How Much Content Do You Need to Start a Blog? (Don’t Do This!)

Last Updated on July 31, 2023 by Jordan Alexo

So, you want to build a blog but aren’t sure how much content you need before launching? Well, most beginners struggle with the same problem. At the same time, they want to impress their readers rather than spend months creating content before going live.

In this guide, you’ll discover several ways to launch your blog and what to avoid during the process so you don’t crash and burn.

Also, I’ll share with you my 5-step content plan to help you create and promote your blog. You got everything here to guarantee your blog’s success!

So let’s get started.

Key Takeaways

• There are three blog launch strategies, each depending on the time and resources available.
• The Easy Blog Launch only requires one great blog post, while the Normal Blog Launch needs 5-10 posts covering different topics in a specific niche, and the Hardcore Blog Launch needs 20-30 articles optimized for specific keywords in the same niche.
• Avoid perfectionism when creating content and aim for high-quality content that solves readers’ problems.
• Optimizing content is essential to receiving traffic from search engines, and bloggers should include target keywords in titles, URLs, meta descriptions, headings, and content.
• Consistency is crucial for maintaining a blog’s growth and success, and bloggers should keep publishing fresh content to keep Google’s attention.

3 Strategies To Launch Your Blog

Before diving deep, let’s discuss the different ways to launch your blog. In one way or another, it all depends on your goal and the time you have on your hands. But here are three methods:

1) Easy Blog Launch

So you don’t have much time? Perhaps you have a job and family and are short on time. Then this is the fastest and simplest way to get your blog out there.

You only need one great blog post. For this, analyze your competition for your main keyword. Let’s imagine “Best SEO Tricks” is your keyword.

Look at the top 10 search results and create a more extensive post with more value than they have. Then, with an app like “Detailed SEO Extension,” which you can install on your Google Chrome browser.

You can enter each web page ranking for your search term. And analyze the content, headers, titles, and so on.

Afterward, grab all that information and write your blog post. The idea is to publish more detailed and valuable content than the competition.

However, don’t think having one blog post will be enough. In fact, the Google search engine only starts paying attention to your site after about thirty or more posts.

Anyway, this gets you focused on creating something rather than sitting all day underneath a palm dry drinking mojitos.

2) Normal Blog Launch

Well, this is the standard approach most people should take when launching a blog. For this, you’ll need around 5-10 blog posts. Each covers different topics on a specific niche.

Let’s say:

• 11 Best SEO Tricks For 2023
• How To Optimize Your Website To Rank #1 In Google
• How To Write An SEO Blog Post In 30 Minutes

As you may see, all these blog posts are related to SEO, and their titles and content are more detailed than the previous strategy.

I also suggest you use WordPress since it’s easy to use and you don’t need any coding knowledge. You should choose a simplistic and lightweight theme. This helps your site load faster and have a better user experience.

This strategy is ideal if you have more time at your disposal. It’s a good idea to set an hour or two each day working on your blog. Furthermore, this strategy helps you build an audience for your site more quickly than the previous one. The more content you put out, the more attention you get from search engines and readers.

3) Hardcore Blog Launch

If you are willing to burn the midnight oil and, in a few months, have a blog with many posts and readers, then this is the approach you should take.

With this strategy, you’ll need around 20 to 30 articles optimized for a specific keyword in the same niche. You can use the same approach mentioned above for your site design, etc.

However, you immediately launch a site with plenty of content. Your site targets more keywords at once, allowing it to rank for many more search terms. And therefore, receive more organic traffic and readers.

This strategy is one of the best to maximize the return on your time and money invested. Although it takes more effort, it’s worth it in the end.

Note: Once you launch your site, it’s important to keep constantly publishing new blog posts. See, Google gives importance to websites that keep publishing fresh content. For this reason, you don’t want to be a one-time hit where you publish many articles at once and then stop. Keep at it. Consistency is the key!

What To Avoid When Launching Your Blog? (3 Things)

When launching your blog, you want to avoid a few common mistakes. Often many people fall into them, and for this reason, they don’t see much progress.

1) Perfectionism

I struggle with perfectionism. Sometimes, I’d spend a whole week writing and optimizing a post. But guess what? This is a huge waste of time, and you should avoid it.

The most important thing is to pump out high-quality content as fast as possible consistently. Now you may think, wait, “high-quality”? Yes, high-quality content doesn’t mean your post needs to be perfect.

Instead, it must reply to readers’ search queries and solve their problems. It doesn’t need to be written like your William Shakespeare. In fact, you’re better off keeping your writing as simple as you were writing for an audience with an 8th-grade reading level.

2) Not Optimizing Your Content

When someone starts a blog, their idea is to receive traffic from Google and other search engines eventually. So, you must learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization) basics.

You can watch some videos on YouTube to get an idea. However, you should optimize each post to help the search engines better understand it and your site’s content. But also to help your readers navigate easily from one post to another.

At the very least, you should include your target keyword in the title, URL structure, meta description, headings, and throughout the content.

Another important thing is to learn how to create supporting content. This relates to the idea of creating content clusters around a specific topic.

3) Lack of Consistency

Usually, beginners have a wrong notion about the time it takes for a site to grow. They think that once they start a blog, it will take off and become huge overnight.

That’s not true! Often it may take about six or more months until you start noticing trickles of organic traffic. For this reason, you need to be prepared not to give up, no matter what. Just put your head down and keep producing new content.

The time a website takes to receive traffic depends on several factors, such as:

• The keywords you target. When starting, try targeting long-tail keywords. The competition of your niche. If you choose a saturated niche, it will be hard to get noticed and rank.
• How often do you post new content? You should aim for at least one blog post a week or two, depending on the size of your niche. But of course, the more content you put out, the faster your site will grow.

These are some tips to remember if you want your blog to take off and perform well over time.

How To Create A Content Plan To Launch Your Blog (5-Steps)

Now that you have a better idea about how to launch your blog and what to avoid, let’s see the steps to take:

Step 1) Brainstorm Ideas

Do you know the niche you’d like to get into? I recommend choosing a niche where you have plenty of products and services to promote. Once you have decided, it’s time to brainstorm blog post ideas.

For this, you can use tools like:

• Google Trends:  It helps you better understand what people search for on Google.
• Ubersuggest: This tool offers powerful insights on keywords and topics related to your niche.
• Answer The Public: This tool covers many topics related to your niche and suggests questions you can answer in your blog posts.

Another option is to analyze your competitors’ content to understand what to write.

Also, analyze these keywords to see their competition and try to find keywords with low competition. That will make it easier for you to rank in the search engines. You can read this post here to help you find “long tail keywords” quickly.

I recommend having a list of about thirty or more blog post ideas, so you can keep your blog going for a few months.

Step 2) Create a Content Calendar For 60 Days

Once you have a nice list of ideas, now create a content calendar for the next 60 days. This will help you keep your posting organized and consistent. For this, you can use the good old “Google Sheets.”

Here’s mine:

You want to make sure most posts are relevant and create a topical cluster. In other words, create content related to the same topic to group it and increase your chances of ranking.

If you’d like to understand this better, watch this video below:

Step 3) Write At least 5 Posts Before the Launch

I already explained three launch strategies, but ideally, you want to launch with at least five blog posts. However, don’t write all five articles at once. Write each one separately, and make sure it is SEO optimized.

If you can produce more content, the better!

Personally, when starting, beginners wonder if they should keep posts on draft. So they can publish these posts weekly and keep their audience engaged.

But the problem is you don’t have any audience, so why bother? Only if you’re already a popular figure with a huge following, then can you benefit from keeping posts on draft to maintain engagement.

In most cases, you’re probably nobody ever heard about you. For this reason, publish everything and keep writing more content.

Step 4) Getting High-Quality External Links

Once you have some content on your site, the good idea is to get some external links that point back to your site. Make sure to get backlinks from similar websites in your niche and preferably from authority sites.

The more high-quality links you get, the better your rank in the search engine. One of the best ways is to offer to write a guest post on other blogs with a link back to your blog.

You can easily find sites to guest posts by searching Google, for example:

• “niche + blog + guest post”

So, you don’t want only to publish content on your site but also on other sites that are related to your niche.

Step 5) Keep Track Of Your Progress.

Looking at your Google Analytics metrics for the first few months will be like stargazing—you won’t see much. Sometimes, you may feel like smashing your computer against your wall. But don’t give up, as you’ll need to track your progress.

I mean, do you want to check what content is working? or what content isn’t working? See, one of my biggest mistakes initially was to target highly competitive keywords. I spent my first seven months trying to rank for keywords I couldn’t rank for. As a result, I didn’t get any traffic from Google.

That’s why you want to track your progress with Google Analytics and Search Console. You want also to see where your keywords rank and which are the best ones that generate more leads or sales for you.

This will help you adjust your strategy. Perhaps, you may notice you need to change to a different type of content. It can still be inside the same niche, but you may need to target lower-competition keywords.

So, you want to keep tracking your success and failures. Instead of blinding, publish content, hoping for better days. Those better days may never come if what you do doesn’t work.

5 Things You Need To Launch Your Blog

One thing Google loves is seeing your website as a credible source of information. For this reason, here are five things to keep in mind:

These pages provide credibility to your site. Even if you have an affiliate site, you want to make it look like a legit business. As a result, you’ll avoid getting penalized by Google and other search engines for looking spammy.

2) Install Google Analytics And Search Console

You want to track search volume and organic traffic on your website. That’s why you need to install Google Analytics and Search Console. Both are free tools offered by Google and are essential to track your blog’s progress.

You can install Google Analytics on your site using an all-in-one SEO plugin like RankMath or Yoast SEO. In these plugins, you can find the options to integrate these tools.

To use Google Search Console, follow the instructions on their website.

3) Install An All-In-One SEO Tool

I already mentioned these tools before. However, installing a plugin to optimize your on-site SEO is important. As I said, you can use either RankMath or Yoast SEO.

You can use both freely, and it speeds up the process of optimizing your site for SEO because you won’t have to optimize each page or post manually. Instead, you have several fields and options in the plugin settings.

4) Have A Mobile-Friendly Website

In the past few years, the number of people using mobile devices to visit websites has increased significantly, and Google knows it.

That’s why you need to have a website that is optimized for mobile devices. Nowadays, this is simply because most WordPress theme developers create mobile-friendly themes.

If you’re using WordPress, you can check if your theme is responsive or not. By doing this, you’ll be sure that your website looks great on mobile devices.

5) Powerful Recommended Tools

Although you don’t need to use these tools yet, they can help you produce higher-quality content.

• AI-Writers: If you want to boost your content production, consider using artificial intelligence tools like Jasper AI, Copy AI, or ChatGPT. These tools can quickly create outlines, research information, and even create content for you.
•  Grammarly: This is a must-have tool to provide readers with quality content. It scans your copy and suggests changes to make it more readable.
• AI SEO Tools:  Well, optimizing your content for search engines is complicated. If you want a tool to help you with this, try Surfer SEO or Page Optimize Pro. These tools use artificial intelligence to help you get better rankings in search engines.
• Keyword Research Tools: Knowing what keywords to target is essential. To identify them, you can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.

If you’d like to learn more about Copy AI, read this full review here.

Last Thoughts

As you may see, launching a successful blog requires planning and the time you have available. For this reason, choose one of three different strategies: Easy, Normal, and Hardcore Blog Launch.

Whatever strategy you pick, the most important part is to publish consistently high-quality content. The type of content that can resolve readers’ problems. Also, avoid common mistakes like being a perfectionist and instead focus on putting out valuable posts.

Furthermore, take some time to learn basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills. If you want to see your organic traffic grow, it’s essential to use the right keywords in titles, URLs, meta descriptions, headings, and content.

You can find useful tutorials on YouTube or buy an inexpensive SEO course on Udemy.

So remember to launch your blog and work on it consistently as soon as possible. And don’t look at your immediate results because often you won’t see many. Instead, focus on providing your readers with high-quality content and keep improving. Doing this will help you reach success in the long run.

If you have any questions leave them below, Jordan Alexo will reply asap

FAQ – How Much Content Do You Need to Start a Blog

Let’s quickly see a few frequently asked questions.

1) How Many Blog Posts Before Monetization?

The number of blog posts before you think about making money depends on your niche and traffic. If you plan to use Google ads, you need a good amount of traffic. For this reason, it makes take several months.

In case you want to make money with affiliate marketing. You can immediately start writing product reviews. It doesn’t mean you’ll make money one day to another.

2) How Many Posts Should You Pubish Per Day?

Well, it depends on the number of posts you can post. If you want to build a site, the more post quickly you can post, the better. However, the most important thing is consistently publishing quality content, even if you can only post one or two daily posts.

In other words, you should post five articles every week for months rather than publishing thirty posts in a week and never touching your blog again.

3) How Long Does It Take To Get Organic Traffic To Your Blog?

The time it takes to get organic traffic to your blog depends on several factors, such as your niche, keywords, and competition. However, on average, it can take 3-6 months to start seeing some organic traffic to your blog.

Sometimes, you’ll only notice after nine months or a year. For this reason, you should see your blog as a long-term investment rather than a quick way to make money. Keep working consistently, and you’ll start seeing results eventually.