When I talk to aspiring bloggers about their goals, I often hear immediate questions about monetization: “Should I use ads or affiliates?” “How do I get sponsorships?” “When can I sell digital products?”I get it. We all want to turn our passion into profit. But here’s the uncomfortable truth I wish someone had told me earlier: **if you’re serious about blogging as a business, your first goal shouldn’t be making money. It should be reaching 100,000 views per month.**I know that sounds backward. Why build traffic before figuring out how to monetize it? Because without traffic, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby that occasionally pays out pocket change.
Why 100K Views Changes EverythingThink of traffic like a retail location. You can have the most beautiful storefront with the best products, but if only twenty people walk past it each day, your business will fail. The same principle applies to blogging.
At 100,000 monthly views, something fundamental shifts:
You have real negotiating power.
Brands actually respond to your emails.
Affiliate programs that seemed out of reach suddenly become accessible. Ad networks that previously ignored you now court your business.
Your conversion rates matter.
With substantial traffic, even a modest 1% conversion rate on a digital product means 1,000 potential customers. At 5,000 monthly views? That same conversion rate gives you just 50 people. The math simply doesn’t work at small scale.
You can actually test and optimize.
Want to know if your audience prefers video content or written tutorials? With 100K views, you’ll get statistically meaningful data within days. At lower traffic levels, you’re essentially guessing in the dark.
You’ve proven product-market fit.
Traffic is validation. It means you’ve figured out what resonates with an audience, how to reach them, and how to keep them coming back. That’s the hard part. Monetization, comparatively, is the easy part.
I’ve watched countless bloggers fall into what I call the monetization trap. They get their first 1,000 views per month and immediately plaster their site with ads, affiliate links, and pop-ups begging people to buy their course.The result? They make maybe fifty dollars per month while simultaneously degrading the user experience that could have helped them grow. They’ve optimized for pennies while sacrificing pounds.
Even worse, they split their focus. Instead of spending 100% of their energy creating amazing content and building traffic, they’re now spending 50% on content and 50% on monetization schemes that barely move the needle. Their growth stalls, and they wonder why blogging “doesn’t work.”## How to Reach 100K ViewsGetting to 100,000 monthly views isn’t easy, but the strategy is straightforward:
Commit to consistency. You need to publish regularly and stick with it for at least 12 to 18 months. Most bloggers quit at month four when they’re still at 2,000 views and feeling discouraged. The winners keep going.
Focus obsessively on quality and value.
Every post should make someone’s day better, solve a real problem, or teach something useful. Mediocre content doesn’t get shared, linked to, or remembered.
Understand search and distribution.
Whether it’s SEO, social media, email, or another channel, you need to master at least one way to reliably get your content in front of new eyeballs. Great content that nobody sees is worthless.
Study your analytics ruthlessly.
What topics drive traffic? What formats perform best? Where do your readers come from? Double down on what works and cut what doesn’t.
Once you hit 100K monthly views, everything changes. You can start monetizing strategically rather than desperately. You can afford to be selective about sponsors and partners. You can test different revenue streams and actually measure what works.
More importantly, you’ve built a real asset. Your blog now has momentum. Even if you reduce your publishing frequency or take a month off, your traffic doesn’t immediately crater because you’ve accumulated enough evergreen content and built enough authority.This is when you can “relax” a little. Not stop working, but shift from pure traffic-building mode to a more balanced approach that includes sustainable monetization.
I’m not saying you should completely ignore monetization until you hit 100K views. If a perfect affiliate partnership falls into your lap at 20K views, take it. If you want to test a small email funnel, go ahead.But understand your priorities. Until you have substantial traffic, your job is to build traffic. Everything else is a distraction.
Get to 100,000 monthly views first. Build the audience. Prove the concept. Establish the asset.Then monetize from a position of strength. That’s when blogging becomes a real business rather than just an expensive hobby.
