How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging?

Depending on what blogging model you adopt, determines how quickly you start to make money online. Pick the wrong one and it could take you years.

Like me, you probably started a blog thinking that you could make money online in a few short days or even a few short months.

You might have spent the last month creating your blog and still nothing.

Why am I not making any money yet?

And how long does it really take to start making money blogging.

You think, oh, I know … my blog isn’t pretty enough, and that’s why people aren’t visiting, or I don’t have enough pictures, or the one’s that I got just aren’t doing the trick.

You make some changes … you add a nicer looking WordPress theme, (this is the sixth time you changed your theme, by the way), but hey, no worries, another change won’t hurt … and you add some cooler looking pictures.

Yeah, that’s it … that will do the trick … they’ll come for sure now.

But honestly, you just did it, because it was easier than creating more content, (and while you were working on it, you were hoping it was going to make a difference to your business).

Anyway …

You sit back, admire the effort you put into your blog, pat yourself on your back and wait for visitors to come.

Then …. nothing, zip, nada.

Disappointed, you think to yourself, hmmm – what should I do now.

Luckily,  the phone rings – it’s your mom.

So you put your blog in the “too hard to do basket” (at least for now) and tell her all about your new endeavors.

You come back to your blog a day later and see you had 5 visitors to your blog.

You’re excited.

You look at your blogs analytics and discover the five visitors that came to your blog was your mom, aunt and you (you visited three of the five times).

Sad face 🙁

I feel ya.

I’ve been there.

But, iIt does help if you know what to expect.

So in this post I’m gonna tell you exactly how long it can take to make money blogging, but I’m also going to show you two blogging methods that I have found tremendous success with.

But, before I do that, here’s a little bit about myself.

Who am I?

My name is Frank and I earn a full-time income blogging.

I have been making money online as a full-time affiliate marketer over the past 15+ years.

It’s been a minute, but I do remember the day when making money online was just a dream.

At some time point in time I must have entertained the idea long enough for me to purse it, because purse it, I did.

I must admit, it was a tough road because the Internet was still in its infancy back then, so I had to go through a lot of trial and error and testing before I came out the other end.

And the result of all that hard work is, in a word – “freedom“.

I mean imagine waking up in the morning and doing whatever you want to.

You can sleep in if you want to.

You can go on holiday if you want to.

You can go shopping if you want to.

I tend to take of lot of these things for granted these days, because it has become my new norm, but I still think it’s kinda cool and when I do “stop to smell the roses” I do feel grateful that I have these choices.

I have spent a lot of time, money, blood sweat and tears being able to do what I do today, and I hope what I have to share in this blog, helps you in your online journey.

You don’t have to spend anywhere near as much time or money to do what I do, join this blogging program here (its free to get started).

Read more about my crazy story here.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging?

Having the right expectations can help you succeed with blogging.

If you have the wrong expectations then you’ll give up moments before you start making money with your blog.

I remember coaching a person at Wealthy Affiliate, who had created a great fitness blog, with awesome content, but he just wasn’t making any money with it at all.

I help coach all of my referrals.

I must admit, he should have been making money by this stage, but for whatever reason, he wasn’t making any money.

I told him to keep producing content for his blog and he should start seeing some sales very soon.

A month later still nothing … and then a month after that – still nothing.

I kept reassuring him that he should start seeing some sales soon. I was so convinced that I offered to buy his blog off him if he decided to sell it in the future.

Eventually, he decided to purse other endeavors.

I felt disappoint for him, because I knew how much time and effort he had put into his blog.

I could see the potential in his blog, but he just couldn’t wait any longer I guess.

So I bought the blog off him.

A month after I purchased the blog, the first sale came in.

Turns out the keyword phrases he chose for some of his articles were harder to rank, so, took a little longer to rank in the search engines, but when they finally did rank, they brought in traffic and in turn sales.

There’s a lot of different variables to take into consideration when determining how long it takes to make money blogging. The keyword phrases you chose to blog about, the quality of your articles, how many articles your blog has, and how many articles you post a week.

The ranking process takes time as well.

On average you are looking anywhere from 3 months (optimistically)  but more realistically 6 – 12 months.

Some folks might say, that’s too long a time to wait, but when it results in freedom, how long are you willing to wait.

Having said that, if you only have one blog post in 6 months then it’s unlikely you’ll make money.

Conversely, if you have posted 90 easy to rank keyword phrase articles, within that time frame you will be in a better position to make money.

Blogging Is Simple, But Not Easy

Blogging is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to make money online, because it is such a simple business model to implement.

But, SIMPLE is NOT often easy.

Let me explain.

Have You Ever Tried to Lose Weight?

The concept is relatively simple.

Just eat less calories than you need, move more, and you’ll lose weight over time.

Simple? Yes … but not so easy to implement, otherwise we’d all be skinny.

Sometimes, we get side tracked with dieting plans like, low carb diets, or high protein diets, plant based diets, excluding certain foods like tomatoes, mushrooms and beans and the list goes on and on.

But, whatever diet plan you chose, the common thread with them all is to eat less calories than you need and move more.

You can be on a low carb diet, but if you’re eating too many calories then you’ll still put on weight.

Some eating plans might be just what your body needs and you’ll find losing weight so much easier and faster than using other plans.

And if this plan was something you could do on a consistent basis then you will reach your optimal weight in no time.

And the same can be said about making money blogging.

The concept is very simple, but not so easy to implement, especially if you adopt the wrong content marketing strategy.

Like losing weight, there’s just so many different ways to approach blogging.

That’s why you will see people who have been blogging for years only making a small amount of money, while others who started six months ago earning over a $1000 a month.

Some content marketing strategies work faster  than others.

Content Is King

“Content is King” is a term that has been thrown about by many marketers over the years, and to be honest it’s kinda old and boring. But, nevertheless, it’s still relevant now as it has ever been.

The phrase has been used so many times, that has almost become a brand in itself, and has lots its meaning.

Some experts tell you to blog about anything and everything to bring traffic to your blog, but if you already have a blog and have adopted this strategy you will know it doesn’t work very well.

Content is King with the right content marketing strategy.

You have to approach the development of your blog from a holistic point of very, which means you have to understand who your target audience / niche is, what keywords they type into the search engines and how to get your blog to popup in the search engine rankings so they visit your blog.

All of these parts work together to make up your content direction.

And just like the “weight lose” analogy I used earlier, creating content is simple, but often not easy to implement.

Most folks get bogged down with what to blog about, but if you understand who your target audience is, then mapping out your content direction becomes so much easier.

Adopting Strategies That Work

So what strategy works best?

The best strategy that I found works the work, both in the short term and long term is an authority blog.

Even though I show you how I can make money in as little as 8 days using a different strategy here, in my opinion it is best to adopt an authority blogging strategy because search engines love them and they tend to rank for so many keyword phrases over time as your blog ages.

They also tend to weather algorithm changes as well.

When writing this post, this blog was less than six months old… it has a simple layout … a few picture sprinkled about in each post … and within six months it was generating a good part-time income.

The significant being that there are other blogs that are well established in the search engines that are still not earning a part-time income.

So whether your goal is to make $100 a month or even a $20,000 a month it can all be achieved using blogs coupled with the right strategy.

How much money you make and how soon you make it, is up to you, and how much effort you’re willing to put in.

Learn how to start your own blog and make money here.

Here are two strategies that you can use to start making money with your own blog.

Strategy 1 : Authority Blogs

Authority blogs are designed to focus all of it’s content on a niche subject.

In a way you become the go-to-guy or girl for your particular niche.

Identifying your niche can prove to be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome, but once you have then everything else falls into place.

If you want to know how to identify your niche and what you should blog about to make money then read this.

If you want to build an authority website then you will need to create blog posts on a consistent basis.

By consistent I mean daily, however the reality is, if you work a full-time job, then creating a blog post at the end of the day is probably the last thing you want to do.

Therefore the next best thing is to create a blog post once or twice a week.

Just keep in mind that the more content you create, the more visitors you potentially get from the search engines. The more visitors you get, the higher the chances are of you making money.

Blogging on a consistent basis, trains the Google bot to keep coming back to your website more frequently, than if you are posting sporadically.

So the more content you post, the quicker the bot will spider your content and the faster you will get indexed and ranked in Google.

In the past I have had posts on the first page of Google within 5 minutes after I created it, because I posted daily.

So something to keep in mind.

Keyword Research

Focus your first 30 posts on generating buyer keyword traffic to your blog.

Buyer keywords differ from other keywords, primarily because when a searcher types those terms into Google, they are typically ready to make a buying decision, as opposed to being in research mode and searching for more information.

You are more likely to make a sale when a person is at the end of their research phrase, and is just looking for that one last piece of reassurance to know that they are making the right decision.

And this is where a lot of people that start a blog get it wrong and wonder why they aren’t making money – they focus on ranking for the wrong keywords.

I like to call this content ‘pillar content’ because they act as the foundation of your cash machine.

To find buyer keywords you will need a keyword research tool like the one I use here, which will identify which buyer keyword terms are the easiest to rank for in Google.

Once you identify them you simply write content that fulfills the searchers intent, which I show you how to do here.

Some say, all traffic is good, but I would rather make sales with 100 visitors a month, than make no sales but get 1000 visitors a month. So optimizing your content for the right visitor is critical.

Strategy 2: Mini Websites

Keyword research is fundamental here.

(EMD) – exact match domains still work even after Penguin 2.0 which was rolled out 22 May 2013.

Although the ‘weight’ of EMD’s do not hold as much clout as they used to pre-updates, they still hold enough to get some good rankings. Albeit it for a short a time in

some cases.

These websites are nothing more than a handful of landing pages, however with the right on-page and off-page optimization you can rank in the search engines for the keyword extremely quickly.

All you have to do is create a one or two page wordpress blog with the domain as the keyword you want to rank for and then create back-links to get it ranked. Backlinking is a little out dated now, and can even hurt your chances of ranking in the search engines,

Obviously, if your keyword is really long like this: how-long-does-it-take-to-make-money-blogging.com, then this is going to look really suspicious to Google and you are more likely to get deindexed for a domain name like this.

So pick a keyword that has got a reasonable number of searches, anything over 1000 local exact searches a month, with low competition.

Post at least 2000 – 4000 words on the front page, the longer the better because it will rank for multiple keyword phrases and get some back-links from websites with a Trust Flow 10 and greater.

Vary the anchor text 70% general terms like ‘click here’, ‘learn more’, ‘go here’ etc, 30% anchor text and domain name. Just mix these percentages up depending on where you rank.

I have made sales using this technique in as little as two weeks.

See a working example of this here.

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Frank

Entrepreneur, Blogger, Affiliate Marketer and webmaster of Stealth Secrets. I have been earning a full-time living as an affiliate marketer since 2004. Want to do the same? Check out what I recommend.

Latest posts by Frank (see all)

• Let Me Show You How To Start a Blog & Make Money In JUST 5 Days - June 5, 2021
• Super Affiliate Machine: Is it Legit Or A Scam? We Review It - November 4, 2020
• Newbies Business Affiliate Guide - October 17, 2020

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