How long does it take to earn from a blog? There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and you’ll find competition in every niche. The busier niches will be harder to get traction in, and so it will take considerably longer in a competitive niche. Pick a low competition niche, and it can be more difficult to monetise, even with a large amount of visitors.
A new blogger can make a sale quite quickly, if they are lucky. But to earn consistently from a blog, you need a consistent amount of visitors who are making purchases from you regularly. You can of course monetise a blog with advertising too. But ad clicks only earn tiny amounts so you’ll likely need to generate a huge amount of traffic to make this consistently profitable and worth your while. See affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense.
Whatever you choose to do to monetise a blog, you’ll never be profitable without traffic. So let’s look at traffic generation first since it’s so important.
How Long Does It Take To Earn From A Blog? Traffic
You can get traffic instantly if you pay for it. But that’s not the point of blogging. The point of blogging, if you want money from it, is to generate free traffic. Once you get enough free traffic and you can successfully turn that traffic into leads and sales, you can start earning from a blog. There’s two main elements here: Free traffic and sales! You can’t make sales without traffic, but you can still have traffic without sales! So traffic is the key if you want to make money from blogging.
There’s targeted traffic and general traffic too. As an affiliate marketer, I want targeted traffic. Targeted traffic is traffic I have specifically focused on to optimise for leads and sales. These are visitors who are more likely to be interested in the products I promote on this site. Since most visitors on a website don’t buy from you, it pays to get more of the traffic which will convert.
To get traffic to your blog takes time. Depending on your niche it can take months or years. But you can speed this process up if you find long tail keywords with low SEO competition. These are the “low hanging fruit” of keywords which relate to your product and are easier to get ranked for on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
You can also build a niche website too. This can help you get more traffic from the SERPS if you choose a niche and build a website around specific keywords.
How long does traffic generation take? If you’re blogging regularly and promoting your blog posts, you can start to see visitors quite quickly. But stop and they will quickly die off. Maintain consistency for several months and you should see your visitor numbers growing consistently too.
How Long Does It Take To Earn From A Blog? – Monetising Your Blog
Of course all this traffic is no good without somehow monetising it. You can either use advertising or affiliate marketing and I would suggest testing out both to see what works for you and your topic. Ad clicks only bring in tiny revenues and I personally found affiliate marketing to be the better bet. This means you need to align your blog topic with some affiliate offer which you feel is a good choice. It needs to be a good match for your blog topic, or your readers won’t be very interested in it.
With high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products you stand to earn a lot more per sale compared to standard products. So your choice of affiliate product is pretty important.
You can also offer something on your site as a freebie giveaway. Offer this in exchange for your visitor’s email address. By building an email list, you can make more of the traffic you get. Even with a small amount of traffic, it’s worth doing this because you can start to build a data base of subscribers to send messages to and build a relationship with. Ultimately this list is used to sell affiliate products.
Earning From A Blog – Cart Before The Horse
Don’t put the cart before the horse when it comes to earning from a blog it’s easy to get over excited and rush in creating content and hoping for a sale. But the truth is, it’s very competitive out there and if you don’t sustain the necessary traffic, you won’t make consistent sales. A “one off” sale is encouraging, but you can pay your rent from it! You ultimately want a consistent income from blogging which can be built upon over time. The best way to approach blogging is therefore to first find your niche.
Finding your niche is the most important decision because your whole blog will be built on this decision. If your decision is flawed in some way, you’re building a skyscraper on the foundations of a cottage! Ideally choose a topic you love and have a huge passion for. Otherwise, it can be difficult to sustain the effort needed to go the extra mile. With blogging, expect to be creating content for several months if not years.
If you can’t see yourself doing this in your given subject area, it might not be the right one.
Summary
Nobody can tell you exactly how long it will take you to earn from a blog. Get clear on how much you want to earn. Will it be a hobby job or do you want to replace a full time income? Once you know this, it will help you to realise what is needed to create a consistently profitable blogging habit. Are you ready to write posts and promote them over the next year consistently? Or, are you just wanting a side hustle which you can only give a few hours a week to?
In any case, blogging is unlikely to be profitable for the first few months while you find your feet. Google’s sandbox means you’ll be unlikely to rank on the first page in the SERPS – search engine results pages. But there’s still other search engines and your own promotion on social media.
With the right attitude, there’s no reason you can make a good income from blogging. But be prepared to roll your sleeves up and stick with it, even when there’s nothing to show for it for some time. When you love blogging, you’re much more likely to do this and stick with it. But when you’re only looking for the outcome, it can be difficult to sustain, especially if you’ve chosen a topic you don’t care about!
See also how to earn money from a blog.