Make money doing the work you believe in
I was asked how I grew my blog:
Always, but especially early, I think you should strive to have a good audience rather than a larger one. It is better to have five people whose opinions you respect and who wants to discuss the topics with you and give you feedback rather than 50 people who just passively subscribe. If you have an audience of people you can learn from you are going to grow as a person, and that is what matters in the long run.
I found my first readers on LessWrong. (Forums, as the person I talked to said, are like open mics for online writing.) LW wasn’t a perfect fit for the kind of writing I do, but it was close enough that a subset of the people there was a match for me. And that is enough! They could then tell me where to go to find more people who were into the same things as me (for instance, S told me that my essays would probably fit better at the slatestarcodex subreddit, where I also published in the beginning, and where I met three friends of mine). You go to one café, and then you get told about the other cafés you can go to..
As you can tell, I reached out to a lot of people early on. Whenever someone commented and said something intelligent (which is common on LessWrong) I would reach out and ask if I could get them to read the draft for my next post. I got to know a lot of people this way, which led me to be introduced to other people, and I also got a lot of valuable feedback that helped me fix some of the bigger flaws in my writing.
If you find an audience that you like and learn how to write in a way that makes them excited to read, the blog will eventually start growing through word of mouth.