How long does it take to make money blogging? According to recent research it can take around 20 months for a blog to start making money, on average. But there’s lot of factors at play with blogging. How well you do will depend on the niche you choose, how often and how well you write, your SEO (search engine optimisation) and the relative competition. In a very competitive niche, you can expect it to take much longer before you get traction. Less competitive niches may even be hard to monetise, too.
Another consideration is your monetisation methods. Those who earn more from a blog typically have more revenue streams.
How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – Hofstadter’s Law
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. Hofstadter’s Law is an adage coined by Douglas Hofstadter to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity.
Blogging definitely fits with this adage and it’s definitely not a get rich quick scheme. So if you think you can write a few blog posts and suddenly have a heap of traffic you’re definitely very much mistaken. Blogging is a discipline which only pays off months (perhaps years) down the line.
So if you’re determined to build a blog which makes money, it’s well worth choosing a topic you are passionate about. Google can take months before it determines whether or not to rank a blog on the first page of Google. Before this happens, your only traffic is going to come from your own promotional efforts.
So if you’re blogging only for the outcome, chances are strong that you’ll give up before you make a dime! If, on the other hand you are passionate about blogging, and love your topic, you’re in with a much better chance simply because you’re better able to sustain the necessary effort to make it work over the longer term.
How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – A Valuable Lesson
I started a blog several years ago about a topic I knew nothing of, not cared about! The topic I had chosen was only because I thought I could easily rank a website on it and get free traffic from Google. I failed to look for monetisation methods or the sustainability of my interest! After 6 months of writing, I finally gave up! Writing was labour intensive, since I didn’t know my topic. I had to research each blog post. So it was much more difficult and much less enjoyable than a topic I knew!
My site did reach the top of Google for its main keywords. However, it was a difficult topic to monetise and another blog soon took the top place. As my listing fell off Google, I realised I had made a mistake in choosing a topic I didn’t care about. The blog which replaced mine was full of informative videos from someone who clearly had a greater vested interest in the topic.
So beware of the “easy” niches which are easy to rank for. They also may be less easy to monetise than others. Choose a topic you love and enjoy the process. You’ll last much longer and bring more value to the table.
How Long Till A Ranking?
There’s a lot to consider before you start out blogging if your intention is to earn from it. Your topic is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. Without a care for monetisation, what topic would you blog about, just for fun? This can give you an idea about where your interests lie, and what you’re most passionate about. But you also need to tie this interest in with a monetisation strategy for your blog to become financially profitable.
For a website to start ranking on Google, it will usually have been published for several months. Before this, new websites typically are “sandboxed”. The Google “sandbox” is used to place websites on the sideline while they are assessed. As you grow the volume of your content, Google will recognise your blog as worthwhile (or not) and give you a ranking accordingly. But this could be months down the line.
So before you see the results of your efforts, you may need to have put a lot of work into blogging beforehand. If you’re blogging in a difficult niche, which is hard to sustain, you’re very likely to burn out and quit.
Summary
It can take several months or years before a blog will make money. There’s many variables which will determine how well your blog does and over what timescale. Here’s just a few of them:
- The niche/topic you choose to blog in and the relative competition on the search engines (e.g. Google)
- The age of your blog – older blogs tend to do better for traffic
- Your link profile – how many other websites link to you, which websites link to you and their authority/standing with Google
- The rate at which you create content and the quality of your content
- Your blogging style and how Google perceives your writing/content (use an SEO plugin to help and write for the end users, not the bots).
- How people interact with your content – is a big signal which shows Google how people perceive your content
- Your social media presence and other social signals such as social shares, backlinks, likes etc
- Your monetisation methods and how this relates to your content (popular monetisation methods are affiliate marketing products and advert placements)
You can speed up your timeline to make money blogging through the use of email marketing and also through using paid marketing strategies. See PPC vs organic marketing.
