How to Make Money With a Blog: The Three Routes and When to Use Each

There are only three ways a blog makes money. Ads. Affiliate commissions. Your own products.

That is the whole list. Sponsorships, memberships, coaching, services — they are all just versions of one of those three.

The hard part is not learning the names. The hard part is knowing which one fits your blog right now. Pick the wrong one at the wrong moment and you can work hard for a whole year and earn almost nothing, while doing everything else right.

So let me walk you through all three, with the real 2026 numbers. A lot of the advice still floating around online is two years out of date, and some of it will send you somewhere that will not even take you anymore.

First, the mistake that costs the most

Trying to earn too early.

I understand why people do it. You have written twenty posts. You want some proof this is not a waste of your evenings. So you stick ads on the site.

The ads earn pennies, because ad money follows traffic and you do not have traffic yet. Meanwhile your site is now slower and messier. The few readers you did have are more likely to leave. Which slows the traffic growth that was the only thing that could have made those ads worth having in the first place.

You made the site worse in exchange for small change.

Earning money is step seven of ten in the Content-to-Income System, and it sits at seven on purpose. Build the thing. Get people to it. Then earn from it. Every time someone reverses that order, it costs them months.

Route one: display ads

You get paid for attention. Ads show up on your pages. You earn based on how many people see them, and where those people live.

What it needs: real traffic. Ads are a numbers business. The amount you earn per visitor is tiny, so it only adds up to something once a lot of visitors show up.

Why it is worth waiting for: once it runs, it is about as close to hands-off as blogging gets. You do not sell anything or talk anyone into anything. You publish, people arrive, the money follows the traffic. This is how my crochet and recipe sites earn.

A note on links: I’m not an affiliate for any of the ad networks or programs below, so nothing on this page pays me either way.

The 2026 doors, and which ones are actually open

This is the part that changed most, and the part most blog posts still get wrong.

• Google AdSense. No traffic minimum. Google asks for original content, real navigation, an About page, a Contact page, a privacy policy, HTTPS, and a site that is actually indexed. It pays the least of any option here. Think of it as a placeholder, not a plan.
• Journey by Mediavine. You need 1,000 premium sessions in a 30-day window and a connected Google Analytics 4 account. Premium means readers from places like the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Wix and Blogspot sites are turned away automatically. So is “excessive use of AI” — worth saying out loud on a site like mine that is all about using AI well. AI can help you research and organize. It cannot be the writer.
• Raptive. 25,000 pageviews a month, down from 100,000 in late 2025. Between 25,000 and 99,999 pageviews you also need half your traffic from the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand or Australia, long-form content on most pages, and a domain at least six months old.
• Ezoic. Here is the one that will surprise you. Ezoic used to be everyone’s beginner recommendation. As of February 19, 2026, new sites need 250,000 monthly active users. Blogs already on Ezoic before that date get to stay, but if they remove the code for more than seven days they lose that and have to meet the 250,000 bar to come back. If a post from 2024 told you Ezoic is where beginners start, that post is wrong now.

Notice what happened there. Two of the big networks came down a lot. One went way up. Always check the network’s own eligibility page before you plan around a number — here is Raptive’s, for example. These pages get quietly edited, and the blog posts about them do not.

What people get wrong: thinking all traffic pays the same. It does not, not even close. A thousand readers from the US are worth far more to an advertiser than a thousand readers from somewhere with a smaller ad market. Your topic matters too. Finance and home improvement pay well. Pure entertainment does not.

Route two: affiliate commissions

You get paid for trust. You recommend something. Someone buys it through your link. You get a cut.

What it needs: far less traffic than ads, but the right kind. One post that ranks for “best budget standing desk” can out-earn fifty posts that rank for “what is a standing desk”. Affiliate money comes from people who are close to buying, not people who are browsing.

Why it suits small blogs: you can make your first affiliate sale with a few hundred readers a month, if those readers came looking for a recommendation. That is not true of ads.

What changed with Amazon in 2026

Amazon Associates is where most people start, so you should know what happened this spring before you build a plan on it.

On April 14, 2026, a new Associates Operating Agreement took effect. Three changes matter to you:

• The “halo” is gone. You used to earn on whatever else a person threw in their cart after clicking your link. Not anymore. You earn on the product you promoted and its variations, and that is all.
• There is now a 180-day clock. The item has to actually ship and get paid for inside that window to count. Pre-orders are a gamble now.
• Every page linking to Amazon needs real commentary. Amazon widened its definition of original content to mean analysis or transformation that adds something for the reader. A page that is a list of products and nothing else is a problem.

On top of that, commission rates in several categories were cut through 2026, in some cases by around half. Creators have been reporting income drops of roughly a quarter. The cuts did not land evenly — long-standing publishers kept better terms than high-volume review sites did.

I am not telling you to skip Amazon. Their conversion rate is still very strong, and it is an easy program to be accepted into. I am telling you not to make it your only income. Read the current operating agreement yourself before you lean on it.

What people get wrong: writing “best of” posts about things they have never touched. Readers can tell. So can Amazon now. If you have not used it, say whose review you are quoting and link to it. Honest secondhand beats fake firsthand every single time.

Route three: your own products

You get paid for solving something. A printable, a template, an ebook, a course, a pattern, a spreadsheet. You keep nearly all of the money instead of a small slice of it.

What it needs: not traffic. A relationship. Usually an email list. Selling to strangers is hard. Selling to people who have read you for six months and believe you know what you are talking about is not.

Why it is the one to aim for, eventually: you set the price. Nobody can cut your commission rate overnight. No network can change its threshold and lock you out. It is the only route where you own the whole thing.

What people get wrong: building the product first. Please do not spend two months making a course nobody asked for. Ask your readers what they are stuck on. Make the smallest possible thing that fixes it. Sell that. If it sells, make the bigger version. There is a full list of free and low-cost places to sell if you want to see your options.

So what should you actually earn?

I cannot give you a number, and anyone who gives you one without asking what you write about is selling you something.

What is true in general:

• Ad money moves with traffic in a fairly steady way, once you know your own numbers.
• Affiliate money is lumpy and usually comes from a small handful of pages.
• Product money depends almost entirely on your list and how much they trust you.

The other thing that is true: the first money is always smaller than you hoped and always takes longer than you planned. That is normal. It is not a sign you picked wrong.

The part nobody enjoys hearing

You cannot fix a traffic problem by changing how you earn.

When a site earns very little, the tempting move is to swap ad networks, add more ad slots, or hunt for a better affiliate program. Sometimes that helps a bit. Usually the real problem is that not enough people are arriving, and the fix is further upstream — better topics, better posts, better ways of getting found.

Check the traffic before you change anything about the money. It is nearly always the traffic. If that is where you are, start with how to get traffic to a new website and come back here after.

And 2026 has made that harder, so let’s be honest about it

Search traffic to publishers has dropped hard this year. AI answers now handle a lot of the questions that used to send people to blogs, and “best of” searches are often answered right there on the results page. Plenty of bloggers who were comfortable two years ago are not comfortable now.

I am not telling you that to scare you off. I am telling you because it changes the smart order of operations.

If one search engine can decide your income, you are fragile. Build a small email list earlier than the old advice says to. Get a second traffic source going. And lean toward the routes where you keep more of each visitor — affiliate income and your own products — rather than waiting for the pageview count that gets you into the big ad networks.

Which route, at which stage

Here is the short version. Find yourself on this list and do that one thing.

• Under 1,000 visits a month. Earn nothing on purpose. Write. Get indexed. Put an email signup somewhere visible. Adding ads now costs you more than it pays you.
• 1,000 to 10,000 visits. Add affiliate links to the posts where people are close to buying. Only those posts. This is also where Journey by Mediavine becomes possible if your readers are mostly in the US, UK, Canada or Australia.
• 10,000 to 25,000 visits. Keep growing the list. Sell your first small product to it. Do not build a course yet.
• 25,000 pageviews and up. Apply to Raptive. Now ads are worth the clutter they cost you.
• Any stage at all. Have somewhere for people to give you their email address. It is the only asset here that nobody else can change the rules on.

One last thing

You do not have to choose one route forever. Almost every blog that earns well runs two or three at once — ads paying the steady baseline, affiliate links earning on the buying-intent posts, a product or two carrying the margin.

You just should not start all three at once. Start with the one that matches the traffic you actually have today, not the traffic you are hoping for. Add the next one when you have earned your way to it.

If you are not sure where you are in all of this, start here and I will walk you through the whole path in order.

You Might Also Like

• How to Get Traffic to a New Website — the step that has to come before any of this works.
• How to Build a Niche Website With AI: The First 90 Days — if you do not have the site yet.
• The Content-to-Income System — all ten steps, in order.
• 12 Platforms to Sell Digital Products — for route three, when you get there.
• Why Pinterest Doesn’t Punish You for Being Camera-Shy — a second traffic source that is not Google.
• Beginner Mistakes in Online Business — the other expensive ones.
• Start Here — the whole journey from the beginning.

More in this topic:

• How to Choose a Profitable Blog Niche: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners
• How to Start a Content Website
• How to Update Old Blog Posts for More Traffic
• 20 Digital Products That Sell Online (Beginner-Friendly + Good for Etsy)

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