If you’re interested in starting a blog, you might be wondering how long it takes to create a blog.
And that’s a good question.
However, the real question is probably how long does it take to create a blog AND make money with it, right?
How Long Does It Take to Create a Blog…Really?
Because if we’re being honest, it only takes a couple of minutes to create a blog. Seriously.
Here are the steps for creating a blog:
- Find a domain name
- Purchase web hosting
- Install WordPress
- Write a post
Done. You’ve created a blog.
That will take you maybe 10 minutes. 30 if you’re struggling to find a domain name.
But that’s probably not what you want.
You want a blog that is going to make money.
In essence, you want a business.
And you should.
You’re going to spend a lot of hours on this thing.
Hours is being generous. More like months and years so you would want to know how long it takes to actually make money with a blog.
Unfortunately, the answer is that it depends but it’s important that I explain why.
How Long Does It Take to Make Money Blogging?
As I said before that’s the important question and I know you didn’t like the original answer so we’re going to dive deeper.
First, we need to ask another question and that is how do you expect to make money with your blog?
This is an important question to ask. In fact, it’s the one we base all of our business philosophy around because it makes a huge difference in how you approach your blog.
Ads
Let’s say that you’ve decided that you’re going to make money with ads. There is nothing wrong with that but you need to understand that things are going to take time because you probably don’t want to even bother with AdSense.
So you’re either going to go for the big ad networks like AdThrive or Mediavine. For AdThrive you need 100,000 pageviews a month and Mediavine you need 50,000.
Those are a lot of pageviews and it’s going to take you time to get that many. It’s also going to depend on your niche.
What if you’re in a small niche and it’s pretty hard to get traffic?
How quickly can you produce content?
Is there a great place to actually promote this content?
How difficult will SEO be?
There are a lot of factors that are going to determine if you can really scale your blog’s traffic quickly enough to get into one of the ad networks in a reasonable time that you’re happy with.
Being ambitious, you might be lucky to get to 50,000 pageviews a month within 6 months and that requires a lot of work.
So we could say that it will take you a minimum of 6 months to make money with your blog if you’re only using ads.
Thankfully, that isn’t the only way.
Offers and Affiliate Marketing
Offers are your own products and services that you sell.
We have a number of offers that we sell across a number of different brands. It’s our #1 way to make money.
Now here’s the thing with offers (and affiliate marketing). The money you make with them is not determined by the amount of people who show up for your blog.
What do I mean?
If one person visits this blog and really wants to learn Adobe Lightroom, then they might go and purchase the Adobe Lightroom course.
So we just needed ONE person to make money and in theory that one person could come on the very first day that the blog is launched.
There is a low chance of that happening but it’s possible.
So how long does it take to make money with offers or affiliate marketing? Possibly just one day.
That’s why we always encourage anyone starting a blog to have a game plan for offers and affiliate marketing.
It’s what we base our whole blogging course around.
What Do You Need to Make Money Blogging?
This is another important question to ask because it’s silly to ask how long it will take if you don’t even know what is needed.
As we talked about in the previous section you know you need a game plan with HOW you’re going to make money with your blog.
But just knowing how you’re going to do it doesn’t mean you know what to do.
The most important thing is that you gotta get good at creating content. I don’t mean quantity. I mean quality.
It’s great if you can do a post a day but it’s not great if those posts are worthless.
Too many bloggers get started with a false belief that they can just start writing and because they spent some time writing then that means they deserve to get traffic.
One important thing to keep in mind is that you don’t deserve to get people to visit you unless you earn it.
And that takes time unless your first post is an absolute banger, but if you’ve never blogged before then what are the odds of that?
You really need to understand your audience and most importantly WRITE WHAT THEY WANT TO READ.
That’s where most people fail.
They write about stuff people aren’t searching for or interested in.
The better you get at writing the content people want and keeping them engaged with it, the better off you’ll be.
Promotion
After you’ve created the content you need to spend the time promoting it.
I won’t go into major details about that in this post because promotion is a book on its own.
However, you need to find the right channels that will work for you.
SEO is an obvious one and after that things become less obvious.
Pinterest works really well for some bloggers but it’s highly dependent on niche.
From there you also have other options such as Quora, Reddit, or YouTube.
Patience Is the Key
Nobody likes to be told to be patient but there is no exact timeline for how long it will take you to create a blog and make money from it.
We put our focus on setting your blog up so you can make money on day 1, but there are too many variables to say it’s going to happen. However, if you don’t set yourself up to make money from the first day you launch, then you’re just delaying your chances.
Why would you want to do that?
Getting a blog set up takes a couple of minutes but being successful with blogging takes months to years.
