How long does it take to make money online?

The blunt answer is at least a year, sometimes longer.

Yes, I know there are all these challenges out there which imply that you should be able to make money online within a few weeks (30 days is a popular time frame). This isn't really true. Well you might make a few dollars in 30 days, but not much more. It takes a while for websites and blogs to establish themselves before they really show profit.

What usually happens is this:

In great excitement you set up your new blog, convinced you are on the path to riches. You get indexed within a week (sometimes sooner) and start to get a little traffic on long tail keywords. You monitor your stats avidly.

But the money doesn't really gush as hoped and then three weeks later your site disappears from the search results. In a panic you check all your keywords and finally put your entire URL into the engine to see if you are there. Nothing. Oh my god, I've been slapped by Google, the cry goes up. What did I do wrong? Then you check whether you are in Bing and find that Bing hasn't even got round to indexing you in the first place. Google is evil. Bing is evil. You've been scammed. You hang around the Warrior Forum and let off steam with a few rants and notice that everyone else is doing the same. The crowd convinces you it is all impossible, and you give up. Another blog goes to the great internet graveyard.

What you should have been doing is updating your blog daily even while you had disappeared from the SERPs, and carefully building backlinks to it. And also setting up a new site in a new niche. By the time the new site is up and running and going through the Google Dance, the old site will suddenly reappear in the results and begins to get traffic again. You continue to build backlinks and add new material to both sites, and you gradually start to rise in the ranks. Then your sites disappear again. It turns out that the search engines are doing some sort of major update. But you keep going and are now starting your third site in your third niche.

After a full year of this, site number 1 finally starts to get stable and holds a steady position in the search results. Now traffic fluctuates depending on users rather than search engine rankings. You notice dips in traffic on the weekends or at certain times of the year when people stay offline. You are now starting to get hits from a wide variety of keywords. But you are still not number 1 in the results for your main keyword, you seem to have settled at number six. You keep going, slowly adding more content and building more backlinks. And then you get to experience another update in the search results where one or other of your sites disappears for a couple of weeks.

At the end of year 2 you start to see your site rising again, and get closer to the coveted number 1 position. And with the rise in ranks comes a substantial rise in traffic, and a rise in profits. You are at last making decent money online.

Occasionally the process is quicker than this - but more often than not it takes longer, much longer in the case of the competitive niches. Making money online is a marathon not a sprint. Yet people persist in believing that because it's the internet it should be "quick" and "easy". Make money online fast is a popular search term. Actually there is a grain of truth that making money on the internet is quicker than in the offline world. Bricks and mortar businesses usually take five years to show profits. So one year, maybe two years is pretty quick. Of course it's not as quick as making money in 30 days. But you didn't really think you could make big money in 30 days, did you?