Marcus Cook runs The Success Bug. By finding his niche and building up his archives, he started earning money on just a $250 startup investment.

A common question I get as a blogger is, “Can you actually make money blogging?” I always answer this question with a yes, but I add the caveat that it doesn’t happen overnight. I tell people to look at blogging the same way they should look at investing. You have to give time for your investments to grow before you can reap the rewards.

However, blogging is one of the most ideal side hustles to have as it doesn’t cost much money, it doesn’t take much time, and it’s virtually effortless to assimilate into your lifestyle.

There are many full-time bloggers I know who make a six-figure income from their blog. What’s nice is that they do this while only working on their blog anywhere from 10 to 20 hours a week. As more and more people turn to the internet for product reviews and how-to articles, now is the perfect time to start a profitable blog in any niche.

How to get started blogging

Blogging gets such a bad rap because it takes a while before you see any income. Sure, there are exceptions, but you won’t see many people coming to your site in your first year — expect to make anywhere from $0 to $500 per month in those first 12 months.

This is mainly because your blog revenue depends greatly on your monthly traffic. In your first year, you will have maybe a few hundred to a few thousand monthly visitors. This leads many people to abandon blogging, as many of us are keen on instant gratification.

However, there is no reason to give up on your blog after your first year. All blogs really require is time, as the monetary expense of keeping a blog running is marginal. Your primary expense will be your hosting plan, domain provider, and CMS platform (WordPress, Squarespace, etc). You can find a hosting plan for as low as $10 a month, a domain provider for $10 to $20 a year, and most CMS platforms cost no more than $100 a year.

This means all you need to do is make over $250 in one year to break even. Now, this may or may not happen in your first year. But, if you can tough it out and set zero expectations for your first 12 months, then you will be well-positioned to enjoy the long-term gratification of running a blog.

Monetizing your blog

There are three ways to monetize your blog. You can either use display advertising, affiliate marketing, or sell a product or service. Most bloggers start with display advertising as it is easy to set up. In your early days, when you can only partner with Google Ad Sense, you will be making anywhere between $0.30 to $2 per thousand views.

As your blog grows in traffic, you will be able to start partnering with premier ad networks like Ezoic, Mediavine, and Ad Thrive. Once partnered with these networks, your revenue per thousand pageviews will go up to anywhere from $7 to $30.

This is why it’s so important to learn SEO, as it will be the backbone of your blog growth. As you increase your visitors, your ad revenue will also increase, not to mention the sales of any affiliate products or services you offer on your website.

How I built my blog to make money

When I started taking my blog, The Success Bug, seriously in May of 2020, I had zero traffic, and my co-founder and I were questioning if blogging was right for us. Luckily, it was around this time that we on-boarded college students looking for blogging experience.

With a whole summer of free writers, we were able to increase our content production massively. By the end of the summer, we were getting around 2,500 visitors a month.

During the summer, we covered everything from entrepreneurship to marketing, business strategy, and personal finance. By the end of the summer, we realized that we were covering too many topics when only one was driving most of our traffic: personal finance. So we decided to stop writing about all other topics and just focus on money.

We kept up an aggressive content strategy, and we were able to bring our traffic from 2,500 visitors in September 2020 to 67,000 in May of 2021. At this point, we were able to partner with Mediavine, a premier display ad network that pays us around $30 per thousand pageviews. We got set up with the platform in June and made $672 that month. In July, we made $1,200, and just this past month, in August, we made $2,000. As our revenue increases, we hire more writers to produce more content. Given our current growth rate, we expect to be making around $5,000 a month just off display ads by year-end.

-Business Insider