It’s a reasonable thing to ask as bloggers, we want to know how many blog posts we should produce per week for the most optimal result. Optimal meaning we can make a living blogging or at least be on the right track to blogging success. In this article, we’ll get you the answer straight without complications and any vague “it depends”.
The number of articles you should write per week is 12. This will add up to 600 articles in a year’s time. With 600 articles, you should expect about $50k to $100k per year in income. You should aim to have 100k monthly pageviews to your blog to make a living blogging.
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Case study: Financial Samurai
Financial Samurai is a very big personal finance blog and he has been blogging for more than 10 years. He worked on Wallstreet where he was making a base salary of $250k per year and with a bonus of up to $500k per year.
He blogged 3 times a week for 10 years before he quit his job. Granted, he could’ve quit his job earlier if he chose to but seeing that he earned a lot at his former day job, it took more time for his blogging income to replace his day job income.
Here’s what Financial Sumarai said would be possible for 60% of bloggers who are blogging 3 times a week:
- Year #1: $1k — $10k (150 blog posts)
- Year #2: $10k — $30k (300 blog posts)
- Year #3: $30k — $50k (450 blog posts)
- Year #4: $50k — $100k (600 blog posts)
- Year #5: $100k — $250k (750 blog posts)
- Year #6: $150k — $350k (900 blog posts)
- Year #7: $200k — $500k (1050 blog posts)
- Year #8: $300k — $600k (1200 blog posts)
- Year #9: $400k — $800k (1350 blog posts)
- Year #10: $500k — 1M+ (1500 blog posts)
According to FS, If you want to make $50k per year, you’d need 600 blog posts. Let’s say you want to make a living blogging within a year. That translate to 1.64 blog post per day that you’d have to write to reach 600 articles at the end of the year.
It typically takes 6–8 months for Google to rank your article so when you first release your article, it’s likely that the traffic wouldn’t come until months later.
If you can produce 600 articles in a year, you should give it at least 6–8 months more to see how well your articles do and how much you can make.
It’s true that the more articles you write, the more you’ll earn since you’ll gain more pageviews with more articles.
Something Financial Samurai said that really hits home is the fact that he said blogging doesn’t even seem like a job to him since he enjoys writing and writes what he likes.
I find it excruciating if I have to write about something that I’m not interested in. Some articles although do have a lot of search volume may not be the best articles to write about since you may not be interested in writing it and that will translate to a reduced quality of the blog post.
An example is an article I did on how much money MrBeast makes. Writing about celebrities never interests me. I gag at celebrity news. I simply don’t care. I mean why would I? I think it’s ridiculous for people to worship the ground somebody walked on just because they’re a celebrity. So you can imagine the pain I went through to write a blog post on that.
However, you don’t always have to only write articles that you’re interested in. There are articles that are huge moneymakers and aren’t too competitive at the moment. If you find one of those articles, it’s good to take your time to produce them even if you hate the process because those blog posts may earn you lots of money for years to come.
If you really want to make a living blogging, you should give it time. With time your efforts will pay off. It took him several years to make a full-time income blogging. Of course, you can get there faster if you can produce high-quality content faster.
In summary, based on this case study, you should aim to produce at least 12 articles per week to make living blogging in a year’s time. You’d need 600 articles to make $50k per year. You can get there in a year or three.
Case study: Adam Enfroy
Adam Enfroy is currently making $200k per month with his make money and software review blog. He started his blog in 2019 and within 2 years was able to make more than a million from his blog.
He only had 250 articles when he was making a full-time income blogging. That’s not to say that you can make a living blogging with just 250 articles.
He did a lot of backlinks. He had 3000+ backlinks to his site in the first year and was able to increase his DA from 0 to 70 in that year.
He used his job title as leverage to make it happen. He was working as an affiliate manager at a major company at the time and was able to hire writers to help him write all the guest posts he was accepted for about 6 months in.
I personally don’t think it’s likely for anyone else to have 3000 high-quality backlinks in a year’s time without having some huge leverage and some employees under your care. His case is really an anomaly. Nobody else was able to see such fast results in recent years.
A typical scenario in blogging
The most common thing you’ll see in blogging is that, with more high-quality articles, your page views per month should increase. That is true in most cases. However, it does take time for those page views to come in so you’ll have to be patient in the meantime.
Give each article at least 6–8 months time to see its full potential.
How many page views do you need to make a living blogging?
To make a living blogging, you’ll need 100k page views.
Your blogging income can come from Google Adsense, affiliate sales, guest posts, etc.
Google has a convenient Ad revenue calculator you can use to tell you what you should roughly expect from having Google ads on your site given the industry you’re in.
Some industries earn more than others per 1000 ad revenue compared to others. For instance, the finance industry earns more than the art industry in ad revenue.
If you’re only relying on ad revenue alone, you need at least 100k monthly pageviews to make a full-time income blogging.
Avoid content cannibalism
Content cannibalism describes the scenario in which as a blog’s posts increase, so does the similarity between different posts on the blog. Some of your earlier blog posts may already be ranking higher on Google but since you released another similar article, it’s now competing for your own content causing your other articles to drop in ranking thus impression and the number of page views.
To avoid content cannibalism, you should aim to produce content that isn’t too similar to each other so ensure you have a wide variety of keywords you’re targeting.
Final thought
Different industries require different amounts of page views to make a living blogging. It all comes down to how well you can monetize your blog. It’s good to target existing articles on your blog that are doing well and add some affiliate links to your content so you can fully monetize your blog.
To have more winning articles that do well on Google, you’ll have to write more of them.
Unfortunately, having the best article on the topic won’t always help as your low DA score can prevent your article from ranking. It could also be Google’s metric preventing your articles from being seen. Perhaps, Google’s algorithm doesn’t think it’s the best content out there on the issue.
Blogging for a living takes time. You have a lot of stuff to learn. That said, the more high-quality articles you have, the luckier you get.
Good luck!
Very informative keep posting
Thank you! 🙂