Are you just starting out as a blogger and considering purchasing a domain name but are unsure whether or not you will ever make money from it? Or you’ve been doing it for a while without getting paid for it?
This guide will help you get a guesstimate of how much longer it would be before you start making a good income from your blog, or at least an amount that justifies spending time on it.
Factors that determine how long it would take for your blog to generate income
Just like any other entrepreneurial venture, success with blogging depends on some factors you control and some you don’t.
Your niche, for example, is under your direct control.
Choosing one only based on the earning potential could be a recipe for failure because you could lose interest or drown in competition. Instead, if you choose a less lucrative niche that you truly enjoy and can write forever about, you could secure a loyal audience base, deliver value, and get paid for it quicker.
Let’s discuss a few other factors and cases:
1. What amount qualifies as real money for you
Your blogging efforts need to be proportional to your expectation. You could be looking for a surplus or passive income in which case $1,000 might look good, and even a solid net income for bloggers from low-income countries.
But if you want to make a full-time income by investing all your time and money into it like a real business, you could target a revenue of $15,000 per month or more.
You need to have a number in mind because without one, you can’t calculate backwards and determine monetization methods, publishing frequency, and other key factors that influence the success of your blog.
2. Niche
All niches need the same effort to start getting results. You need to have helpful content in droves, conversion optimization and SEO in place, etc. So it’s better to pick a niche that makes more money.
But there’s a catch.
Niching down
Increased competition in high-revenue niches prolongs income generation. But niches with low RoI are rarely worth the effort.
What’s the solution?
Sub-niches — branches of niches.
For example, budget travel is a sub-niche of the broader Travel niche.
With so many blogs in the market, even sub-niches are super competitive so you would need to niche down further. Family budget travel, for example, could be a good choice.
While niching down is important, it is important to avoid cutting too deeply. In order to draw visitors, your theme needs to have a sufficient interest in the market. After consistently producing content, you might begin to make money from your blog within eight months if you can strike the right balance between your blog’s competitiveness and revenue potential. YMYL’s market YMYL or Your Money Your Life is a term coined by Google to identify niches that directly impact readers’ financial, physical, or mental health and well-being.
This factor is important for blogs that get a good chunk of traffic from Google Search, which is the majority of them.
To succeed in these niches within an acceptable time-frame, you need to be an expert or should be able to source an expert to write and review content. Without the right credentials, it would take really long to rank on Google because you are yet to build trust with it.
In general, YMYL niches could take up to two years to start generating income.
Country-based niche popularity
Your income per thousand visits could be affected by the different niches that draw visitors from various nations. When compared to other nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia frequently generate traffic with higher incomes. This is because advertisers offer higher prices to these nations because they have a greater tendency to spend. Additionally, due to higher consumerism in these nations, you could find more products to review, giving you more niche options. Dirt bikes for example could get better traction in the US compared to most other countries. Use the free Google Trends tool to analyze the niche popularity in different countries.
Finally, some niches lend themselves freely to varied monetization methods, allowing for faster monetization. Explore various monetization methods before finalizing a niche.
3. Channels for marketing
You need to get a high volume of relevant traffic landing on your blog to make money. The faster you are able to bring in traffic, the quicker your blog starts generating an income.
Your marketing game needs to be top-notch to attract high-volume and high-quality traffic.
Leverage as many marketing channels as you can and link them to each other. You might want to think about getting visitors to sign up for a newsletter if your SEO efforts bring in traffic. If your YouTube channel is successful, get people from there to Pinterest or Instagram. Marketing channels can together drive more traffic than the individual sum.
Furthermore, each channel has a different pace of attracting traffic. SEO, for example, could take months but Google Ads is faster. So you could start getting faster results with paid Ads and maybe even Pinterest while your SEO slowly does its magic.
Using a variety of marketing strategies could significantly accelerate your blog’s revenue generation.
4. Existing industry trust in your personal brand
If you are a known expert in your niche, you could make money from your blog from day one. That’s because you already have a loyal audience base who probably know you from your personal website and they just need a place to checkout and buy stuff from.
But if you have to build a blog and a brand from scratch, it might take much longer. That’s because search engines like Google, which in most cases generate a large majority of blog traffic, prefers brands over blogs. Additionally, it takes time to build a lot of backlinks for new brands with no authority.
5. Publishing frequency, and content quality and relevance
You must look at each blog post as a salesperson. Each of them have the potential to drive relevant traffic that converts on the same article or drives visitors to a landing page where they turn into a paying client. The faster and quicker you put these salespeople to work, the more opportunities you create to bring traffic and make money from it.
But the content velocity should not compromise quality. Provide value and good reading experience to build trust – the secret ingredient that eventually leads to more sales and money.
Top-quality content retains visitors for longer giving Google a strong indication that your website means business and must be ranked higher. It also builds topical authority, further aiding your content to rank faster and higher. And the better you rank, the more relevant traffic you pull, and the more money you make.
6. Monetization methods
There are many ways to monetize a blog even if you don’t want to publish Ads. Some of them pay better than others and some are quite unconventional. For example, you could turn your blog into a portfolio or showcase and get a job or a freelancing contract using it.
You could even sell your blog for a good margin when it starts to take off.
And even if you use traditional methods, you might be able to start making money sooner if you choose the right combination of monetization strategies. 7. Toolkit for blogs Your blogging infrastructure has a direct influence on how fast you make money.
For example, if your web hosting provider does not provide continuous uptime, your visitors would stumble on 5xx server errors. They won’t be able to access your content, so they won’t click on your links and Ads and you don’t make money.
The opportunity cost would increase if these errors were discovered and corrected in time. Switching host could also impact SEO, further delaying making money from blogging.
Your content management system (CMS) also has a strong impact on how quickly your blog starts getting traction. For blogging, you do not need a juggernaut like WordPress that needs a ton of settings even before you create your first blog.
Instead, you need a light CMS to get started and set up required systems. Super, a Notion based website building tool could be the perfect platform for blogging due to its flexibility. It also works with great design, advanced SEO, and pages that load quickly even if you don’t know how to code. You can select a ready-to-use template and get started in no time.