A lot of people have made money online. If you freelance, have a YouTube channel, or run a blog, you’re making your money online. But when you’re getting started in your online money making journey, you often can’t help but wonder how long it’s going to take. This is why most people run YouTube or TikTok accounts. Blogging is a more stable and sure way to make money online. But it isn’t the easiest thing. It takes a long time to make money blogging. And your articles are unlikely to be read for a very long time. That being said, people who are smart know that blogging is the foundation of the internet.
The honest answer, it depends
It all depends on how much traffic you drive, and how quickly. It also depends on how well that traffic converts. If you figure out how to sell something fast, you can make money fast. Some people, like me, prefer to just create good content. I’ll promote stuff on this site as the traffic comes. It could take you 6 months to make money blogging; it could also take you 10 years. There’s no real way of knowing until you put in the work.
Medium and Twitter can pay you (almost) now
I don’t know how long it takes to get monetized on Twitter/X. I could check, but I won’t. It’s not a serious way to make money online, at least not yet. If you want to make money quickly from your writing though, combining X and Medium is the way to go. They both pay out monthly, and you’ll get views almost immediately. I don’t recommend these platforms over the long term though.
Having your own site is more stable, but much trickier
Life is full of tradeoffs. If you have your own website, you have a lot of stability in the world of blogging and digital publishing. But it’s a bit harder to get traffic. Prepare to spend a year or two doing nothing but writing and seeing no results for years on end. In the long run, it’s worth it. You can depend on your own website. It’s hard to depend on a platform.
It takes a while to develop a digital product
Not only does it take a while, but you’re probably going to need to have some kind of skill or experience in order to make it good. Digital products are tricky business if you’re going organic. Creating a subpar product can ruin your reputation. Be aware of this when creating digital products. You’re going to want to put in the work.
Only blog for money to be in the top 1%
If you are aiming to make like $60,000 per year after taxes from your blog, then you’re good to go. That’s the kind of drive it takes to make it in today’s world of online business. Top 1% is the bare minimum. Entering the top 0.1% is when you get the outsized rewards. In the US that’s when the private jet money starts. In the rest of the world, that’s when you can hope to be a multimillionaire when you’re still young. If you can get your blog income up into the $150,000 to $300,000 range and stay consistent, real wealth is at your fingertips.
Think in terms of years, not months
If you’re blogging for a living, it should generally be for the purpose of entering the ranks of the wealthy across the globe. You’re going to want to be blogging about a real topic that has real value, and attracting a reasonably large audience for it. If you’re blogging for work-life balance, it might not go so well. So, ask yourself what you want your net worth to be 5-10 years from now. How much money do you want to be bringing in as a result of your web business? That should determine how and how much you should be blogging and promoting yourself on social media.
Social media drives traffic the most quickly
If you post to social media, you get immediate traffic. Social media is the best way to get attention and backlinks to your articles. Nothing’s a guarantee though. Write good content and push it to social media. There isn’t much that you can do beyond that. If it gets a lot of attention and makes money fast, you’ll know that you’re good at what you do.
Somewhere around the 200-400 article mark, you should have an idea of how you’re going to monetize
This is all I can tell you as someone who’s actively in the trenches. It takes a ton of writing before you can even think about monetizing. In this blogging game, the top 1% of users are eating up pretty much all of the value. You’re going to need to write a lot before you can even think about monetizing your content. Writing 200 articles could take you as little as 20 days if you push yourself hard. They probably won’t be so good at that speed, but it’s definitely possible. In my experience, it takes about 200 articles for you to get an idea of where you’re going.
Clickbank and Amazon Associates are the fastest affiliate programs
If you have no connections, no traffic, and no friends with businesses, Clickbank and Amazon Associates are the fastest affiliate programs for new bloggers. A lot of the products are hard to recommend. They’re kind of nonsensical, sometimes, especially on the Clickbank side. But your job is to make money, not worry too much about customer satisfaction. Be careful not to ruin your traffic source though.
You can include links to dropshipping stores
It doesn’t really matter what you’re selling. If you want to include the link to your drop shipping store on your blog, you’re going to get money as soon as someone’s interested. This is the fastest way to make money online. Direct eyeballs to products.
It takes most people around two years to earn money from their blog
This is both anecdotal from my experience, and from this survey’s data. The average blogger takes about 22 months to earn a living from their site. In my experience, I “earned” my first dollar after a year of blogging, but the payout system didn’t work. I was with Medium, and they banned me for “using AI”. I hope it will take me less than two years to make my first sale or commission, but who knows? I have to push my articles on social media. For now, all I can do is keep building.
Understand all the different ways of monetizing
There are six ways to make money from your blog, each with some drawbacks. If you understand them fully, you can figure out how to monetize fast.
- Ads
- This is the best way to make your blog a passive source of income. Ads are constant sources of income, and basically indexed to inflation. The only problem with ads is that they aren’t very lucrative. You’re just renting out space on your website. You aren’t making any sales.
- Affiliate marketing
- Affiliate marketing is the best way to make money online. You promote someone’s product for them. Basically, move the eyeballs that are already on your page, to products that are already known to be selling well. This is the easiest way to make money if you understand content creation.
- Physical or digital products
- Selling products is semi-passive. You need to make sure that your products are current. But if you have an interesting and relevant product, your blog can work as a sales engine for it.
- Guest posts
- If you’re getting traffic and attention, other bloggers who are looking to get traffic can pay you to post on your site. This is a win-win. You get content for your site, they get exposure.
- Services
- The most common type of business is a professional services business. If you have a large enough blog, one of your users will be wealthy or motivated enough to buy one of your services.
- Premium/paywalled media
- You need to be creative here, but it’s possible to make money with a paywall or a podcast. The New York Times makes money with its subscription section. Podcasts also pay decent royalties. Premium media is extremely worthwhile if you have the right audience. Generally speaking it’s easier to build a site that sits on the open internet.
The more you work, the sooner you get traffic
This is the simple truth. The process of blogging is different for everyone. A real blog is a very serious endeavor, and can create a lot of economic value. It’s going to take you a ton of work to create a complete website. The more you work, the sooner you make money. There’s nothing stopping you from making money today, even though you shouldn’t expect to.
If you launch on social media and have a well-written article that links back to an Amazon or Clickbank product, you’re going to make money. That’s probably the fastest way to get started. How fast you make money overall depends on you. If you want to make money fast, you need to find a fast way to get social media traffic. That could be short video, but you’re going to have to be creative when linking back to articles. Regardless of how you drive traffic, know that blogging is a long term game. Only get involved if you are willing to apply yourself consistently for a few years. When you see the potential, you’ll realize it’s very much worth it. When it comes to the internet, you’re quite early if you’re reading this. Most people across the world don’t even have a personal computer.
Thanks for paying attention.
