Bloggers who consistently provide valuable content that meets readers’ needs can make a living from it.
Bloggers profit through ads and affiliate commissions.
Business owners through leads and sales.
As the owner of a number of monetized websites, I’ve looked at how many articles I needed to have (or should have) before “going live” with a new website 6+ times.
The answer is that you can go live with as few as 3-5 articles on a website, providing a) Those articles are good and high quality, and b) You have an established publishing schedule that you’ve worked out how to fulfill.
“Good, High Quality Articles”
Good, high quality articles are articles that you’re proud of publishing.
It’s really that simple.
If what you are proud of publishing:
- Answers readers’ questions in depth/detail.
- Provides value to readers.
- Convinces readers you actually know what you’re talking about.
For you, that might mean your articles meet a certain required length or number of words, that they are the best you feel you can do (after investing a fair amount of time into research and/or personal experience), that they have custom images or explanatory graphics, or that they thoroughly answer the question posed by the article’s title.
(I can’t tell you how many times I’ve paid a writer for long form content that failed to even answer the article’s title clearly and concisely before going further into the topic.)
Write Articles That are a “Minimum Viable Product”
There is a concept in blogging that you should be aware of if you plan to make any money from a website.
“Minimum viable product” has been used by a number of bloggers to refer to a piece of content (an article) that meets the most basic quality criteria and checks. It’s not a bad article or piece of content in any way, but it’s also not the best that it could be, nor the best that it will become.
This is an extremely important idea to understand.
This IS what you should be publishing.
“A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development.” – Wikipedia, Minimum Viable Product
When you “blog,” you’ll need to decide which production style works for you:
- Perfecting every single piece of content before publishing it.
- Publishing high-quality articles in volume, and then returning to perfect the articles that begin to rank in search engines over time.
Either of the above blogging styles work, but the latter is the preferred method for a monetized site, 9 times out of 10.
Neil Patel does (a) above: He basically publishes articles for free that are so thorough and high quality that he could be selling them as e-books. Almost every time. They’re long, detailed, thorough, have custom graphics, tables of content, original research, and more.
He does a great job of that.
But that’s not the only style of blogging–nor is it the only workable way to blog.
And if you’re new to blogging (like wondering how many articles you should have before starting your blog), the Neil Patel approach is not the best way for you.
Here is exactly why:
In the time it takes you to research, write, and publish 1 “perfect” blog post, you could instead research, write, and publish 5-10 high-quality blog posts.
Okay? And?
That matters because: Every time you write and publish an article, you are placing a bet (or gambling, in the early stages when you haven’t yet mastered keyword research) on the fact that Google and other search engines will find and rank your content high enough in their search results that your articles become profitable to you.
If you’re a business owner, you’d want the recognition and leads that this article might bring to your company.
If you’re a blogger or “niche website” creator/owner, you’d want the advertising revenue and affiliate commissions that this article will make for your website.
High Quality in Quantity, Not Perfection
Every high-quality (not perfect!) article you write is the equivalent of casting another fishing line off of your boat.
You are going to catch more fish with 10 high-quality articles than you are with 1 “perfect” article.
And, you are going to yield an even greater catch after building a fleet of ships, i.e., several large websites that could each be considered respectable, well-established, and trustworthy resources by people within the industry or vertical, as well as members of the public.
What Articles to “Perfect” and When to Do So
As you pump out numerous high-quality articles, you will begin to see over time which of your articles are gaining traction in search engines.
Where exactly will you see this? In Google Search Console, and in Google Analytics, as well as on any page of your website that tracks views and displays articles by most “viral” or popular.
You can then go back and further improve or perfect those specific articles if you’d like to (or if you think doing so would help them rank higher.)
That brings us to the second criteria mentioned above:
“b) That you have an established publishing schedule that you’ve worked out how to fulfill.”
To make a “niche” or content website profitable, you will need HUNDREDS of articles.
Two-hundred “perfect” articles might make you $5,000 a month (real example).
Seven hundred high-quality articles might make you $12,000-$14,000 per month (real example).
The problem with assuming you are going to nail “200 perfect articles,” is that the math involved in this “perfection” requires levels of keyword research that 10 out of 10 new bloggers simply do not have.
Keyword research takes practice and trial and error. Lots of it.
To put it simply, if you’re wondering how many articles you should have on a website before launching it, you (sorry to say) simply do not have the keyword research experience down well enough to hit every article out of the park.
A “perfect” 5,000 word article with custom images, videos, etc., etc., isn’t perfect if it answers a question that no one ever types into Google.
That’s where keyword research comes in.
So, launch your blog when you have at least a small batch of content, say 3-10 articles, and when you have an exact plan on how you’re going to publish every so often.
Publishing twice a week is a great rate, once weekly is also alright. Twice a month might be okay as well.
But if you’re serious about blogging, it’s helpful to know that the best thing you can ever do is PUBLISH MORE CONTENT that is high quality and meets the criteria above.
Don’t obsessively check your traffic stats, don’t pay for another course, and don’t start another website until your first is profitable.
Just write and publish.
Quality articles.
Hundreds of times.
Again and again.
If you did that while learning keyword research better along the way, you would build a blog that generates enough revenue for you to live off of.
Caveats
There are two points worth adding to the above. Neither of them should truly be a problem but both are worth being aware of.
1. Start your website with enough articles written to fill all ‘slots’ on your homepage.
If you’ve chosen a WordPress theme that creates a fancy homepage for you—which most custom WordPress themes will do—you may wish to write enough articles to fill each of the slots on that homepage, merely for the sake of looks. When you launch a website, you will have very, very little organic traffic coming to the site for anywhere from 1-6 months. You can improve that through good content and using social media to drive traffic to the site, but generally, your site will get 1-2 visitors per day for 6 months. Just keep writing and publishing high quality content. If you plan to announce to friends and family or others that your new website just went live, you’ll probably want to have enough content on it to leave the homepage looking complete. You can delete some of the sections provided in the default homepage layout if it helps you. Importantly though, many websites that make a great deal of money don’t look all that good to begin with. Since most traffic arrives to individual articles on the site and come from users on mobile devices, simple WordPress themes are usually the best option. Again, most money making websites look pretty goofy on a desktop display and they don’t need to look perfect to make money. Design should be acceptable but you can waste resources (time and money) on design, that would be better invested in content. More content. More content! Less of everything else.
2. You may want to avoid having 25-40 articles published on the same date, followed by none for a few weeks or months after.
Assuming you want to launch your site in a way that looks professional and presentable (see #1 above, on custom WordPress themes,) you can backdate articles. Simply add up the number of “slots” on the homepage of your chosen theme, and date your articles starting that many days ago. This is usually better than publishing all 25-40 (or so) of the articles needed to fill your homepage slots on a single date, as you won’t be able to keep that publishing volume going forward. And that looks as unprofessional as launching a site with a homepage with unfilled article slots.