How Many Articles Do You Need To Blog Full-Time?

How Many Articles to make a living blogging?

It’s many people’s dream to turn their blog into a full-time career so they can quit their jobs. 

If you can make a living blogging, you can have so much more control of your life. You’ll be location-independent. You can be anywhere in the world because as long as there is an internet connection, you’ll be able to work. Many full-time bloggers work just 10 or fewer hours per week and pull in a comfortable 6-figure. 

The freedom that comes with blogging is tremendous. You can have so much more time for your family and friends and you can do anything else that you desire with the extra time you have. So how do you do it? How many articles do you need to write to make a living with blogging? Let’s find out. 

Read the article on 10 easy ways to drive free traffic to your site. 

Does the number of articles you have on your blog matter?

Yes. You have a lot lower chance of making a living blogging if you only have 10 articles on your blog. Compared to somebody else who has 500 articles or 1000 articles their chance of making a living with blogging is substantially higher. 

Some people will tell you that it doesn’t matter how many articles you have because if your articles are terrible, it won’t bring you any traffic anyway. 

They are right in a way. You must make sure your articles are high-quality. If your articles are high-quality, the number of articles you have do matter. The more high-quality articles you have, the more pageviews you tend to get and the more money you make. 

Check out this article: Safest backlinking strategy all bloggers must use.

Does the quality of your articles matter for blogging? 

Yes. It’s not just the quantity of the articles you have on your blog that matters, the quality also matters as well. Many people will tell you that it’s all about the quality or the quantity when it’s in fact, both! You need to focus on both the quality and the quantity if you want to give yourself a real chance of making a living blogging. 

A high-quality article typically has between 2000–2500+ words. A high-quality article also covers what the title suggests and more while staying on topic. There should be a consistent writing style across your articles. A high-quality article should look clean with subtitles, graphs, and pictures to aid in readability. 

How to find the best article to write for your blog. Click here. 

Can you make a living blogging with less than 100 articles?

You can certainly make a living blogging with less than 100 articles but to many bloggers, that number of articles is too small to make an impact. 100 articles may not get you a full-time income if it’s not monetized enough and/or doesn’t bring in enough traffic to your site. 

If you can monetize your articles well, you may just require less than 100 articles to make a living with blogging. 

50 Ways to make extra money today, read here. 

How do I monetize my blog? 

There are many ways to monetize your blog: affiliate marketing, ads, sponsored posts, selling your own digital or physical products, etc. 

Check out this article: 6 Ways to make consistent income blogging in 2022

How many articles do I need to have on my blog to make a living blogging? 

The more articles you have the more chance you have of making a living blogging. 

Time wasters…
Something a lot of bloggers do is obsessed over writing the perfect article. They’ll spend an entire weekend working on an article that only has 500 words to show. They’ll end up producing only 1 article per week and 50 at the end of the year. 

Low productivity
Look, I’m not judging if you can only produce 50 articles per year because you may have other responsibilities that take precedence but if you want to make a living blogging you need to know that it may take more articles of trials and errors to find which articles are the money makers than the 50 you currently have on your blog. 

More articles, more shots
Some of the articles you write are going to do really well, it’ll rank high on the first page of Google. Other articles you write will do poorly, no one will be reading them and you can hide a body in it because nobody ever checks. 

For most bloggers especially beginner bloggers this will be the reality for your blogs. You’ll produce a lot of articles that get nowhere. This is why you need to have a lot of articles so you have more shots of some of those articles doing well. 

At least 500 high-quality articles
Aim to have 500–1000 high-quality articles on your blog before you can expect to make a living blogging. I know that seems like a large number but I’m not here to paint a rosy picture for you. 

You’ll also need to let those 500 articles sit there for at least 6–8 months since it takes time for Google to recommend the article to those searching for it. 

A study on the number of articles and income
Ricky from Income School did a study on his blogging students and found that those who have 500 or more articles and had given it at least 8 months to rank on Google make roughly $2600 per month if they are underperforming.

(There are other factors that affect income not just the number of articles such as niche, quality, pageviews which tends to go up with the number of articles you have) 

Assume you’ll underperform
I want you to assume that you’ll underperform in your blog because most likely you will underperform. You aren’t a professional blogger yet, you’re a beginner. 

Being conservative with the answer
If I were to tell you that you’ll make a full-time income with blogging with just 100 articles, you may be greatly disappointed when it doesn’t happen. Simply put, I’m being very conservative with my assumption of how many high-quality articles you’ll need to make a living blogging. 500 pieces of articles is a good spot to aim for but you can certainly do it with fewer pieces of articles. 

You can aim for that number 500 but on your way there you may realize that you can make a full-time income blogging with just 200. 

Read: can you make money blogging about anything? 

Why must I give it at least 8 months to rank on Google? 

You need to give each article at least 8 months to rank on Google because it takes time for Google to trust your site and your articles. Something that you just put out won’t be ranked on the first page of Google (unless you’re super lucky or you dominate the niche). 

It typically takes at least 8 months for an article to get to the highest amount of ranking on Google it’ll have so before that time is up, it’s too early to assume whether this article is a money maker or not. 

Once you have given your articles at least 8 months to rank on Google, you’ll be able to tell which articles are doing well and which aren’t. Focus your energy on those articles that do well, refine them, make them better, add some affiliate links, monetize the articles more, etc. 

If you can have a large number of articles that do well and you are actively monetizing the articles, you’ll be able to make a living blogging. 

And of course, the only way to have more of those winning articles is to write more! 

Read 6 ways to make money off a blog. 

Can you make a living blogging in under a year?

You can certainly make a living in under a year with blogging. If you want to make a living with blogging in just a year, you need to put out a lot of content in the beginning so you have time to let it rank on Google to tell you which articles will do well. 

The more high-quality articles you put out, the higher your chance of making a living blogging in under a year. 

Read the 7 most profitable blogging niches. 

How many articles should I put out per week on my blog if I want to make a living in one year? 

I would aim to let all my articles have at least 6 months of time to rank on Google first and seeing that we need at least 500 high-quality articles for us to find the money makers, you’ll need to have 500 articles out before the 6 months mark. 

There are 180 days during those 6 months that you can use to produce 500 articles which comes down to 2.77 articles per day that you need to write or 19.44 articles per week that you need to write.

Don’t be discouraged by such numbers because it may take you fewer articles to get to a full-time income. 500 is a good number to aim for but it’s totally possible that it’ll take just 100 articles for you to find enough winning articles to make a living off your blog. 

Remember, you can always stretch your goals to two years or more if you can’t do it in one year. 

Having something out is better than nothing. If you shoot for the moon you may land amongst the stars. If you can aim high, you may fall high even if you don’t reach your goals. 

Learn how to make money on Medium here. 

How many words should my article have? 

Now let’s talk more numbers. It’s not just the number of articles you have, you need to make sure the quality is good and one aspect that constitutes the quality of your article is the length of your article. 

You should aim to have at least 1000 words per article but the articles that get to rank on the first page of Google typically have between 2000–2500+ words with the average number of words being 2400 ish. 

A short article isn’t able to cover enough information to make it high-quality. Thus, if you want to increase your chance of ranking on the first page of Google, you need to make sure you have long articles.

However, if you have to cover something that is not relevant to the title of the article in order to reach 2400 words, you should just stop there as it may hurt the ranking of your article to write about nonsense and things that aren’t relevant to the topic. 

Learn how to make money with podcasts here. 

How do I write articles faster?

Now that you know you need to aim for 500 articles, you need to get going. How do you write articles faster? The best advice I can give you is not to overthink, just start. Many people overthink the process of writing when all they need to do is to begin. 

I just start writing and get into the flow. I let whatever words I deem fit flow out onto my screen like water. I don’t overthink, I just write. 

Of course, doing the research takes time but the good news is that you can do your research as you write. You don’t have to finish the research phase before you start writing as there are many different sections that can be completed without doing the research for the entire paper first. 

Reframe from editing anything before you are done. If you start rereading and editing your article after every few sentences, you may never finish your article. Instead, don’t do any edits until you completed the entire article. 

You can also outsource some of the articles on Fiverr. 

What is content research in blogging?

You can do content research to find out what articles you should write about. Doing content research can help you identify the gaps in the niche that need an answer but don’t have any. 

You can simply type in the name of the articles you want to write and if you see any forums on the first page of the search result or if you click into the articles and the articles seems to be missing something, it’s a good sign that you should start writing such article. 

It meant that there could be a demand for the article but there isn’t a lot of information done on it. Writing such an article may bring you a lot of traffic to your site which you can use to your advantage. 

You want to find articles to write that may bring you a lot of traffic so you can monetize those articles and make a living with blogging. 

Learn how to make money on Fiverr with these 20 easy gigs here.

Do I need to do content research for every article?

You don’t have to do content research on every article that you’re writing but you can certainly do this more often to make sure you can bring in some traffic for everything that you write. 

Click here: 50 ways to make extra money. 

Final thought

To make a living blogging, you should aim to produce 500 high-quality blog posts and give it at least 8 months to rank on Google before you give up. 

Blogging is a lot of work but it can also be tremendously rewarding. Makingsenseofcents.com makes $100k per month. That’ $1.2M in a year! How many people can say that they make more than a million a year? 

Making money blogging is totally doable. If you can write 500 high-quality blog articles in a niche that has proven success and you give it at least 8 months to rank on Google, you did what 99% of bloggers haven’t been able to do. Many of that 99% of bloggers are able to earn $5000 or $100,000 per month with their 200 articles. 

Nevertheless, 500 articles are what you should aim for. Make sure the quality is good otherwise, it won’t matter how many articles you have. 

Good luck! 

Read: How to make money self-publishing on Amazon KDP.