• The quality of your content – Google looks for a number of signals to determine this
• Back links – over time you should find back links to your content are naturally growing. This is a major signal to the search engines and will determine your ranking position on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). 
• How well you promote your content – writing blogs is not the end of your work, you also need to actively promote each piece of content you create
• Time on page – Google watches your visitors and uses this information to see how people respond to your content – do they click away, do they return etc.?
• Your niche and the relative competitiveness of it

The most important part of blogging is your content. Write high quality content and your posts will stand up longer over your competition. If your posts aren’t high quality, fewer people will see them, there will be less people linking to them and Google will likely down-rank them too. The next best thing you can do besides write (consistently) high quality content is blog promotion. 

How Long Does It Take To Grow A Blog?

Of course a single blog post, promoted in the right way can give you a sale, if you get lucky. But if you want to attain a consistent income from blogging, you’ll need more than the odd “one hit wonder”! To make blogging a consistent source of income you’ll need a lot of regular sales and this starts with regular visitors. Unless you’re paying for visits you’ll need a lot of content on your blog to start ranking on the SERPS (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com etc).

Once your blog posts start gaining traction, you should see more traffic, leads and more sales, depending on how you monetise your site. (See how to earn money from a blog.) But this comes after a lot of hard work. Depending on your niche, and how competitive it is, you might need to post regularly for several months or even several years. In a more competitive niche it’s going to take longer. If there’s little competition, your blog can take off much sooner.

But it’s always better to take charge of your blog promotion rather than relying on Google to rank your posts. It may not rank your content at all, and in any case it will usually take some months before you are established. Google have a “sandbox” where they hold newer websites “on hold” before ranking them at all, so it can take a few months of blogging before you get recognised. 

To speed up the process you should be actively promoting your posts as you publish them. Use an SEO plugin, social media share buttons and automated posters to syndicate your blog posts automatically. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for a list of them.

How Long Does It Take To Grow A Blog? Blog Topic

So, if growing a blog to the point of continuous (free) traffic, consistent leads and consistent sales is the objective, you’re going to need to be persistent. There’s 600 million blogs on the internet which means in most subjects you’re going to come up against a lot of competition. The more competitive your topic is, the harder you’re going to need to work, and for longer!

So the choice of your blog topic is an important one. Choose a topic you’re unfamiliar with and remember you’re going to need to research each post you write. Choose a topic you’re not interested in and this will get tiresome pretty quick. So if you’re going to sustain the necessary output needed to succeed with a blog, you need to choose a topic you can write about for a good deal of time. If you don’t think you can continue creating content in a subject area for at least 6 months, and perhaps longer, it’s probably not a good choice.

Choosing a topic close to your heart, or that you’re passionate about is the best advice here. But remember also that if you want to profit from your blogging, you’re going to need to monetise it in some way too. This can be done in any niche, and you can use advertising and affiliate marketing. But certain niches will definitely be more profitable than others.

How Long Does It Take To Grow A Blog? – Email Marketing

If you monetise your blog with affiliate sales, you’re going to want to get an autoresponder service. Build an email list from your blog and it can be much more profitable. Get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing and build an email list of subscribers. With an email list, you can build a longer term relationship with your blog visitors.

By automating the sending of email messages, you can drip feed your subscribers with useful information while selling your affiliate products to them. On a blog, most visitors are gone in minutes, never to return! So the email list is one of the best ways to make the most out of your blog visitors, by offering them something valuable in exchange for their email address.

Small Wins

You can see some traction quite quickly if you’re regularly posting content and sharing it. But on the whole, it will likely take several months or years before you see your regular free visitors growing exponentially. When this happens buy yourself a bottle of champagne! 

But until this happens it can be a slow and daunting battle building and sharing your content over and over again. Make habits out of doing this and over time you will be rewarded for it, provided your content is helpful. You also should identify those keywords in your niche which have the least competition. By targeting low competition keywords which have fewer competing websites, you can more easily pick up rankings for your content.

The key to sticking with it through blogging is by rewarding yourself for the small wins. It doesn’t happen overnight but if you only focus on what you can do each day, in several months you can have a heap of content which is effectively doing the work for you! The small wins might be:

• Creating your first article and publishing it on your blog
• Sharing your content on a social media platform
• Automating the sharing process – use a plugin such as Postplanner.com or Revive Old Posts
• Getting a hit on your website (Use a counter so you can see this)
• Getting a lead onto your email autoresponder
• Making your first sale

Summary

So, how long does it take to grow a blog? The answer to this question will depend on what you ultimately want from your blogging. If you’re after a steady stream of income from blogging, this can take longer than getting a steady stream of visitors. Depending on your niche and how much time you can give to blogging, it can take several months or several years.

There’s no definite answer because everyone has a different set of circumstances to build their blogging time around and not everyone will want to blog about the same things. In a less competitive niche, you can see a lot of traffic within a few weeks, if you’re posting regularly and sharing those posts. In a more competitive area it will definitely take longer.

The best advice I’ve had is to choose a topic I you’re passionate about and which you can consistently blog about for an indefinite period of time. Choose a topic you’re uninterested in and it will become a chore, especially after a few months!

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