year into a blog expecting it to run itself.
A realistic step-by-step if you’re starting from zero
- Pick a niche with buyers in it, not just interest in it. Ask yourself who spends money to solve this problem, not just who’s curious about it.
- Publish one solid post a week for six months minimum before judging whether it’s working. Three posts is not a sample size.
- Start an email list from post one, even with a basic free download as the incentive. This is the single habit that separates blogs that earn from blogs that don’t.
- Add one affiliate or ad income stream once you’ve got steady traffic, purely to cover costs, not as your main plan.
- Build a small product or service by month 6 to 12 aimed directly at your readers’ actual problem. This is where real income tends to start.
- Track your numbers monthly. Traffic, subscribers, income by source. If a number isn’t moving after three months, change the input, not the whole plan.
If money needs to come in while the blog builds, it’s worth doing both at once rather than betting everything on one horse. This guide to making money online without upfront investment covers routes that pay faster than blogging while your content compounds quietly in the background, and this piece on working from home to make a living, not just pocket money is worth reading if you’re trying to work out whether blogging alone can replace a full income for your household, because for most people, in year one, it can’t.
So, what should you expect?
If you’re blogging as a side project with no product or service behind it, expect £0 to £500 a month once it’s established, and be pleased if you get there. If you’re building a blog as the front door to a business, whether that’s consulting, a course, or a service like the virtual assistant business model many of my clients run, expect the blog itself to earn modestly while the business behind it does the heavy lifting. Either way, treat the first year as unpaid research and audience-building, not income. The bloggers who get disappointed and quit are almost always the ones who expected month three to look like month thirty six.
Related reading: How much do you charge?.
Frequently asked questions
Can you really make a full time income from blogging alone?
Yes, but it’s rare and it takes years, not months. Most bloggers who replace a full salary have added a product, course, or service on top of the content, rather than relying on ads and affiliate links alone. Pure ad and affiliate income from blogging tends to cap out well below what most people need to live on.
How much traffic do you need to make money blogging?
You can earn small amounts, £5 to £50 a month, with as few as 1,000 to 3,000 monthly visitors if you have the right affiliate deal in a buying-intent niche. Meaningful ad income usually needs 50,000+ monthly sessions to qualify for premium ad networks with decent RPMs.
Is blogging still worth starting in 2026?
Yes, but not as a get rich scheme. It’s worth starting if you want a long term, low cost way to build trust and an audience that eventually supports a product, service, or consulting business. As a standalone income source with no plan B, it’s a slow and often disappointing bet.
What’s the fastest way to see blogging income?
Sell something directly to your readers, a small product, template, or service, rather than waiting on ad networks or affiliate approval, which both depend on traffic thresholds you may not hit for a year or more. A £27 product sold to 20 people in your first three months will outearn most new blogs’ entire ad income for that period.
Related reading: What Is the May 13 Date Shown on Instagram Reels? and What Is an AI Agent, and How Do You Build a Simple One?.
If you want the full breakdown, here is everything I know about content marketing.
