A lot of people think that starting a blog can earn money easily and almost immediately. This is a wrong mindset. Earning money through blogs is not as easy as it seems. A lot of studies, consideration as well as effort is needed before you can successfully make your first buck online. Nowadays, you can find a lot of money-making blogs which actually “teach” you how to make money online. Most people will be disappointed of the results as they are comparing themselves to the money-making blog authors.

First thing first, if your objective for starting a blog is to make money online, it’s gonna be very tough and probably might fail in the end. This is also a very common advice from almost every problogger or bloggers who make money online.

When is the best time to monetize your blog? In my humble opinion, you can start monetizing your blog when:

• Choose a potential niche for your blog.
• Your blog is at least 3 months old.
• Your blog is active and with an average potential traffic.
• Your blog can attract targeted audience for targeted advertising (depends on your blog’s niche).

Some think that to monetize the blog right from the start is the best. The reason: If you wait until you have traffic, you are risking on chasing readers away when you suddenly introduce ads in your blog which there were none before.

But like what I just mentioned, it is better to let your blog be around for some time in the blogosphere (get indexed, traffic) before putting up ads.  You can start by putting just one ad in the beginning and make sure you do not clutter your blog with full of ads as it may stop your potential readers to revisit your blog in the future. Start experimenting more into monetizing your blog (with more than one advertiser) when your blog traffic grows.

However, do not forget, it takes a lot of time and effort to let your blog grows.

Here is a list of useful articles for further reading on monetizing your blog:

• Can you really make money blogging?
• 10 ways to monetize your blog
• How not to monetize your blog