How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging Archives

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.

How Long Does It Take To Earn From A Blog

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!

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging

If you intend on building an income from a blog, you need to set up your “stall” in the right way first. It’s easy to rush in and burn out within a few weeks. Or, if you choose a topic you’re unfamiliar with, you will have your work cut out for you.

If you don’t know your topic well, you’ll have to research every single post you write. This can get tiresome very quickly. Ideally at least choose a topic which you have an interest in and want to learn about anyway. Choosing a topic you love will make writing your blog a joy rather than a chore.

how long does it take to make money blogging?

If you make writing your passion, you can write for months and years. But if you pick a topic you know nothing about, or have no interest in, it’s much more difficult to sustain the necessary motivation to work long enough to make your blog profitable.

That way, as you learn something new about your topic, you can blog about it.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – Products

Monetising your blog with advertising, such as with Google Adsense means placing adverts. around your content. When people click on your adverts, you make small commissions based on advertising cost. Each click will usually only pay tiny amounts (less than $1/£1), depending on the topic of your blog.

This is a tough monetisation method and you’ll need to create a lot of content and get a huge volume of traffic before it pays anything like a reasonable income.

Alternatively you can use affiliate products which relate to your blog topic. With affiliate products, you sell other people’s products and services for a commission based on the sale. Most bloggers have an opt in box to collect details of their visitors. When a visitor signs up to a bloggers newsletter, they opt in by handing over their email address. In exchange, the blogger gives them something of value, such as an ebook.

Here’s one of the ebooks I give away on my websites.

Types Of Affiliate Products

There’s different types of affiliate products you can use as a blogger. The type of product you choose to use on your blog will determine how long it takes to make a reasonable income from your blogging efforts. Of course, the amount of traffic you generate from your blog will also play a large part in it too. (More on this later).

Certain affiliate products will work harder for you, making you more money, than others. Some products only pay 3-11% commission. Others pay 40%-100% commission. Which do you think will get you a reasonable income faster? Of course there’s other factors at play too here. The type of product you promote on your website will also have a bearing on the content you write. Or, you could choose products based on what you like to write about.

Ideally, choose products which pay you the best commissions and, if you can a recurring commission. Recurring commission affiliate programs will allow you to earn a substantial income from a blog in a much faster timeframe than most other affiliate products. But in order to sell those recurring income products, you’ll need to write about subjects which attract the right audience for those products.

For example, if you write about knitting, you’re unlikely to sell software products which are used by affiliate marketers on your site. You’ll attract people who are interested in knitting. So you’ll need to find knitting related affiliate products.

Finding Recurring Commission Programs In Your Niche

To make your blog pay the most for your efforts, you will want to find the affiliate programs which pay the most commission. Digital products tend to pay much more than physical products. Amazon for example, will pay 3-11% commission to its affiliates. That’s not much if you’re wanting to earn a living from your blog. If you consider an “average” product sells for $10 on Amazon, you’ll only make 11% at the most on the sale – $1.10. Even a $100 product will only earn you $11.

Clickbank is another option too. Clickbank sells digital products on the internet which pay affiliates upwards of 40% commission. Products are usually valued at around $100. This means you’ll earn $40 a sale. There are even some recurring commission products you can find on Clickbank too. Find them by using CBEngine.com and using the recurring commission products tab.

Picking A Niche To Write About

Before starting a blog, think about what you’re going to write about and why. If you’re going to sustain your writing for long enough to make it pay, you’ll need to pick a topic wisely.

I started a blog about garlic harvesting but knew nothing of the topic. Within 6 months I was completely fed up of the topic and gave up. The site quickly fell off the search results and eventually I dropped it completely. It was a lesson learned – don’t choose a topic you don’t love!

Ideally, find some high paying affiliate products and create your content around them. Or at least find products you can align with so you can be authentic in their promotion. If you’re highly motivated within a certain topic, it will be much easier to write in it and keep creating content for the long term.

Generating Traffic To Your Blog

Just writing a blog won’t necessarily get you instant traffic. You’ll also need to share your content too. Over time, Google, and other search engines should rank some of your content. But you shouldn’t rely on this, especially in the early months. Depending on the topic you choose, getting traffic can be fairly straight forward, or very difficult. With a competitive niche, such as affiliate marketing, you’ll find there is lots of competition.

A less competitive niche, such as basket weaving, for example, might be easier to get traffic for than affiliate marketing. But whatever topic you choose, here’s a strategy to help you rank some of your content. Keyword research is a major key in getting traffic to your blog. If you just write random content, it’s less efficient than writing content which is already being searched for.

You can find long tail keywords which are already getting looked for by using Google’s keyword planner. Once you find a suitable keyword, which you want to write some content for, compare the competition for it with a Google search.

Then do a phrase match search for the same keyword too. These two searches can give you an overview of the possibility of getting your content on the first page of Google.

For more on traffic generation read “Create Free Website and Make Money“.

Monetising With Email Marketing

Getting traffic is one thing and selling products from your blog is another. To make the most of your blog traffic, you need to turn it into subscribers and build an email list. With an email list you can build relationships with your subscribers over months, and even years and decades! On a blog, visitors will likely only be there for a few minutes!

So if you build an email list, you can make much faster progress in making your blogging profitable than without one.

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

Plant a Chinese bamboo sprout in the ground and you will see nothing for four years, sometimes longer. You water and fertilise, water and fertilise, but nothing. If you didn’t know about the plant, you would presume it was dead, and throw it away. But approximately after 5 years of gestation something remarkable happens. In a six-week period the Chinese bamboo tree grows to a staggering ninety feet tall – that’s right, ninety feet tall!

I like this analogy for blogging. It’s a similar process where nothing happens for a long time. You need to put in the work of creating content, sharing your content. Keep creating and sharing, learning and linking. If you look for results too early, you’ll surely quit, since there’s nothing to see.

But if you do a little each day, build an email list and use recurring income products, suddenly things will start to happen all by themselves. Without lifting a finger, you’ll see people visiting your site, opting into your email list and purchasing your products. It’s like a magic money tree which needs years of love and attention first, before it bears the fruit!

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – Summary

How long does it take to make money blogging? So to sum up, it can take months or years to make blogging. You can even blog and never make any money. You need to keep going, build an email list, and choose the right products for your audience. To make your blog work harder for you, you need to take the right steps:

Build an email list and learn how to build a relationship with your subscribers – offering them products and value in your emails
Target keywords in your blog titles which are relevant to your products and which give you a change of getting free traffic
Use products which pay more, ideally choose high ticket recurring income digital products, if possible in your niche.
Share your content and make it easy for your visitors to share, see create free website and make money for more on getting traffic.

Of course there are much faster ways to generate an income from the internet. If you’re not ready to spend months or years, you can use paid marketing strategies, social media marketing strategies and a whole host of others. For training and resources access the Mentors All In Program here.