7 Best Blogging Platforms to Make Money

WordPress originally began as a blogging platform 2003. It’s now the most popular content management system in the world, used to build everything from personal blogs to booming online businesses.

You have two different WordPress platforms to choose from:

• WordPress.com: All-in-one website builder and host that’s easy for beginners to use. Most membership plans have fees, and your monetization options are limited.
• WordPress.org: Website-building software only. It’s completely free and allows for all types of blog monetization, but you’ll have to pay for a web host and take a more hands-on approach to building your blog.

While you can use WordPress.com to start a blog for free (or for a very low cost), it’s not ideal for making money. Instead, you’re better off creating your blog with WordPress.org.

This is by and large the best blogging platform on the market. It’s also the most powerful. Thanks to optional themes and plugins, you don’t need to have professional design or coding experience to build an amazing website. WordPress does have a slight learning curve, but it’s well worth the effort for the money-making capabilities.

For example, you can integrate your WordPress blog with Google AdSense and make money from ad views. You could build a business website around your blog where you promote and sell services. You could even add an online store and create blog content based on your products.

Plus, you can do all the other types of revenue-generating activities that bloggers do, like selling memberships, adding affiliate links to posts, and allowing brands to sponsor your content. WordPress lets you do it all.

Pricing: WordPress.com plans start at $4 per month ($48 billed annually). WordPress.org is free, but you’ll need to purchase a domain name and web host.

Blogger is a free blog hosting platform, and it’s super easy to use. Zero technical skills are needed. To create your own blog, just give it a name and then start writing.

The tradeoff with a platform like this is that everything is simplified. You have a few dozen themes and layouts to choose from, but they all look similar. You can add some extra pages—like an “about” or “contact” page—but your site will mainly consist of blog posts.

Blogger doesn’t offer any inherent e-commerce features, so you’d need to link to a third-party payment processor to make money from memberships or product sales. That said, Blogger is compatible with Google AdSense, and you can incorporate affiliate links into your content, so it’s still possible to make money through Blogger.

Pricing: Free.

Medium is a free blog creator. If the ability to transmit your content to a large audience matters most to you, you’ll be pleased to learn that Medium has over 100 million monthly readers. So it’s a great place to go if you want to spend less time on marketing and more time writing.

Another advantage is that you can access earnings from your blog though the Medium Partner Program. This monetization program allows you to make money according to the following metrics:

• Blog post views or listens that are 30 seconds or longer
• Claps, highlights, replies, and other types of engagement
• New followers
• Engaged followers
• Boosted stories

Similar to other free and freemium platforms, Medium has the drawback of providing limited control over the appearance and functionality of your blog. You’ll also have to abide by Medium’s list of rules for writers, meaning you can’t just write about whatever you want.

These rules include one big drawback: You can’t advertise third-party products or publish sponsored content on your Medium blog. However, you can make money from your Medium blog by promoting your own products or services or by including affiliate links.

Pricing: Free option as well as a paid plan that costs $5 per month ($60 per year) and offers a custom domain, access to member-only stories, and the ability to create a publication and earn money as a Medium writer.

Ghost is premium software made for bloggers. While you can add pages to explain the purpose of your blog and help people get in touch with you, the primary focus of this app is to empower people to blog.

The distraction-free writing interface is a nice touch. All the essential features and widgets you’d need to write a blog post are included. Many users also report that Ghost offers faster loading times than other blogging platforms, which is essential to attracting users to your page and keeping them there.

Ghost may be the best blogging platform for making money from memberships or influencer marketing. In terms of monetization, this platform offers built-in solutions that you won’t find on other platforms. To start, you can add a tip jar or ask readers for donations. You can also create paid memberships for loyal readers who want access to gated content or extras.

While Ghost does allow you to customize your branding, you have to pay for custom themes and integrations. If you’re unsure whether Ghost is the best blogging site for you, the good news is that you can try it out for free for 14 days before committing to one of their paid plans.

Pricing: Membership plans start at $9 per month (billed yearly) or $11 per month (billed monthly).

LinkedIn is best known as a social media platform for professionals. What many people don’t know, however, is that it’s also a good place to start a free blog. It’s an especially good choice if you’re blogging about your career or job-related topics.

Although social media posting makes up the crux of communication on LinkedIn, you can also write entire blog posts. When published, these posts will be connected to your LinkedIn profile and will be accessible to LinkedIn’s base of over a billion users.

LinkedIn is arguably the easiest platform to use for blogging. You won’t need to worry about web hosting or designing your blog. However, it’s not really designed to be a blogging platform. Consequently, your blog won’t really look like a blog—it’ll just look like a collection of social media posts.

Unlike some other social media platforms, LinkedIn doesn’t offer any built-in monetization tools. However, you can still make money from your content using traditional blog monetization methods, like including affiliate links in your blog content, asking for donations or tips, selling merch, or promoting your professional services or products.

Pricing: Free.

Substack is one of the newer options when it comes to blogging tools, and it’s free to use. Although it’s new, it’s quickly gaining traction among digital creators and consumers. Substack claims to have 35 million subscribers, including over 3 million users who pay for a subscription.

All you need to do to get started is set your subscription price, then determine which posts are available only to paying members. Substack won’t cost you anything until you start earning money—at that point, they’ll keep a 10% cut of your revenue.

Substack is a great blogging platform for content recycling. One big reason why writers choose this platform is because of how easy it is to create multimedia content. You can write a post, publish a vlog, and create an audio version of your content.

Another major benefit is that Substack offers you access to a network of readers right from the get-go. This is great for beginner bloggers, as long as you’re willing to sacrifice some freedom over your blog content and design.

Like Medium, Substack is its own platform, which is a drawback for some. You’ll be publishing blog content on their site, and you’ll have to abide by Substack’s content guidelines.

Pricing: Free. If you enable subscriptions, Substack will take 10% of your revenue once you start making money from your blog.

Weebly is a drag-and-drop visual website builder. Because Weebly is a hosted platform, you won’t have to pay for additional web hosting or worry about technical maintenance.

What’s nice about Weebly is that it offers a user-friendly experience for everyone. What’s more, it’s a step up from basic blogging tools that limit creativity. With this tool, you can create a beautiful custom blog to go with your original words.

You can use Weebly at no cost. The tradeoff is that you’ll have a Weebly-branded email and Square ads will appear on your site. Alternatively, you can sign up for a paid plan to get a custom domain.

In terms of monetization, you can do anything you want with a Weebly blog. What the site is really designed for is e-commerce, so it’s one of the best blogging platforms for bloggers who want to open an online shop and sell products as part of their blog monetization strategy. The platform also supports Google AdSense.

Pricing: Free option or paid plans starting at $10 per month (billed annually) or $13 per month (billed monthly).