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how long does it take to start making money on a blog

How long does it take to start making money on a blog?

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One of the commonest questions new bloggers or would-be bloggers ask is ‘how long does it take to start making money on a blog?’

I get asked this question a lot and I also see such questions a lot online.

But I am always annoyed by most of the responses I read online. See an example below.

Check out another example below.

Anyway, you may be wondering why these responses are annoying. Well, the simple truth is that their claims are not true and can be misleading.

The Truth: How Long It Takes To Start Making Money On A Blog

I do not need a survey to tell you how long it could take to start making money from your blog.

In truth, you can start making money from your blog as early as 1 to 2 months after starting your blog.

With a monetization method like AdSense, you can start making money from a new site. How and why?

AdSense is one of the few ad networks that have no minimum traffic barrier to approve a site for monetization. The AdSense team just wants to make sure your content is good, that you are legit, and ensure your site has a good user experience. How much traffic you get does not count here.

You could follow this simple checklist to get your new (or old) site approved by Google AdSense and start making money now.

But frankly, you can’t be making any decent money on your blog as a beginner, and neither should you expect such.

Nonetheless, you can still make money on your blog within 1 or 2 months.

Making money on a blog is easy but making a living from it is the hard part.

So, the big question is how long does it take to start making a living from Blogging?

How Long Does It Take To Start Making A Living From Blogging?

Of course, there are many variables and factors involved but on average, it takes anywhere from 2 to 5 years to start earning a living from blogging.

Making a living from blogging and making money from blogging are two different things.

As mentioned earlier, it is easy to start making money on your blog but making a living is the difficult thing.

Another important thing to consider is where you live and the value of your local currency.

As you may know, most of your earnings on your blog are likely going to be in USD. The cost of living in your country and the value of your local currency is one determinant of how much is ideal to make a living.

In some countries, a minimum of $1,000 is enough to make a living. In other countries, you need more or even less than $1,000.

The point here is only you can decide how much is ‘making a living’.

Factors That Affect Blog Monetization

In order not to bore you with so much jargon as some would, there are just 2 major factors that determine how much you will or can make from blogging.

1. Monetization method

There are a thousand and one ways to make money from blogging. The ones you settle for have a significant effect on how long it’ll take you to start making money or how much you’ll make.

For example, if you have chosen affiliate marketing (CPL or CPA models), you may start earning more quickly than someone who has chosen display ads. Why? An affiliate marketer could buy traffic to sell affiliate products to earn commission faster.

On the other, earning a living from display ads may take longer because you need a huge number of traffic to start earning a living from display ads. It is very difficult to buy traffic to earn from display ads as you would with affiliate products.

All in all, each monetization has its own specific variables or factors which you should explore.

For display ads, Earnings Per Click, or Earnings Per a thousand impressions are crucial to your earnings. Also, the display ad network you choose is also a major factor. More on that in a minute.

2. Traffic

Traffic is the most influential factor in earning as a blogger or publisher.

Imagine a physical store with no customers visiting it. Or an empty mall. Similarly, a blog or website without traffic cannot be monetized.

In addition, the higher your number of traffic, the higher your chances of earning more money.

It is also important to note that the geo of your traffic matters a lot especially if you monetize with display ads. Typically, traffic from USA would fetch you more money than other goes.

Generally, there are 2 types of getting traffic to a blog:

  1. Organic: All sorts of non-ads sources of getting traffic to your blog including the search engines and Social Media.
  2. Non-organic: All methods of advertizing to get traffic to your blog including Social Media Ads, Google ads etc.

If you have chosen to go the organic route of getting traffic, especially from the Search Engines, I strongly recommend that learn SEO so you can get as much traffic as possible without paying for it over the years.

The following guides should help you with SEO and improve your traffic over time:

Ways To Make Money From A Blog

As mentioned before, there are several ways to make money on your blog. I strongly recommend that you read my ultimate 19 unique ways of monetizing a Blog.

In that guide, you have everything you need to know about blog monetization.

But you should know that Affiliate marketing and display ads are the most common ways of making money from a blog.

If you have chosen display ads, start with AdSense and then go for Ezoic. Why?

Adsense takes 32% of your earnings, hence why they pay so little, compared to Ezoic which takes just 10%. So, I advise new bloggers to join Ezoic and make it the primary source of earnings while keeping their AdSense. Here is why.

The following guide should help you with Ezoic:

Final Thought

To reiterate, you can start making money on your blog as early as 2 to 3 months after starting but the earnings would be too small.

Rather, one should focus on making a living from blogging. On average, it takes minimum of about 2 to 5 years of hard and smart work to start earning a living from blogging.

If you ever thought blogging is a quick way to make money with less hard work, sorry, you are wrong. With that mindset, you’ll feel frustrated when results are not going your way yet, and easily give up.

One thing that can help is choosing a niche you’re passionate about, not just niches that can fetch more money.

Finally, remember that blogging is a real-life business and not just a hobby. To grow, you must invest your time and money in order to move faster.

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