Quick Answer: You don’t need to wait until you publish a certain number of blog posts before you launch your blog. It’s best to launch it right away & then gradually begin adding blog posts.
Wondering how many blog posts you need to publish before launching your blog?
If so, you’ve landed in the right place. We recently uncovered how many blog posts you need before adding affiliate links, but in this post, we’ll talk about how many you need before actually launching.
And we’ll also explain why launching your blog before writing any blog posts at all will give you the greatest chance of seeing success.
Yep, you heard that right. Launching with 0 blog posts! So let’s dive in…
How Many Blog Posts Should You Have Before Launching?
The short answer is zero.
You should launch your blog right away before adding any blog posts at all.
And whilst that may seem scary, in that people may start arriving at your unfinished website… That’s not how it works in reality.
You don’t just press “launch” on your website & start getting visitors coming to it right away. If you did, every website owner would be a millionaire.
But it’s easy to see why you might think that. And I’ll admit, when I first started building websites, I used to hold off launching them until they were “ready”.
However, that’s a big mistake & it can actually result in it taking longer for your website to see success.
I know this may sound crazy, but as somebody that’s made a full-time living from building & launching websites over the past 10+ years, stick with me & hear me out.
Why You Should Launch Your Website ASAP
The reality is that as a website owner & content creator, most of the visitors arriving at your website will do so from search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing.
The process will look like this:
- You’ll create content
- Search engines will automatically discover it
- They’ll list it within their results as an option to click on when people search for something related to it
- Visitors will start arriving at your website
And when search engines discover a new website (which they do automatically), there are 2 stages to them listing it within their results.
These stages are known as:
- Indexing
- Ranking
Indexing refers to the stage where a search engine first notices your website & starts listing it within its results.
You’ll know if you’re site is indexed because if you type in your website address into the search engine’s search bar, you’d see it show up in the results.
But this literally just means the search engine has “noticed” your website & begun watching what you’re doing & what you’re publishing.
If you search for any keywords related to your website, it would be so low down in the listings that still, nobody is really going to be able to find it.
For example, if you had a dog blog and you searched for “dog blog”, your site wouldn’t show up because it’s only indexed, it’s not yet ranked.
Ranking is the part when you start to get visitors. This is when a search engine has begun to trust your website & as a result, starts to move it higher in the listings.
So, how do you get ranked?
Well, as I just mentioned, this is all about trust… And trust is built over time.
A search engine wants to see that you’re publishing content consistently & that you have no plans to take your website offline anytime soon.
This process of building trust usually happens over a period of 3-6 months after launching your website.
So by delaying the launch of your website, you would be extending the time it would have taken to start building trust & getting ranked.
For example, if you waited 6 months to launch your blog because you wanted to publish 30 blog posts first, then your total time to gain rankings could extend to over 12+ months.
Whereas if you just launched your blog and then started publishing, it would be building trust with the search engines all that time.
And I know I can still hear a “but” floating around in your mind, so let me touch on that next.
What If Somebody Visits Your Website Before It’s Finished?
If somebody visits your website before it’s finished, then so what? Big deal.
A visitor to an unfinished website is always better than no visitors to a website that’s hidden away until it’s “ready to launch”.
Especially when it comes to affiliate marketing because as soon as you start getting your first visitors, that’s when you could start to begin making money.
The biggest challenge when creating content online is attracting visitors. So if visitors start arriving at your website before it’s even finished, then you should be over the moon, because that means you’re achieving very quick success.
How Long Does It Take A New Blog To Get Traffic?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question as it can be quite random & there are a few factors that can influence it, but let us run over some typical timeframes.
First off, if your website has 0 content, it will get 0 visits.
Once you publish 5+ pieces of high-quality content, the search engines will consider your website to be worthy of ranking. Though this is really the low-low end of the scale – the more content, the better.
Content alone won’t get your website ranked. On top of content, you’ll need to build trust with the search engines. They’ll want to see you “prove” that you’re going to keep the website online because, of course, if you take it offline, it’ll be bad for their users.
Once you’ve proven to the search engines that you’re in it for the long haul & that you intend to keep your site active, your content will begin to move up the rankings (providing it’s high quality) & you’ll likely begin to get visitors arriving.
This process, all in all, will typically take around 3-6 months.
What you should be aware of, however, is that the results are not necessarily linear.
This means that whilst some people may see gradual growth & an increase in rankings over the 6-month period, others may see nothing at all & then wake up to a sudden increase in rankings & traffic right at month 6 (or more).
So the best thing to do when launching a website is to simply put it live right away, then consistently publish new & high-quality content for at least 6 months, as regularly as you can.
After 6 months, you will no doubt be surprised by the positive results & then that’s when you can leverage a method such as affiliate marketing to begin making money.
We’ve already uncovered how many blog posts you need to start affiliate marketing.
The Bottom Line
Don’t wait around & don’t worry that people will start coming to your unfinished website. Just get your blog launched right-away
The sooner your blog is launched, the sooner it will begin building trust with search engines & the sooner you will begin getting your first visitors.
And on top of that, the sooner you can begin making money through a means such as affiliate marketing.
So hopefully, this blog post helped answer your questions & clear up why it’s better to launch your blog right away as opposed to waiting before you have a certain number of posts.
Also, if you’d like to learn more about affiliate marketing & how you can begin making money from your blog as an affiliate marketer, then be sure to sign up for our free training before you leave.
In our training, we teach you how to launch a bog (the right way), how to start generating traffic ASAP & how you can then begin making money from your visitors.
