I’ve built a bunch of blogs most of which have earned their first $100. In this post, I will show you the progress of some of these sites.
I’ve included a personal WordPress blog, an affiliate marketing blog, and a Medium.com blog.
Short answer: It takes 3-6 months of full-time work to reach your first $100. No results are guaranteed!
Let’s take a closer look!
Site 1
On my affiliate marketing blog, it took 3 months (and about 50-100 blog posts) to earn my first $100.
But this is exceptional. Usually, it takes much longer than that.
Firstly, it’s the 4th blog that I have launched so I knew exactly what I was doing.
Secondly, the blog is an affiliate marketing website with mostly affiliate blog posts (like “Best cottages in Finland”).
Thus, my audience is just a couple of clicks away from making a purchase. That’s why I could earn $100 with only a handful of visitors (about 500 in total).
Typically, you need thousands of visitors to make your first $100. In some niches, it might take even 10,000 visits.
Site 2
I started my blogging career on Medium.com in Dec 2020 with zero experience in writing.
Based on my earnings report, I crossed the first $100 mark around March 2021. That’s about 3 months.
I think I wrote about 3-4 posts per week (about 3-5 hours/day). So that’s about 50 posts.
But this doesn’t give you a realistic picture either.
I wanted to share this because I think Medium is a great place to start blogging. You can earn your first $100 much quicker there thanks to the built-in audience.
But if you start your own blog (such as a WordPress blog), it will take a very long time to build an audience.
But that doesn’t mean you can earn more on Medium. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Medium income is not passive. If you stop writing, you will lose 90-95% of your revenue in a week or two.
But if you start your own blog that ranks on Google, it might bring in passive income for years.
Site 3
On my first “real” blog, it took about 1.5 years before I made my first $100. I wrote about 300 posts and worked 6-8 hours every day.
But this is because I didn’t monetize early and the niche wasn’t that good.
When I monetized after 1.5 years, the first monetized month was instantly $1,500.
Based on the traffic levels, I could’ve expected to make my first $100 about 6 months in after writing about one post every day (~3-5 hours/day).
That’s a realistic expectation.
Make your first $100 after 6 months of writing a lot every day.
Ok, that doesn’t sound too motivating.
But then once you get the ball rolling, you might 10x your income during the next 6 months.