I have built 3 successful/monetized blogs over the past 2.5 years.
In my experience, it takes about 1,000-2,000 hours before your blog is monetizable and you can potentially earn a full-time income from it.
Make sure to watch my full video about the topic.
Assuming you work 20 hours/week, it takes 1-2 years before you potentially find any success.
In this guide, I teach you why it takes so long to build a successful blog. Also, I’ll share insights to my three sites you’ll surely find useful to get an idea of what it takes.
Why Does It Take Time to Succeed?
The Short Answer
Before search engines show your posts high in search results, you need to build trust. The only way to do this is by writing long and detailed blog posts—which is a time-consuming task.
Roughly speaking, you’ll need to write at least 50-100 blog posts that are at least 2,000 words in length. Before this, Google doesn’t usually treat you as a trustworthy authority in your blog’s niche.
The Long Answer
Blogging has changed.
These days, it’s not a technical showcase to have your own blog. It takes 15 minutes to start a new blogging site with the existing affordable tools.
People won’t visit your blog out of curiosity or for the lack of better resources. Instead, there’s a ton of competition and it’s hard to stand out.
These days, the only way to succeed as a blogger is by solving readers’ problems.
You need to provide detailed answers to questions people ask search engines. And the only way to get visitors to a blog is by having it rank high for relevant search queries.
If you think about search engines, they are products that want to suggest the best possible results for the searchers. To rank #1 on Google, you need to provide the best resource on the internet.
To do this, your articles need to be more detailed (and longer) than any articles in the top 10 results.
For example, one of my best-performing articles is 14,000 words in length and took the better part of a week to write.
It’s also not enough to write every now and then. You need to be consistent within your niche.
If you think about search engines, they want to suggest trustworthy resources. If a random blog has an article about a random topic, there’s no chance to rank high because there’s not enough trust.
To build trust in the eyes of search engines, you need to write a ton of content within your niche. All of these posts need to be those “ultimate guides” that take hours or even days to write.
I’ve actually written a free minicourse about how to start a successful blog. Make sure to check it out as it contains all the information you need to succeed as a blogger in the 2020s.
My Sites and Experience
To get a better idea of what you can expect from your blogging site, I’ll share some valuable insights into my own blogs.
Site 1: codingem.com
My main site, codingem.com is in the tech/coding niche.
This is the site I’ve spent the most time on. I was a software developer so it was a no-brainer to start a coding blog (even though coding is a really bad niche when it comes to monetization).
Nonetheless, before I hit my first $10,000 per month, it took:
- 14 months of working 40 hours/week.
- ~300 blog posts.
Because this was my first site, it took 2,000+ hours to make it really work.
Here’s the growth of the site.
Last year, one of my articles became really popular (but has died down since) and I almost hit 1,000,000 pageviews (750k+ sessions) in December.
Site 2: bloggersgoto.com
Bloggersgoto.com—this very site you’re reading right now is my project where I teach people how to succeed as a blogger.
The site earns about $1,000/month through affiliate marketing. I’ve only spent 3 months on this site. To get here, I’ve:
- Worked 40 hours/week for 3 months.
- Written about 60 blog posts.
Here’s the growth curve for my 2nd site. I started truly contributing to the site on Nov 2022, and it started to grow nicely ever since.
However, some well-performing articles are about topics that are trending right now. Thus, there’s less competition and it’s easier to get more views.
But on the downside, the trends might die down and I might lose 70% of the traffic—not a great strategy if I only had this site.
Site 3: parhaatmokit.fi
I run this site with my friend. It’s in the accommodation niche in Finland—a very niche site and only available in the Finnish language.
Before we hit the first ~$1,000 month, we wrote:
- 300 hours in total (about 10 hours a week for 6-7 months)
- ~100 blog posts
Here’s what the growth looks like:
Wrap Up
I hope I was able to give you some idea of how long it takes to build successful blogs these days.
To put it short, a blog is a real business. You need to spend hundreds or even thousands of hours on it before you can monetize.
No matter what blog posts you write, make sure to provide value. Solve the searchers’ problems in the best possible way. Write in-depth guides that are better than any one of your competitor’s articles.
By the way, make sure to check How Long Does It Take Before a Blog Post Ranks.
Thanks for reading! Happy writing!