How To Start A Blog And Make Money

It begins, as most questionable ventures do, with a cup of coffee and an overinflated sense of one's own opinions. You're sitting at the breakfast table, somewhere between existential dread and the third cappuccino, and you think: I should start a blog.

Once, that statement would have been met with derision, a bit like announcing that you're starting a boy band or a cryptocurrency. Blogging used to mean a kind of digital self-flagellation: endless HTML tinkering, earnest musings about sourdough, and a readership consisting of your mother and a confused spam bot in Ukraine. But now, in this glorious, AI-fuelled age, blogging has become rather chic again. It is the digital equivalent of having your own column, without needing to know anyone at Condé Nast.

And, more importantly, it has never been easier, faster, or cheaper to do.

In the old days, starting a website was like building a small cathedral: expensive, fiddly, and entirely at the mercy of mysterious priests in the IT department. Now, with the effortless efficiency of companies like GoDaddy and Bluehost, you can have a domain and a fully functional blog up and running before your espresso cools.

The entire process feels almost illicitly simple. You think of a name, ideally something that sounds both intellectual and unserious, like Notes From The Flight Deck or The Moderately Informed Hedonist. You type it into GoDaddy, and within seconds you've purchased your little plot of digital real estate for less than the price of a decent Negroni. Then, with Bluehost's one-click WordPress setup, you're suddenly staring at a blank screen that's full of promise and mild terror.

This is the internet's great democratisation: you no longer need a server room, a team of coders, or a small fortune to begin. You just need taste, persistence, and the vague ability to form coherent sentences.

Of course, every blog must stand for something. Otherwise, it's just another collection of half-baked opinions and borrowed witticisms (which, admittedly, has never stopped the rest of the internet). The modern blog is an extension of identity. It is how one announces, with modest flair, "I have something to say, and I'd quite like to be paid for saying it."

The key, then, is to find one's niche. This word, once confined to interior design and boutique perfumery, now represents the backbone of online success. The internet rewards specificity: the man who knows everything about fine tailoring will always outrank the man who knows a little about everything.

Do you have opinions on aviation luxury, cigars, or the ethical sourcing of truffles? Perfect. The narrower your focus, the wider your audience. Paradoxical, yes, but also very Google.

And if you're thinking, But I have no particular expertise, take comfort: most people don't. What they have is curiosity, charm, and Wi-Fi. The secret is to write as if you know what you're talking about, an art at which British gentlemen have excelled for centuries.

If all this sounds like work, fret not. Artificial intelligence has entered the chat, quite literally. Where once you needed an editor, a proofreader, and a thesaurus, you now have ChatGPT and its many AI cousins, ready to ghostwrite your first draft, check your grammar, and even suggest headlines that make you sound more intriguing than you are.

AI is, in this sense, the modern valet: efficient, discreet, occasionally overenthusiastic. It will polish your sentences, press your paragraphs, and leave your blog looking crisp enough to impress your digital readers, as long as you remember to add your own voice. The machines may be clever, but they're rarely funny.

And that is the crucial difference. A gentleman blogger must never sound like an instruction manual. The internet is already full of those: earnest people writing about "10 ways to maximise SEO in 2025." Your job is to entertain, inform, and perhaps, if the stars align, sell the occasional affiliate product with enough panache that no one minds.

Ah yes, the money. You didn't think we'd forgotten, did you?

There are, astonishingly, people out there making small fortunes from blogs. One couple documents their van life on YouTube and now earns enough to buy the van manufacturer. Another man writes about credit card points and employs a small army. Blogs that began as hobbies now sustain empires: The Points Guy, Cup of Jo, TechRadar, The Blonde Abroad.

How, you ask? Through that delicate ballet known as monetisation. You write about products or services you actually like, you embed affiliate links (for instance, the aforementioned paragons GoDaddy and Bluehost), and when someone clicks and buys, you earn a modest commission. Multiply that by thousands of visitors a day, and you'll see why so many people now earn more from blogging than from actual employment.

There are other sources of income, of course: display ads, sponsorships, online courses, even selling digital products. But affiliate marketing remains the most elegant. It's passive income at its most civilised: you share what you genuinely find useful, and in return, the internet tips its hat.

Of course, a blog without readers is rather like a private jet without fuel: glamorous, but going nowhere. The art of drawing in an audience is part science, part sorcery. It involves SEO (search engine optimisation, for those who don't speak acronym), a dash of social media charm, and a healthy disregard for sleep.

In practice, it means writing titles that answer what people are searching for, using words like "best", "how to", and "gentleman's guide to" with strategic flourish. It means linking to other credible sources (and occasionally to oneself, because one must be one's own PR machine). It means patience, that rarest of virtues in a world that refreshes every fifteen seconds.

Traffic takes time to build. But like fine wine, or a well-tailored reputation, it improves steadily with age.

There's a popular fantasy that bloggers wake up rich one morning after a viral post. This is nonsense. Blogging success, like most success, is achieved gradually, and through a heroic amount of pretending to be confident. The first few months will feel like writing love letters to the void. No one comments. No one clicks. But the digital gods reward consistency.

And once you break through (once the algorithm finally decides that you are, indeed, relevant), your traffic grows like an enthusiastic houseplant. More readers mean more clicks, more clicks mean more sales, and before long, you're the smug owner of a side income that rivals a junior banker's salary.

If blogging is now an art, then taste is its currency. The internet is an abundant place, full of people screaming into the void. What separates a gentleman blogger from the digital masses is tone. Speak as you would at a dinner party: witty, informed, conversational, but never desperate.

The charm lies in understatement. Mention your affiliate links lightly, as if confiding in a friend. ("I happened to set up my site with Bluehost. Marvellous people, frightfully efficient.") Never hard-sell. Readers can smell greed like cheap cologne.

Keep your writing clean. Your sentences should glide, not grunt. Your opinions should amuse, not exhaust. And your headlines should promise just enough mischief to make people click.

The beauty of blogging lies in its subtlety. It's entrepreneurship without the chest-thumping, art without the suffering, journalism without the editors. You can run a small digital empire from your laptop, the kind that earns money while you're sleeping, or more realistically, while you're doomscrolling in bed.

The truly elegant part? You own it. No boss, no algorithms changing without warning (well, fewer of them), and no office politics, unless you argue with yourself in the comments section.

Over time, your little corner of the web becomes an asset. A readership forms. Partnerships emerge. Brands reach out. You begin to realise that your opinions, once free, are now billable.

In a sense, blogging has always been the perfect pursuit for a modern gentleman: independent, creative, quietly lucrative, and best done with a drink in hand.

And in 2025, with tools like GoDaddy and Bluehost, it's no longer the daunting task it once was. You can claim your domain, launch your site, and write your first post before the weekend. You can use AI to smooth the rough edges, analytics to measure progress, and your own voice to stand out in a world of sameness.

So pour another coffee (or something stronger) and take the plunge. The internet awaits your opinions, your charm, your particular brand of elegant mischief. Start small, keep writing, and watch as your words begin to compound into something remarkable.

Because in an age when everyone's talking, the gentleman who speaks well (and knows where to host his website) will always have the final word.