Can Your Blog Make You Enough Money to Retire?
Most people love the idea of making money with a blog, and thanks to the tools available today, it’s an entirely viable career path. So long as you have sufficient traffic and a source of revenue (like advertising or affiliate marketing), you could potentially make enough money to meet your living expenses. If you’re incredibly lucky, you could even become wealthy doing this.
But is blogging capable of earning you enough money to retire comfortably?
Option One: Become a Breakout Success
Your first option is to become a breakout success. It’s definitely possible to become a multimillionaire by blogging, but this isn’t something you should count on. For this to work, you’ll need a combination of important factors going for you; you’ll need to dominate a specific niche, you’ll need a high-growth strategy that keeps earning you new visitors, you’ll need near-perfect quality content, and you’ll need a monetization strategy that can tie your visitors to revenue, without alienating them from your site. Above all, you’ll need a lot of luck, since you can have nearly all these factors in place and still fail to generate the revenue you’d like.
This is a pleasant way to retire from blogging, but it certainly isn’t reliable, so it’s best to come up with a plan you can rely on.
Option Two: The Long, Consistent Way
Your other option is to retire by taking advantage of the funds you generated throughout your career as a blogger. The basic idea is to leverage the power of compound interest, which allows you to grow your investment significantly over time. For example, if you start with $1,000 and you make 10 percent interest per year, the first year, you’ll make $100, bringing your total to $1,100. The next year, you’ll make $110 in interest. After 5 years, you’ll have $1,610. After another 5, you’ll have nearly $2,600. If you’re consistently putting money in, your growth rate will be even more impressive.
There are a couple of important strategies you’ll need for this to work. First, you’ll need to consistently put money away. That means reducing your living expenses to the minimum, and generating income in excess of those living expenses. Ideally, you’ll be able to put away at least several thousand dollars a year. Second, you’ll need to invest your money wisely. It’s important to leverage a tax-advantaged vehicle like a Roth IRA, and then use your money to invest in a diverse array of assets, focusing heavily on stocks and index funds (especially in your early years of investing).
The Big Picture
Ultimately, your goal will be to save approximately 25 times as much as you’ll need to live a comfortable lifestyle per year. Different people will have different standards for what is “comfortable,” so come up with a plan that works for you; some will just want to meet their basic needs, while others will want to travel. Either way, set a target annual salary and multiply it by 25; this is your final goal, since a good financial management strategy will allow you to withdraw 4 percent of your principal indefinitely.
Once you get closer to retirement, you’ll need to redistribute your funds to more conservative assets and vehicles. For example, you may rely heavily on term deposits; these accounts secure your principal for a fixed period of time, usually at least a month and up to a few years, and guarantee a fixed interest rate, usually 2-3 percent, depending on the length of the term. You could also purchase an annuity, which would guarantee regular payments to you for the rest of your life. Otherwise, you’ll need to balance your investments in stocks, bonds, and index funds to secure a decent return while also limiting your financial risk.
The sooner you start following this strategy, the better, since every additional year of compounding makes it easier to build the wealth you want. Plus, the longer you invest, the more time you’ll have to gain experience and become a smarter investor, making even more money.
Doing What You Love
One nice feature of blogging is its appeal to the people who pursue it as a career path. If you’re reading this article, wondering if you can make money from blogging, it’s probably because you’re passionate about writing or are passionate about a particular subject. That means the work you’re doing won’t feel like work, and your “retirement” may just be writing less often than you once did.
The other perk is that your investment strategy isn’t dependent on your career as a blogger. If you ever find you’re passionate about something else, you can continue growing the funds you made from blogging as you pursue a new career.