How to Create Passive Income with a Blog in 2025
I wanted to share with you some nuggets of blogging gold that I found really valuable.
The woman in this video makes well over $100,000 a month with her blog. Her name is Sophia Lee.
Her site is PerfectBlogging.com, and she’s a friend of a friend, Nell T., in internet marketing.
Before I share with you summarized details of Sophia’s advice to help you create income with a blog like she does, I want to stop on the word blog for a minute.
Don’t get hung up on the word “blog.”
Lots of people I know who post content on social media trip over this word.
Blog is just an easy way to say a WordPress website or content management system. That’s it.
It’s not a diary, you don’t have to be a high status influencer to publish a blog. You’re just publishing content, same as anywhere else online, like Facebook.
You can publish anything you want on your blog, from recipes to reviews to essays to articles to content shared by other people, to business listings… anything at all that you want, on your own website.
Blogs are still around, or no?
My teenage son’s always saying stuff like “nobody reads blogs anymore, right?”
This lady’s income total says otherwise, so don’t worry about the word blog. Instead, let’s hear what this woman has to say.
You can get all of her information in more detail in the video.
But I wanted to summarize all her monetization tips because they’re really good.
I’ve been meaning to write a post like this as I pick up information on the current online publishing environment.
But I’ve had missing pieces of the puzzle also, because I’ve been out of the blogging picture for a while.
So, having this right in front of me is really helpful and I appreciate that Sophia took the time to make the video.
Perfect Blogging from Sophia Lee. Summary of Tips to Create Passive Income with a Blog.
Tip 1: Get a Self Hosted WordPress blog.
This means that you pay for hosting, and you buy the domain, you connect the two and then you install a WordPress blog and database on the hosting server.
You would then log into the blog with your own username and password, and self-publish your content there.
The alternative, of course, is having a blog or website hosted on sites like WordPress.com and Weebly.com, Wix etc. Don’t do this.
The reason is because they don’t allow you to post income-generating advertisements on their platforms.
Also, the free hosting is not reliable.
Late last month I went through so many problems with a client who wanted me to work on her WordPress hosted blog. It was a nightmare.
Listen to what the woman in this video is saying, and get your own hosting and blog.
Tip 2: Show up on Pinterest as well as Tiktok.
Sophia explains that you can’t get into the advertising programs that pay unless you first get a lot of page views.
This is true, I’ve experienced it myself and it’s what keeps people stuck.
The current way to get a lot of page views is to start posting on Pinterest.
Pinterest is one of those sites where people easily jump from viewing the image to clicking on the link of the website whereas with other sites like Facebook, that doesn’t happen as easily.
Embed your TikTok videos into your blog posts. This I agree with, and I have seen a lot of, with other blogs that seem to be getting a lot of Google love.
Tip 3: Accelerate your learning by taking blogging and passive income generating courses.
Again, I concur. Many things that I have learned in online business, blogging etc have literally taken me years of heavy mistake making to figure out.
Tip 4: Pay for a WordPress theme.
Sophia explains that it’s easier to work with the higher quality themes than some of the free themes that are available because not all are designed equal.
You don’t need to be a coder to customize a WordPress theme. That’s the beauty of them, and it’s like a compromise because you also don’t need to pay a web designer.
Of course, if you really don’t want to get your hands dirty trying to make a blog, you can buy a theme, and then pay a virtual assistant or designer to set up your blog and make updates to it.
I offer this service, so I’m just going to throw that out there. Email dinagio@dinagio.com for a quote.
The other thing about the themes is I see a lot of people don’t do any customizing of headlines type size, spacing, borders and that sort of thing.
Then their blogs look wonky, and you just accept that that’s how it looks. But in reality, it makes it harder for people to actually stay focused on reading when they visit your site.
And if they’re not engaged with your site content, they’re not going to stay long, sign up or click on anything etc.
Tip 5: Figure out the purpose of your blog.
Are you looking to make money with it? Is it your writing outlet? Is your goal to brand a business?
Here Sophia talks again about the importance of consistently embedding The Tiktok video code directly into your blog posts because video content will get your blog ranked (as of 2024).
She stresses the importance of doing a call to action that links from the Tiktok video back to the actual blog post so that people will end up on your blog– this is a traffic booster and inbound link building strategy.
Example, on Tiktok you might include a line that says “to learn more about this recipe click here” and then direct people to your blog post where they can find a recipe that includes exact measurements.
Tip 6: Adjust to people’s current attention span.
This is important because people are in a hurry. You have surely been that web server, trying to find a quick answer and instead you have to sift through a really long and detailed post.
Help your readers find what they need so you don’t lose their attention.
Sophia uses the example of including a line in the blog post like, “If you want to skip to the most important part of the post, click here” and then it anchor links to, say, the main recipe or whatever you’re sharing on your blog in that post.
Tip 7: Do not use Al-generated content to make blog posts.
Google recognizes this and will penalize you or I should say your blog will drop in rank, if you do this.
Sophia advises that this includes content generated from ChatGPT.
I want to add the following remark about AI and how it can be used to create blog posts faster without actually copying that same content.
Some people I know just use the Al generator to outline some topic ideas. Then they write the blog post from scratch, using the outline as a guide to kick start the process.
In that case, I would say that’s okay.
Sophia also says that Google is emphasizing real life content more than anything. So write your opinion, review a product, say it in your own words, give your own advice and don’t swipe.
She explains that she checks the little things that can slow down a website’s load time and uses the WordPress Rocket plugin which she paid for, to identify and correct these issues.
What she means is that since people often upload images directly that they’ve taken using their phones, these are big files.
The big files take up more bandwidth and will slow down load time of your blog. When this, happens, you lose visitors and engagement. And it’s true.
I myself have left people’s blogs out of inpatience, because I wanted to quickly read something and I was multitasking and the load was taking too long.
She also cautions that you shouldn’t be too reactive to recent changes on the algorithm.
Don’t run wild trying to undo everything you did and turn it into something different to appease the search engines.
Chances are good they’re going to change the algorithm again. So at least some of what you were doing before should be preserved in case these methods hold value in the future.
Sophia emphasizes using Pinterest big time to drive traffic to your blog as you’re just getting started.
She’s created a course to help people do this.
(I just want to say here that I hope it’s an ebook because I literally have no time to log on to lives.)
Here’s a huge monetization tip from Sophia.
Remember, this woman is earning 100K plus per month from her content publishing/ blog and no, that is not a typo.
She’s totally transparent about how she did it: by piggybacking her niche focus. This is awesome.
First she launched a home organization blog where she shared tips for having a beautiful, well organized home space.
She grew her blog audience from that for a long time.
Then she started offering organizational planners on that site for free.
She built an interest around that sub niche and eventually pivoted on the planner idea to make planner products a totally different, separate and viable income stream that has earned her way more than the original home organization niche blog.
Take the Pinterest Course from Sophia.
Take a shortcut and order Sophia Lee’s course on how to get started with Pinterest now.
I found out about Sophia from my friend Nell, who is doing well with her own blog and seeing some really good ad monetization results.
These two are way ahead of me, so I figured I would nudge you in their direction.
Here is my friend’s link to Sophia’s course in case you’d like to use it to get going with your own blog monetization.