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Disclaimer: there is no real answer to this. Plenty of people have 30K pageviews a month and don’t make a penny. Others make £2000 per month with only 10k views. It depends on how much you push your blog.
My websites don’t typically make anything in their first year, because I like to follow this formula:
- Build traffic to 30k view per month
- Display ads
- Sell products
I do use affiliate marketing, but it’s a bonus, not a strategy. I feel weird writing products with the intention of selling things unless I’m obsessed with that product.
House plant and house rabbits just don’t attract the big ticket items. I would never pick a niche because if its affiliate marketing potential – I pick niches that I know a lot about, and that I enjoy writing about.
How many pageviews can you expect to get from SEO in the first year or so of blogging?
So many factors determine this:
- Your niche
- How good your keyword research was
- How many articles you’ve written
My most successful website is nine months old and gets 30k page views per month. Traffic is doubling week on week. I have another that’s two years old, has 80 articles and is lucky to get 30 views a day because the keyword research was nonexistent.
When can you start monetising your website?
Right from the start if you like.
I personally like to wait until I have consistent traffic.
Not because it slows your website own and massively turns off customers if you’re inexperienced and salesy, although both of those things are true.
It’s actually because monetising your site is a distraction from writing your content.
How much money can you expect to make from 0-1000 views per month?
It really depends.
If you’re a genius with a lot of time and money, and you could potentially sell a £1000 course. Is that likely? No. But it’s possible,
You might make a few quid from affiliate marketing, and the odd penny from ads, but I wouldn’t monetise a site with this little traffic. I also don’t do sponsored posts, but they are an option if you have the time to reach put to companies.
How much money can you expect to make from 1000-5000 views per month?
See above.
It was really exciting for me to reach 100 page views a day in last month (yes, traffic grows that quickly). I’d had days when I’d reach 400 pageviews on one of my other sites, but it was from places like Stumbleupon which was as bad as bot traffic in terms of quality.
Search traffic is different. It’s at the stage now where it’s growing week by week. The temptation now is to monetise, and if you need the money, go for it.
Add affilaite links if appropriate, and maybe see if you could sell an ebook.
I wouldn’t monetise at this stage, but I’d definitely add an email signup form. Like I said in this post, I use my email list to grow a community, but you can try and flog products if you like.
How much money can you expect to make from 5000-30000 views per month?
At the top end of this range, you could be looking at making decent ad revenue from Ezoic or Mediavine. Not a full-time income by any means, but a few hundred pounds.
You’ll also find that your email list is growing, so you can add affiliate links to email, or sell your own products.
Affiliate clicks start to go up at this stage, and conversions if you’ve engineered your posts to drive them. I get a few clicks, but because house plants aren’t exactly big ticket items, I don’t really push affilaite marketing.
How much money can you expect to make from 30000+ views per month?
This is real traffic, and you can now start to experiment with what your audience likes.
Keep an eye on email open rates, ask your email list about the products they wish was out there.
Assuming you have a CPM of £15 (about medium, but it varies massively) you could be making £450 per month.
That isn’t enough to live on, but consider this: it’s now passive income. You’ve done the work, and you can make a consistent income every month. Sure you’ll have to keep an eye on competitors beating you, but this level of traffic means that what you’re doing is working.
If you have 100 articles, and are getting 30,000 pageviews a month, let’s pretend that each article is getting 300 views per month (it doesn’t work like this, but let’s pretend). If you write another 100 articles, you could have 60,000 views, and £900. Again, once the articles are written, the income is passive.
Year 1 – write 100 articles, and make £0
Year 2 – write another 100 articles and make £5400
Year 3 – Do nothing but update your articles if required and make £10,800
And that’s assuming each article is only getting 300 views, On average, I expect my articles to 1000 views per month after a year. So by year 4, I might be looking at making over £15,000.
For not doing anything. You could make another site in that time.
You could make so much more here. There are so many other factors to consider – if you make your own products you could be making millions, but I can’t promise you that.
All I can tell you is the money you can expect to make from ads with a certain number of articles and views. Some niches have a CPM of £30, some £7. Some articles may only ever get 50 views per month, others may get thousands.
Why I don’t expect to make money from a blog within the first year of starting it
Because I don’t monetise it.
In the first year of creating a website, I concentrate exclusively on creating content. When the content is there, traffic can build. I can’t make passive income without traffic.
Writing a hell of a lot of articles isn’t technically passive, and it’s certainly not guaranteed that you’ll make money from ads forever, but no passive income streams are guaranteed.
But speaking as a writer, having an ad network pay me money for writing about stuff I love feels like free money.
How can you increase the traffic to your blog quickly?
If I were in a position to, I would hire a Pinterest VA.
I know I say a lot about how Pinterest isn’t the magic traffic tree everything thinks, and I stand by that. It’s not quick, and it’s not easy. But it can get results if you hire someone to do it for you that know what they’re doing.
But apart from that, write as much content as you can. Honestly, once those first few months have passed, it will start to grow quickly. It took me the longest time to hit 1oo pageviews a day. MONTHS. But then all of a sudden it feels like someone lit the blue touch paper, and you’re off.
Is it worth paying for traffic?
No.
Put out a few ads if you want, but don’t go to some black hat guy and buy traffic.
The only benefit to buying traffic is that you speed up your process a bit. It’s 100% not necessary.
Final thoughts on monetising your blog
Don’t rush. I know it’s hard,
I first started creating websites to make money nearly a decade ago, and it’s taken me this long to find a way to create a website that makes passive income. The thing I need to do to make more money is write.
This just isn’t a quick process any more. But the time will pass anyway. You may as well dedicate a year to blogging for free (or at a slight loss, because of hosting). You never know – by the time those 12 months are up, you may be able to make a few grand in passive income every year at the cost of hosting and occasionally updating your plugins.
