How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging? [One Year Or Less]

By Jessie Festa. This post on making money blogging contains affiliate links to trusted partners I think you’ll love!

How long does it take to make money blogging?

If you’re focused and determined, you can monetize your blog in one year or less.

That being said, it isn’t as simple as writing more content or taking better photographs.

So what does it take to become a professional blogger?

Keep reading to hear powerful advice from 20 creators living full-time off their websites. Below, they share the strategies that truly helped them turn their blogs into full-time businesses – so that you can do it too!

Psst, don’t forget to pin this post for later!

Start Making Money From Your Blog Faster

Want to grow your blogging income quicker? Make sure to grab access to my free Travel Blogger Resource Library.

It contains 45+ printables, video tutorials, mini masterclasses, and implementation workbooks to help you turn your blog into a profitable business sooner rather than later.

Bonus: You’ll also be added to my email list where I share blogging strategies, opportunities for bloggers, free webinars, and more!

How Long Does It Take Make Money Blogging?

If you’ve been wondering “how long does it take for a blog to make money?”, I have good news!

You can absolutely start making money through your blog within a year, as long as you have a strategy in place.

Consider the end goal with your blog, and then work backward to pinpoint what steps you need to take to get there.

From there, create a schedule to make that happen, including monthly check-ins with yourself to make sure you’re on track for success.

How Much Time Does A Blog Take?

You can put as little or as much time into your blog as you’d like, though realize the more focused time and energy you put into your blogging business, the faster you’ll likely become profitable.

Personally, I work full-time on my blog — as in, about 40 hours per week.

How To Start A Blog And Make Money – Essential Steps

If you want to make money blogging, there are a few important things you need to do:

Choose a good host. If you’re going to spend money on one thing, make it your host. If you’re on a budget, SiteGround and Bluehost are popular options. Personally, I use a premium host called Flywheel.

Choose a theme that offers support. I recommend perusing a marketplace like Envato Marketplace and paying for your theme, as free themes often don’t come with customer service.

Connect your site with Google Analytics & Google Search Console. This way you can monitor your blog stats.

Have a plan for keeping your site speedy and healthy. Slow site speed can hurt your blog growth and profitability, so using a tool like WP Rocket can help you keep things running fast and efficiently — which your blog visitors will appreciate.

Grab your social media handles. This includes for channels you’re not sure you’ll actively post on. This way nobody else can take them!

Sign up for email marketing software. Mailerlite allows you to get started building your email list for free. Alternatively, you can try a month of ConvertKit, a robust email marketing platform made specifically for bloggers and creators, for free.

Pinpoint a traffic-generating strategy. Along with using a tool like Keysearch to help your travel blog post ideas rank in Google, Pinterest can drive major traffic to your website — and it doesn’t need to be time-consuming either.

Here is a quick tutorial showing how I use Keysearch to find keywords I can actually rank in Google for. You can click here and use code “jessieonajourney30” for 30% off!

Personally, I love Tailwind for pre-scheduling pins at the best times. Plus, the platform has numerous features, like Looping and Tribes, to help get your pins seen. Note: My referral link gets you $30 off Tailwind!

I recommend also checking out this guide to growing a blogging business as well as my favorite WordPress plugins and tools.

Create a content plan. I recommend creating a blog content calendar and filling it with blog post topics that will excite your audience. This strategy on how to plan a year of content in 1 week can help you save time, too.

Speaking of saving time, one of the fastest ways to come up with these is to use a tool like Jasper AI, which utilizes artificial intelligence to help you quickly and easily come up with topic ideas, create article outlines, and even draft content. You can click here for a free trial of Jasper.

Update posts for SEO. Along with creating new SEO-friendly content, you should revamp already-published posts. This is an important part of any blogging schedule. To do this, you can use data from Google Search Console, or you can have a tool like Surfer SEO research for you.

Simply pop a blog post link into the tool, and it will tell you how to score quick wins and find missed SEO opportunities. It’s truly like hiring an SEO expert to look over your content and tell you exactly what looks good and what you should change to rank higher in search results and grow your organic traffic.

Here is a quick tutorial of the tool:

How Does A Blog Make Money?

If you’re curious how to make a profitable blog, I share a step-by-step strategy for becoming a full-time blogger in this video — including my favorite blog monetization strategies:

Prefer audio learning?

I also have a podcast for bloggers that teaches all kinds of growth and monetization strategies as well as a free workshop on how to make money as a travel blogger that teaches 10 powerful tactics.

Learn, and then continue reading the blogging tips below.

20 Tips For Taking Your Blog Full-Time In One Year

The answer to “how quickly can you monetize a blog?” truly depends on the effort you put in and the money making strategies you utilize. Follow these tips on how to start a profitable blog from successful bloggers to set yourself up for success!

1.  Grow a well-nurtured email list  

Email marketing for bloggers is a topic I’m extremely passionate about, though I’ve noticed it often gets overlooked by those just starting out.

Your email list is comprised of your most dedicated fans; the ones who can’t wait to hear from you, read your content, watch your videos, and more. That’s why it’s also smart to have a lead nurturing funnel set up to welcome new subscribers.

But how do you actually get people onto your list?

By offering value-packed opt-in freebies that help your community solve a problem quickly and give them a taste of your expertise.

Note that it’s first helpful to:

• Have a solid mission statement so you know who you help and how. A template you can use is “I help [group of people] do [how you help].”
• Know what products/services — either your own or those created by affiliate partners — you’ll eventually pitch.

Knowing these two things allows you to create an opt-in freebie that truly serves your audience and attracts the people who would truly benefit from your product.

My free profitable blogging workshop dives deep into this powerful strategy, as does my free travel blogging course.

Moreover, understanding your strengths can really help you take your blog full-time within a year.

If you’re not sure where your skills lay, take my free blogger personality quiz and uncover your travel blogging superpower!

Your results will also share some helpful tips for utilizing your unique talents to grow your blogging business.

-Jessie Festa, Jessie on a Journey

2. Commit to your blog from the start

I’ve been blogging full-time for seven years now and my biggest tip is to commit.

So many people fail because they don’t go all in.

They are hesitating in some way and aren’t giving enough time to their blog.

If you really want to make money from blogging, you’ve got to fully commit, put in the time, and go full speed ahead.

-Kristin Addis, Be My Travel Muse

3. Remember that it’s not about you

4. Pick a niche for your blog and stick to it

5. Focus on evergreen blog content

I’m not saying don’t post on the popular trends, though I recommend putting more effort into the forever posts. You can even create a blog content calendar to stay organized!”

6. Be strategic on every decision

8. Establish a target audience

9. Engage with other bloggers

10. Create a plan that works for you

11. Find power in the word “no”

12. Create a content schedule

13. Outsource mundane tasks

I was very skeptical about being able to take my website to full-time within a single year, but I’m happy to report that nine months into my journey, I’ve done so.

I think my best tip to encourage others to become a full-time blogger in a year is that if you’re short on time like me, you need to be willing to outsource mundane tasks to be successful.

Things such as editing content, posting content, article research, and finding/creating images can all be outsourced to someone for a nominal fee.

While I still focus a lot of my time on deciding what content to write and creating the content itself, I’d much rather put my energy into that because it’s what really moves the needle in my business and has allowed me to create positive momentum for my website moving forward.”

-Ron from Prison Insight

14. Find your niche keywords

So many bloggers focus on metrics like Domain Authority and pageviews, but there’s only one thing that really matters if you want to take your blog full time:

Money.

I learned early on that earning meaningful passive income from a website doesn’t require a huge number of page views.

Instead, the most important aspect to focus on to make a profit from blogging is finding “buying keywords” that are fairly low competition and writing about them well.

Even if they are low volume, very niche keywords — often referred to as “long-tail keywords” as they tend to be three or more words long — can still be worth writing about if you think that you can quickly get to the first page of Google with a readership made of eager buyers just looking for your expertise!”

-Melissa from Travel Car Seat Mom

[socialpug_tweet tweet=”Truth: You don’t need to be everywhere to build a #ProfitableBlog. Instead, focus on your strengths + throw yourself into mastering one strategy at a time. Click here to read all 20 #BloggingTips!” display_tweet=”Truth: You don’t need to be everywhere to build a #ProfitableBlog. Instead, focus on your strengths + throw yourself into mastering one strategy at a time. Click here to read all 20 #BloggingTips!”]

15. Focus on your strengths

Blogging is such an all-encompassing job that you can go crazy making to-do lists and trying to focus on 100 things at once.

But instead of spreading yourself too thin by splitting your time between writing content, producing YouTube videos, mastering Instagram and growing your Facebook, slow down!

Focus on one platform that you love until you have it under control before attempting to do everything.

-Katie & Ben from Two Wandering Soles

16. Attend local expos

-Tina Pik, Hangry By Nature

17. Focus on link-building

Many websites don’t focus on link building enough, even though it’s one of the things which can make or break your success.

A link profile is one of the most important ranking factors for search engines, as a website with more links from high-quality sources is more credible.

Essentially, it says that other websites trust your content; however, it’s very important to avoid black hat tactics such as buying links because search engines can easily penalize you and stop showing your website in search results at all.

So what are the best white hat strategies for link building?

The most popular tactic is guest posting — where you write an article for a high-quality website in exchange for a link to your site.

Another very good strategy is creating infographics.

People like to share them and use them in their own posts. Therefore if you create a great infographic, you can get a ton of backlinks even without your outreach.

Finally, sharing often on social media can be very effective. Many times someone likes your post and uses part of it in their own article with link credit to your site.

Link building is helping us continuously. Our rankings and traffic are steadily increasing and link building is one of the big reasons for that. It’s definitely an important part of our content promotion. In fact, we credit our first guest post on a high domain authority site is one of the factors that kickstarted our success.

-Matěj Halouska, Czech the World

18. Create “Cornerstone Content”

Becoming a full-time blogger in just one year? Is it really possible these days, with such fierce competition and an oversaturated market?

The good news is that, based on my seven years of experience blogging as a business, the answer is absolutely yes.

The “not-so-good” news?

It’s not easy, though it’s easier with some guidance.

My biggest tip for you is to focus on creating “Cornerstone Content” — as in, your best articles; typically in-depth guides full of useful information about a topic you are considered an expert on. Here is an example.

These will be the posts you always refer to from your other content, and that are more likely to be cited by other websites and blogs — and possibly even large online publications — to bring the majority of your traffic.

Personally, I didn’t take my blog very seriously when I first started; however, in 2012, after taking a number of online blogging courses and reading helpful guides, I learned about the importance of using keywords in your content to help it rank.

In just one year I had 950% more users and 820% more sessions compared to the previous year.

While this massive spike in traffic didn’t lead to full-time income right away, it did once I realized I could monetize it through adding affiliate links to popular posts (again, that Cornerstone Content!). So if you want to make a nice blog income after 1 year, definitely focus on cornerstone content sooner than I did!

Just make sure when using affiliate links to always disclose that you have done so to keep an open and honest relationship with your readers.

-Clelia Mattana, Keep Calm And Travel

[socialpug_tweet tweet=”Do you focus on #EvergreenContent in your #BloggingStrategy? Learn why you should here — plus snag 19 other powerful #BloggingTips!” display_tweet=”Do you focus on #EvergreenContent in your #BloggingStrategy? Learn why you should here — plus snag 19 other powerful #BloggingTips!”]

19. Don’t write for social media

Many newbie bloggers have an expectation that one of their posts will go viral on social media, but the chances of that are very slim and even if it happens, it has little long-term effects.

Instead, focus on writing quality evergreen content that people search for and which has the likelihood of serving as a building block for future content discovery on search engines. It should be more about the reader rather than about you, which also means it will be relevant for a larger audience.

Personally, when I visit a destination I’ll usually work on a few types of content:

• Bog posts featuring personal experiences and impressions
• In-depth travel guides
• “Snack-bite” listicles that are easy-reads such as a “top 10 list”

I once spent several months living and traveling in the Hawaiian islands. From this trip, I published multiple blog posts and a series of travel guides. The blog posts were read by hundreds in conjunction with their publishing, but the travel guides are read every month by thousands of readers in a consistent and predictable manner — 30x compared to readers of the “social media-oriented” content!

Pro tip:

When you create your content I recommend writing for people like yourself.

It might sound like a cliche, but don’t try to be who you’re not. As a traveler, I personally like to read in-depth guides that go into great detail.

So as a publisher, I write this exact content, understanding that there are lots of other travelers like me “out there” who will discover, consume and share my content because it is relevant to them.

-Avichai Ben Tzur, X Days In Y

20. Focus on Pinterest

When I discovered Pinterest in January of 2018 I read blogs and signed up to free email courses on how to use it effectively.

Pinterest is a massive search engine. When people are Googling ideas and tips, quite often a Pinterest result will be on the first page.

Pinterest isn’t just about crafts and baking, either. It’s a gold mine for people who want to drive traffic to their blog.

The key to success on Pinterest is to pin engaging images that make people want to save, repin, and click.

I pin about 30 times a day — mostly my own content, but in the beginning you’ll need to pin other people’s pins not only to grow your followers but to keep Pinterest happy.

Each pin I create either goes to a blog post or one of my products.

You can also use Pinterest for affiliate marketing as long as you disclose that the pin is an affiliate pin. It’s important to play by all the rules.

Today, 90% of my traffic comes from Pinterest, which has helped me increase my product and affiliate income as well as my ad earnings!

-Iva Ursano, Amazing Me Movement

Invite: How To Make Money As A Travel Blogger [Free Workshop]

While we’re on the topic of blog monetization, I’d love to invite you to my free workshop: 10 Powerful Ways To Make Money Travel Blogging.

During the 60-minute on-demand workshop, you’ll learn:

• Myths related to monetizing a blog (that may be holding you back!)
• Strategies for creating profitable content (so those blog posts, emails & social shares lead to income!)
• Tips for earning recurring passive revenue as a blogger (so your income grows even when you’re away from your laptop!)
• How to create products that you know your audience will buy (so you don’t waste your time!)
• Advice for growing your affiliate income (with a strategy that truly works!)
• And more!

Plus, your free ticket to this actionable workshop also includes a Q&A, limited-time replay, and special bonuses.

Click here to grab your seat in the free travel blog monetization workshop.

How to Make Money Blogging FAQs

If you’re still wondering, “how long does it take to monetize a blog?”, I hope these questions can help give you some clarity!

Q) How fast can you make money blogging?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer as it depends on your monetization strategy and how much time you’re able to dedicate to your blog. Some blogs are able to make some affiliate income within a few months but setting yourself a goal of a year is more realistic.

Q) How long does it take to make money from a blog?

Again, this will depend on factors like the niche you choose, how you decide to monetize, how you decide to get traffic (niche keywords with SEO is a good place to start), and how much time you dedicate to the blog. If you follow the advice in this post and treat your blog like a business with a steady content creation strategy, you can likely make money within a year.

Q) How do bloggers make money?

Some ways bloggers make money include affiliate marketing, ad networks (like Mediavine), and brand partnerships. Creating digital products or launching experiences like retreats and group tours are other great ways to earn income from your blog.

How long does it take to make money blogging? 

Leave your own tips for taking your blog full-time within a year below!

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