How To Quit Your Job And Become A Full-Time Blogger

Are you interested in learning how to become a full-time blogger? Becoming a full-time blogger has completely changed my life. I earn a great living (I’m on track to earn over $800,000 blogging this year), I love what I do, I get to help lots of people manage their money better, I’m my own boss,…

Michelle Schroeder-Gardner

Last Updated: January 8, 2024

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you decide to make a purchase via my links, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. See my disclosure for more info.

Are you interested in learning how to become a full-time blogger? Becoming a full-time blogger has completely changed my life. I earn a great living (I’m on track to earn over $800,000 blogging this year), I love what I do, I get to help lots of people manage their money better, I’m my own boss, I travel full-time, and more.

Honestly, life couldn’t be any better.

Related: Why I’m Happy I Made The Decision To Leave My High Paying And Secure Job For Blogging

I know many other people who have successfully become full-time bloggers. They make a great living from it and have greatly improved their lives.

Starting your own blog can lead to many positives, including possibly becoming a full-time blogger.

Trust me, it’s possible.

Just a few years ago, I didn’t really even know what a blog was. I started a blog just because I wanted to have a hobby, improve my financial life by publicly talking about it, and so on. I never started my blog with the hopes of earning a living.

Funny enough, I actually knew nothing about blogging when I first started.

I had no idea that people could even make money with blogs. I learned everything slowly and through trial and error, and I really came to love blogging.

After around a year of blogging, I was already making a few thousand dollars a month from my blog, which is a great start to earning a living from blogging.

And, I absolutely LOVED what I was doing.

Due to my experience, I’m often asked what is the best way to become a full-time blogger. Continue reading for my top tips and enjoy!

Note: You can sign up for my free How to Start and Launch a Successful Blog course here, or by filling out the form below.

Create a plan if you want to become a full-time blogger.

If you want to quit your job and become a full-time blogger, I recommend that you first create a plan.

You’ll want to think about a few things, such as:

  • How you’ll make money from blogging
  • How much money you need in order to quit your full-time job
  • When you want to leave your job by
  • How much money you want to save in an emergency fund
  • How you plan to continually grow your blog
  • What goal(s) you are working towards
  • And much, much more.

Creating a plan allows you to lay everything out in front of you. This way, you’ll know what you’re working towards and know what to do.

Determine what you’ll blog about.

To become a full-time blogger, I always recommend creating a blog around a topic that you are passionate about, that you are an expert in, that you like, or something else along those lines.

Doing this can make sure blogging stays fun and not a chore.

You can blog about several topics or you can blog about one specific thing, such as personal finance. I write about finance and topics related to that because it’s a topic I enjoy.

However, any topic will work, and any topic can make money blogging.

Yes, your blog can be about anything and/or everything. It’s entirely up to you and what you want to do.

Here are some possible topics for your blog. And, the list doesn’t end here. Choose one, all, or some. It’s all up to you.

  • Lifestyle
  • Home
  • Family
  • Finance
  • DIY
  • Small business
  • The outdoors
  • Fitness and health
  • Food
  • Inspiration and advice
  • Animals
  • Travel
  • Games
  • Relationships
  • School
  • Electronics, and more!

The beauty of having a blog is that it can be about anything you want.

Related: Want To Make Money From Home? Here Are 17 Of The Best Online Jobs

Start a blog.

Learning how to become a blogger means that you’ll actually have to start a blog!

You will never know if you like blogging, or if you can become a full-time blogger, unless you start one.

Luckily, starting a blog is affordable.

No, you don’t need a ton of technical skills or anything like that. I started my blog when I didn’t really even know that they existed. Even if you aren’t too computer-savvy, you can still start a successful blog! There are many people who have successfully started a blog even though they didn’t know much about them.

So, the next step of becoming a full-time blogger is that you’ll need to actually start one!

In my easy tutorial, you can start a blog for less than $3 a month, I lay out all of the technical details so that you don’t get confused.

Publish high-quality content.

A blog needs high-quality content, especially if you want to become a full-time blogger. It’s necessary if you want your readers to come back for more.

This means that you’ll want to:

  • Write about things that you believe others will enjoy. If you don’t enjoy anything that you write about, then others probably won’t as well.
  • Do your research. This may include reading other articles, looking up statistics, reading books, and so on.
  • Create content that is engaging. Your writing should make a reader want to do something or engage with you.
  • Write in your own voice. To stand out from others, you should write in your own voice and develop your own writing style.
  • Edit your content. You should never just write content and publish it. You’ll want to reread and edit it. You should be checking for flow, grammar mistakes, and so on.

Love what you’re doing.

Blogging is a ton of fun. The best blogs are written by those who love to write and love everything that goes into blogging.

However, that doesn’t mean blogging is just that simple.

It’s quite easy to spend day and night working on your blog, so enjoying it is something that I believe to be very important. There are always new things to learn, things to research, networking opportunities, writing, and more to do. So, enjoying what you do will make everything much better and even easier.

Network with others.

Networking is extremely important if you want to become a full-time blogger and learn how to earn money blogging.

Many bloggers see other bloggers as competition, and this really holds them back. You should be open to making blogging friends, attending blog conferences, sharing content with others, and more.

Networking can help you to enjoy blogging more, learn new things about blogging, make great connections, and more.

Related: How To Start A Successful Blog In 10 Steps

Find ways to monetize your blog.

Obviously, if you want to become a full-time blogger, then you’ll need to find ways to make money from blogging.

Luckily, there are several ways to make money blogging. These include:

  • Affiliate marketing – Affiliate income is when you place an affiliate link in a blog post and try to earn money from people buying the product through your link. This can be a good way to make money because if there is a product out there that you love, all you have to do is review the product and hopefully others will be interested in buying it as well.
  • Blog sponsorships – Paid blog posts and advertisements are when you place an advertisement on your blog in exchange for money. This might be in the form of a sponsored review, a guest blog post, a sidebar link, an advertisement within a newsletter, and so on. There are many different forms of paid advertisements on websites.
  • Display advertising – Display advertising is when you place an advertisement on your blog in the sidebar, below a blog post, below your header image, or in some other location on your blog. Then, for every so many views that the advertisement sees, you earn a certain amount of money.
  • Creating your own product – There are many products you could create and sell on your website, such as a book, course, etc.

I recommend checking out my online course for bloggers, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. I earn over $50,000 a month through affiliate marketing, and in this very informative online course, I share my exact strategy and tips. If you’re a blogger, then you NEED this course.

Read further about the different ways to make money blogging at The Ultimate Guide To Making Money Blogging – How I Earn Over $50,000 A Month Online.

Improve your page views.

Continually working towards growing your number of page views can help you to improve your income. Due to this, you’ll want to continually improve these numbers so that you can become a full-time blogger.

There are many different ways to increase the number of page views you receive on your blog.

Below are tips to improve your blog’s page views:

  1. Be active on Pinterest – Pinterest is one of my top traffic sources, and it brings me around 200,000 visits a month. I recommend creating great images, making sure the description and title of your images are catchy, pinning regularly, and only pinning long images. In case you are wondering, I use Picmonkey to edit all of my images and Tailwind to schedule them. I highly recommend purchasing this Pinterest strategy guide, as I use it for my Pinterest strategy and it has helped me tremendously.
  2. Find other social media sites to be active on – Besides Pinterest, there are several other social networking sites that you may want to check out. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, and others.
  3. Post regularly – For most blogs, you should publish content at least once a week. Going for weeks or months at a time without a blog post can lead to readers forgetting about you.
  4. Guest post – Guest posting can lead to new readers checking out your blog and subscribing to it. This can be a great way to reach a new audience.
  5. Make sure it’s easy to share your content – I love sharing posts on social media. However, it gets frustrating when some blogs make it more difficult than it needs to be. You should always make sure that it’s easy for readers to share your content. This means making your social media icons easy to find, having the information that needs to be shared (title, link, and your username) already input, and so on.
  6. Create catchy headlines – The title of your post can be a major factor in influencing readers to click over or not. This is an area that I am continually working on, because headlines are extremely important!
  7. Learn SEO – SEO (search engine optimization) is not something I could teach in such a small space. However, I recommend doing your research and learning more about what it is and how it can help you.
  8. Make it easy for readers to browse – If you want more page views, you should make it as easy as possible for readers to read your other blog posts. You should make it easy for readers to find your blog homepage, categories, tags, search bar, and so on. Also, I recommend including links in every single one of your blog posts, so that readers can easily find related topics.
  9. Start an email list – A great email marketing company to check out is Constant Contact. They have great customer service and a free 60 day trial (no credit card required)​.

I recommend purchasing my friend Lena’s book, How I Went From 17K to 350K+ Monthly Page Views In 9 Months. It’s very affordable and informative, and I’m sure you’ll get your money’s worth. I bought it myself and have implemented many of her tips on my blog.

Are you interested in learning how to become a full-time blogger and make money from blogging? Why or why not? 

How To Start A Blog Free Email Course

Want to see how I built a $5,000,000 blog?

In this free course, I show you how to create a blog easily, from the technical side all the way to earning your first income and attracting readers. Join now!

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Michelle Schroeder-Gardner

Author: Michelle Schroeder-Gardner

Hey! I’m Michelle Schroeder-Gardner and I am the founder of Making Sense of Cents. I’m passionate about all things personal finance, side hustles, making extra money, and online businesses. I have been featured in major publications such as Forbes, CNBC, Time, and Business Insider. Learn more here.

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  1. Oh Michelle, this is my big scary dream. I’ve been dreaming of quitting my job and blogging full-time from home but my biggest challenge is getting enough traffic and sales. No matter how much I plan, I can’t figure out what I’m missing.

    So, I’m saving up to enroll for some amazing courses that will teach me how to take my blog to another level. The two courses I’ll go for are Lena’s traffic transformation course and Michelle’s Making sense of affiliate marketing course. For now, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing and learning as much as I can.

  2. DNN

    As long as content is king on the web, I know I’m in the bag for “side hustle millionaire” status. I’m doing the transformation work because “he has lots and lots of content.” 😛

  3. Theresa

    Hello Michelle,

    I first read your blog about 3 years ago. I keep coming back to the idea of blogging and really making an income by way of a blog. And your blog is inspirational. I put in my email again to get the free information on starting a blog. I need to start the blog with the least amount of money at this point and I think I should go ahead and get started or I will not do it.

    The first thing I really need to decide is what I would write about to keep others interested and this it the hardest part for me.

    I hope your suggestions will motivate and help me out. I appreciate what you have shared in your blog.

    Thank you,

  4. Masscv

    To build a popular blog you need to make a lot of effort. Good post!

  5. Noemi

    Great post. I have started blogging 4 months ago. It’s funny how before I started blogging, everything I read about it was new to me, now I can relate more. I want my blog to grow just like any other blogger and be successful. So I’m trying to get as much help from bloggers like you who have been doing this for awhile. so I ask if you can read any of my post at SimplyNoemi.com and give me any tips on how I can make it better.
    Thank you!

  6. Hey Melissa!

    I recommend reading this – https://www.makingsenseofcents.com/2019/04/how-to-earn-money-blogging.html

    It’s one of the questions that I talk about.

  7. Interesting content. Thanks so much. I;ve been doing Blogging the wrong way.

  8. Thanks so much for this helpful guide. I am always skeptical about my ideas not until now. I would stick for a while at the coffee shop I work it and work part time on my blog until it starts to pay off. Thanks

  9. Kristin Brause

    Thanks Michelle! Love your blog and success. I got to make a plan as you said and markdown some goals 🙂 Kris

  10. Tatyana

    Thank you so much Michelle!! This is great!

  11. Quitting a job and starting your own business is a great way to test interpersonal faith. While things may seem financially on shaky in the moment for those who quit their jobs and start their own businesses, it motivates them subliminally to work smarter and harder for themselves. It also motivates them to go the extra mile because most employers fail to see the value in current employees and aspiring job applicants. Agree?

  12. Stephanie

    Really good article, Michelle is wonderful shes an amazing support assistant if you ever want to start your own Blog/website!