anyone actually making money out of blogging successfully?

the email list point is the one i'd underline. and keep a record of income by post. usually a handful of pages earn most of it, so updating those regularly is worth more than writing new stuff most months.

Yes, but almost everyone who does it treats it like a slow business, not a side income. The ones I've seen work picked a niche small enough to own, got the bulk of their money from affiliate links on comparison and review posts, and built an email list early so they weren't 100% reliant on google. The ones that died went broad, wrote what they felt like that week, and lost most of their traffic in one core update. Expect a year before it's meaningful.