It had been now about five years of blogging for me and I have learned the final rule of how long it takes to make this business profitable. Let’s look at the fixed cost your blog and SEO team is a fixed cost, along with the money you spend on self-publishing your work into books. Money spent on marketing and book reviews also adds up to the variable cost. It typically takes three years of rigorous blogging for one to evolve into an author and self publish at least half a dozen e-books. It takes at least two years as an author to have enough work that sells and gets you royalty as well. That’s a total of five years. Ideally, by the end of the sixth year into your journey, you would have sold at least rights to four of your books. That alone will get you enough revenue that it will cover all your fixed and variable cost of the last six year and deliver the blog into profitability where you actually make a take-home income.
So the sixth year is critical and if you can add revenue by selling rights of your books, the blog will be profitable and recover all input costs including administration and marketing costs. So you have to be patient for that long to make your venture profitable. Surviving on Book sales, Royalty, Barter or co-promotion will bring revenue and attention to the blog but it will not be enough to cover the fixed costs even.
It is only rights of the books to be made into audiovisual formats that will deliver profitability, although royalty from audiobooks will also add to the overall revenue. I am now entering the 6 th year of my blogging journey and hoping to become finally profitable as a business.
