I’ve been seeing a lot of posts and books about making money blogging that tout the idea that your blog can become some kind of money making machine in the first month of its life. Or that you can take your failing blog from 0 to hero in a month. Well, I’m going to tell you the truth. The chances of your blog making you a penny in the first thirty days are practically nil. Even in the first three months of your blog life, you’ll be lucky to be making anything.
I know that sounds super disheartening for a lot of people, but unfortunately, it’s the truth. Blogging takes a lot of hard work, and if it’s your first blog then there’s an awful lot you’ll need to learn before it’s going to start earning you any kind of income.
So what’s the deal? Why can’t you make money in your first month of blogging?
Search Engines
As a blogger you rely to a degree on organic traffic from search engines. You spend hours carefully selecting keywords and writing posts around them only to find that you’re not appearing on the first few pages of search results and your posts aren’t getting seen. In some cases, you won’t be appearing at all in the search results because Google hasn’t gotten around to indexing your site yet.
There are things you can do to help speed up the indexing process, but even using those techniques you’re still going to be waiting a while before google starts giving your blog the attention you want it to.
Aside from being indexed, you’re then still going to need to be putting in some hard work with additional posts to help boost up your post’s positions in search results.
Social Media
Seeing as you’re not going to be able to rely too heavily on search results in the first few months that means you’ll need to turn to social media in the hopes of growing your audience. If you’ve already got a juicy social media following then you’re a step ahead of the game. For the rest of you that are launching your social media accounts in tandem with your blogs, well, chances are you’re going to be spending those first few months trying to gain a following.
In other words your main two forms of promotion for your blog are in their baby phases and you’re not going to be getting all that much in the way of views from either of them.
BTW, Pinterest is a great place to start and often you’ll get more out of focusing on Pinterest than you will other social media platforms.
Adsense Approval
There are a tonne of different ways to earn money, but one of the first options bloggers tend to go for is google Adsense. But, what a lot of new bloggers don’t realise is it’s not as simple as just signing up and you’re ready to go. There is actually an approval process that you need to go through before you can start using Adsense. Part of this process relies on you having a decent amount of high quality informative posts AND a good amount of organic traffic. In the first month or two of your blog’s life chances are you won’t get approval for your blog to display any ads.
Affiliate Links
Affiliate links is another way for bloggers to earn money, and for some affiliate links you don’t need to go through approval or anything tricky like that. The issue is, if you aren’t getting views there’s no readers to click on those links. Again, this probably isn’t going to be very profitable in the first few months, or until you start getting a decent amount of traffic.
Posts
Chances are when you start blogging you’re not going to have that many posts on your blog. Aside from the fact you’re waiting for search engines to index you so you can get those all important visitors, you don’t have a great deal of content to attract people to your blog in the first place.
It’s also going to be difficult to keep people on your blog for long. There’s not enough content for them to be reading.
The Learning Curve
There is a huge learning curve when it comes to blogging. Most of the people making these claims probably started blogs back in the day when the world and his wife didn’t have a blog. Now, the market is incredibly oversaturated with blogs so to stand out you actually need to spend time learning things like SEO, marketing, how to identify your target audience, how to identify keywords, learning how to be a good writer, and so much more.
The chances of getting to grips with everything you need to know in the first month or two is slim. Chances are you’ll spend those first few months learning the ropes.
Related Reads
- 33+ Best Blogging Tools You Need To Grow Your Blog
- How To Write An Amazing About Page For Your Blog
- Unleash Your Creativity: Stop Writing Generic Blog Posts
What Did I Forget?
There are probably a tonne more reasons why the odds of your blog making money within the first few months is a serious long shot, so what did I miss?
Don’t get me wrong guys, I’d love to say it’s totally true that you can make money within the first month of blogging, but I’ve never seen any evidence to show that to be true, while I’ve seen plenty of evidence showing it’s not.
