How Many Articles Should a Niche Site Have?

When you’re brand new to blogging, you’ll likely have plenty of questions. One of those questions put simply is, how many articles should a niche site have? More specifically though, how many articles should your site have at various milestones. If you ask 10 people you might get 10 different answers. I’m certainly not the foremost authority on blogging by any means, but I can take a blog from 0 to profit. I’ve done it many times.

Disclaimer: These are my own opinions and views only. I suggest you also listen to the advice of others in the industry, and draw your own conclusions. Make an informed decision on how much content you think you should be outputting.

How many articles should a niche site have?

Below are the main 5 blogging milestones, when it comes to time, that I look at when growing a new site. After each one I’ll discuss how many pieces of content you should ideally try and have by this point, based on my own experiences.

30 days

In the beginning of a new blog it’s vital that you front-load as much content as possible. Shoot for an article a day in the first 30 days, the first 60-90 if possible. Remember, it could take 6 months or longer for a piece of content to rank in Google and start bringing in traffic.

Cram as many decent articles into the first month as possible. This content doesn’t have to be the best on the internet, settle for good. The important part is that you get as many URLs indexed on Google as you can.

3 months

By this point I’ve done one of two things. The first option is that I decided to move on to another project and am letting the initial 30-50 pieces of content slowly rank in Google. At which point I’ll return to it in several months and continue adding new content.

The other option is that I continue publishing to the site and trying to grow it quickly. The problem is that I have several other sites that are producing incomes, and if I put my resources into them then it translates into dollars much, much quicker. A new site is a ghost town for many months and sometimes doesn’t earn money in the first  year at all.

That’s why I typically bounce around from site to site, I’m constantly reevaluating where my time is going to be best spent. Whatever I can do to earn money the quickest is usually what I do.

6 months

By six months old, I like a site to have close to 100 posts if possible. Some organic traffic should be trickling in by this point and that always motivates me to give a new site a little more attention. Having said that, I often don’t reach that goal lately because I’m always putting most of my resources into my bigger sites, so it slows the growth of my newer sites.

Having said that, I strongly suggest that you have as many URLs indexed in the first 6 months as possible. Good data should be coming into Google Search Console by now that you can use to publish better content and get more organic traffic rolling in.

12 months

By a year old I’d say a site with 100-200 articles has a good foundation of content to build on in the second year. The second year is when a site normally takes off for me, if I didn’t slack off too much with content production in the first year.

At this point you should have a good mix of informational and affiliate content, with many different types of blog posts. You should also have a better idea of the general direction you want to take your site in as well as a refined content strategy going forward. For the second year, create more of the content that performed best in the first year.

24 months

By 2 years old, I expect to have a matured site with 200-400 articles. I begin to scale quickly at the one year mark for my sites because that’s the point where I can see a faster ROI. You can get data back much quicker as well which helps in keyword selection.

You should have taken the profits from the previous year, and reinvested back into more content. On top of that you should be writing content as well. It’s often not until your site is over a year old that Google starts taking you seriously, take advantage of that.

Past this point, you can keep scaling to the moon if you like.

Summary

Growing a niche website from a fresh domain to a business that’s generating significant income is no small feat. Once you figure out how to do it though, it’s very repeatable. You start to know what’s normal and what’s not. You’ll get a feel for what you should and shouldn’t be doing. So when it comes to how many articles should a niche site have at different points along the timeline, this is my take.

Thanks for reading!