Hey, I’m Michael Culp, a business master’s student, and today, I’m going to answer the question: how long does it take to make $500 per month blogging?
According to Optin Monster, marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to have a positive ROI on their efforts. So, if you are considering starting a blog, congratulations, you have a path with great opportunities ahead of you.
When you start a brand new blog, it’s realistic to start making $500 dollars between months 6 and 12. If you want to learn more, in this article, we are going to answer the following questions:
- How to make money blogging?
- How long does it take to make money from a blog?
- Is blogging still profitable?
- FAQs
If you want to earn money blogging, Keep reading!
How to make money blogging?
First of all, if you still don’t have a blog, make sure to check out this guide on how to start a blog.
When it comes to making money blogging, there are 6 main ways: selling products or services, coaching or consulting, affiliate marketing, advertising, selling courses or ebooks, and selling membership subscriptions. I’ll explain each form of monetization in the subsections below.
The best monetization strategy comes down to your personal goals and to how many pages views you get per month. If you have small audiences, some forms of monetization will be better than others, and depending on the degree of passivity you aim to achieve, some forms of monetization will also be better than others.
1 – Selling Products or Services
If you already have a product or service that you sell, it’s a great idea to start a blog to drive traffic to it and increase your sales. You can sell your products or services directly into your blog, or you can use a dedicated eCommerce platform such as Shopify or Wix.
Related: is ecommerce a scam?
2 – Coaching or Consulting
Coaching and consulting are great ways to start the monetization of your blog. Coaching and consulting allow you to charge a higher price, and because of that, it will not be necessary to have a lot of page views.
You don’t necessarily need a blog to sell consulting services, but consulting is a great way to start the monetization of your blog as soon as possible. You don’t need to worry if you don’t have many skills before getting started. Your blog itself will help you learn what you need to learn.
If you don’t have much experience, you can easily charge $1,000 per client, and if you’re more experienced you can charge $5,000 or more.
3 – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way in which you can monetize the content you publish, without having to provide any kind of services. If you want to do affiliate marketing, you need to build a content strategy that targets keywords that have a transactional intent behind them.
If you have a brand new website and want to make money as soon as possible, you need to target keywords that aren’t too competitive and that have a buyer intent behind them.
Buyer intent keywords are keywords that involve the best products in some category, single product reviews, and product comparisons. Then you need to publish the content targeting these keywords, join affiliate programs and add your affiliate links inside the content. There are great affiliate programs with a lot of products that you can choose from, such as Amazon Associates, ShareASale, Rakuten, and a lot of others.
Think of a blog as a mediator between a Google search and an actual purchase.
4 – Advertising
Advertising is a very passive form to monetize your blog. The disadvantage is that it makes way less money per visitor when compared to the other forms of monetization. With ads, you can expect to make something around $20 dollars per thousand visits.
If you want to monetize with ads, it will also dictate your content strategy. With ad revenue, you don’t need to worry about the intent behind a query. You just need to focus on writing keywords that have a high volume. It’s not a problem if it’s a very broad keyword.
Some ad networks will require that you have at least 30,000 page views a month before you can join. But Ezoic allows you to join their platform basically with any number of page views.
Placing ads is a great way to make money from people who visit your site but aren’t looking to buy anything. Even if your main form of monetization is affiliate marketing, you’ll need to write about informational keywords to build links and build topical authority. So, there’s no disadvantage to adding ads as the second form of monetization.
5 – Courses or Ebooks
Selling your own online course can be the most lucrative way to monetize your blog. It’s not as passive as affiliate marketing and advertising, but the money-making potential is huge. The upside is that you can make big money, but the downside is that it will require more time and effort on your part.
You’ll need to start developing more skills other than SEO. It will be necessary that you learn how to sell directly, and for that, you’re going to need to have a sales funnel and an email list.
To build your email list, the first step is to develop a lead magnet. A lead magnet is known as an ethical bribe, which is a piece of content that you’re going to offer to your audience in exchange for their email contact. Then, you need to build an automated email sequence to persuade your audiences to go to your landing pages and buy your product.
To build landing pages and funnels you’re going to need marketing software. There are great options on the market such as Clickfunnels, Groovefunnels, and Builderall.
Selling your own digital products isn’t a good strategy to start with though. It’s necessary that you have a big audience to sell to, and that will not be the scenario in the beginning. But after you build your audience, you should seriously consider doing it.
6 – Membership Subscriptions
There isn’t much to say here. Membership subscriptions work almost in the same way as online courses. Its sales and marketing strategies will be the same.
The difference comes down to instead of charging a high price upfront, you’ll charge a small price that your audience will pay every month to keep their access to their content. You’ll also need to update and post new content from time to time, to motivate people to keep the subscription. Or you can set up a system that drips the content, instead of giving access to everything upfront.
Membership websites are great if you want to sell a lot of different mini-courses, instead of selling a big course that covers the subject from all possible angles.
Now that you have defined how you’re going to monetize your blog, you need to build a strategy for acquiring traffic.
7 – Acquiring Traffic
The first step in getting your traffic is publishing content. There are basically 2 types of articles that you’re going to write. And this will depend on your monetization strategy.
If you want to monetize with affiliate marketing, you need to look for transactional keywords. Transactional keywords include single product reviews, the best product for a specific activity or situation, and product comparisons.
Here are some examples:
- Best 4-person tents
- Best running shoes for heavy runners
- Nike Air Max Vs Adidas Boost
- Nike Air Max Review
- Adidas Boost Review
When it comes to monetizing with ads and with informational products you need to write informational articles. Usually, these informational articles will be a list of ideas or how-to guides teaching the user how to do something.
To monetize these articles with ads you just need to opt-in to an ad network and you’re done, there’s nothing much you need to do.
Monetizing with informational products will take more effort. You’ll need to use these informational articles to capture the email address of your visitors. To do this you need to build a lead magnet and put calls to action inside your contact, telling people to subscribe to your list. Then, you need to build an automated email sequence to sell your digital product.
How long does it take to make money from a blog?
The timeline of monetizing your blog can be very subjective and it’s related to several factors. The first thing that it will influence is the niche you’ve chosen and the industry you’re in. To make money as fast as possible, you need to look for niches that have a high search volume per month and that do not have high SEO competition.
The next factor comes down to your actions and your efforts. In the paragraphs below are some questions you need to ask yourself, and based on your answers you can have an expectation if it will be possible to make money fast.
How much can you work per day? This question is pretty obvious, the more work you put in, the more results you get out. This is a factor that will also be dictated by your life situation. If you work a 9-5 job, and have a wife and kids, your working capacity will be much less than someone who doesn’t have a family and has the capacity to work 60 hours a week.
The more content you write, the more results you get. It’s plain simple.
Next, you need to ask yourself, how fast can you write 1,000 words? This comes down to how effectively you are at work. If you have the habit of multitasking, scrolling on social media, and doing a hundred other things while working, you’ll not be much effective.
So, try your best to set up a good work environment and focus on just the work you have in front of you. 2 hours of extreme focus can be more productive than 5 hours of defocused work.
The last question is how much money do you have to invest? You don’t need to invest money to start your blog, it’s completely fine to do all the work yourself, but if you invest money, you can get more work done. The more money you invest, the faster your progress will be.
So, I gave you all the factors that will influence the timeline for you to start making money blogging, but I know that you didn’t come to this post to get generic advice. Now, let me show you some specific numbers about what you can expect.
The guys from Income School performed a study to figure out how much money people are making for 10 posts, 50 posts, 100 posts, and 500 posts on their websites. They found that the average is $80 for 10 posts, $427.90 for 50, $2,349.28 for 100 posts, and $3565,24 for 500 posts.
Income school has a course called Project 24, that teaches step-by-step how you can make money blogging. If you want you can check out my Project 24 review.
That being said, the time that will take for you to start making money, depends on the time it will take for you to write a significant amount of articles. And another important factor to take into account is also what is known as the Google sandbox phase.
The Google sandbox phase means that no matter what you do, no matter how much content you publish, and no matter how many links you build, Google will prevent your site from taking off. The Google sandbox phase lasts around 6-8 months, and the only thing you can do about it is to wait.
With this in mind, considering that you performed solid keyword research and published a considerable volume of articles, you have a realistic chance of starting to make money after month 6. Between months 6 and 12, it’s realistic to expect to be making $500 dollars.
Is blogging still profitable?
Most people like to say that blogging is dead, but the answer is that no, blogging isn’t dead. The truth is that blogging will never go away. Blogging became part of our culture, and it’s the way we find information nowadays.
Let’s do a thinking experiment… How many things did you search on the internet in the past week? Whenever we want an answer to something, the first thing we usually do is perform a Google search. When we perform this Google search, we are giving page views to a blog that is making money because of the view and/or if we click on one of the sponsored links.
If you want to know a recipe you look at the internet, if you want to learn more about a product you look for product reviews on the internet, if you are in a new city you search on Google the restaurants near you.
We are constantly searching online nowadays, be it on Social media, Google, Youtube, or any other channel. I think it’s easy to agree that people will continue to use the internet to perform these types of searches.
Blogging is evolving for sure, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t profitable anymore. It just means that you need to evolve with it, you need to keep learning and implementing the best practices. Blogging in 2022 isn’t as easy as blogging in 2000. But there are way more people using the internet in 2022 than in 2000.
To give you proof that blogging is more profitable than ever, let me show you a statistic. According to Hubspot, Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating into 5.6 billion searches per day, which is approximately 2 trillion Global searches per year. This is a really big opportunity to capitalize on.
The advantage of blogging is that your whole business is based on search marketing. Searching marketing is great because you can target keywords that have buyer intent behind them. So you can get in front of people at the right moment when they are ready to buy.
Social media, on the other hand, it’s a form of interruption marketing. This means that people are using social media for fun, and your brand message will interrupt them, which means that if you don’t catch their attention with something very appealing, chances are high that they will ignore you.
FAQs
In this section, I’m going to answer some common questions about how long it takes to build a profitable blog.
How many blog views do you need to make money a month?
The answer will depend on your form of monetization. If you hit the nail on the head when it comes to monetizing and promoting high-paying affiliate offers, it’s possible to make 4 to 5 figures with less than 10,000 page views. But that isn’t the case for most bloggers.
The most common scenario is monetizing a blog with advertising and Amazon Associates. So, I’ll take this into account to answer the rest of the question.
With these 2 forms of monetization, you can expect to make $10 per month with 1,000 page views, and $200 to $500 with 10,000 page views. When you hit 100,000 page views you can make $5,000 a month, although it can vary a lot, for way more if you’re doing a good job, or way less if you’re not doing a good job.
How long does it take for a blog to be profitable?
There are a lot of different factors that will influence how fast you’re going to be profitable. These factors come down to the niche you’re in, how much content you are able to publish, and how many links you can build.
Another thing to keep in mind is that no matter your efforts, chances are high that you’re going to be affected by Google’s sandbox phase. This is a phenomenon that affects your rankings for the first 6-8 months. So, no matter how hard you work, almost nothing is going to happen during this period.
After these 6-8 months initial period, you can be profitable, provided that you’re moving at a reasonable pace and the niche you choose isn’t highly competitive.
How much does the average blog make per month?
The truth is that the average blogger doesn’t make any money. But this is because they are focusing on the wrong things. And that’s not your case, as you are reading this article until now.
It’s realistic to say that an average blogger who consumes the right information and is working on the right things makes $500 to $2000 dollars.
What type of blog is most profitable?
The most profitable blogs are the ones that focus on Affiliate Marketing and Informational products.
Affiliate marketing allows you to start making money early on, and you don’t need to have a huge number of page views to start making a good chunk of money.
With info products, you can make more money than affiliate marketing, but it will require that you already have an audience to sell to. So, this is a business model better for those who are more established.
How much does a beginner blog earn?
The most common way is by promoting affiliate products. You can find products that are related to your niche and add affiliate links inside your blog. You can add these links to your informational content, and write specific product reviews to promote these offers.
Beginners can also make money with advertising, but it will require way more page views per month.
Conclusion
Blogging is a great way to start an online business and to make an extra side income. Although it’s not uncommon to make $500 to $2000 your first year, you learned that it’s not always easy and it requires some hard work.
Today, you learned how you can monetize a blog, how long it takes to make money from a blog, and how that blog is more profitable than ever.
