Let’s say someone has the writing skills, pizzazz, knowledge base, and E-commerce know-how to start a blog that makes profits from advertisements. Would that be a legitimate entrepreneurial opportunity? How much money do most decent Bloggers make on average?
If they make money from it then yes. The only thing that makes it legitimate as a business is whehter or not it makes money. I know a blogger with a readership of about a million who makes nothing.
Sure it is legitimate. Like any endeavor you may attempt there is a chance of success and a chance of failure. Various ways to make money and probably more to lose money. Such is the life of an entrepreneur.
A tiny number of bloggers make good money, say in excess of $100,000 but only a very,very small number and probably smaller in today’s media environment compared to a couple of years ago. And those that make that kind of money have probably been working at it for years. This WSJ article from Jan 2008 gives a few details; it mentions an Australian blogger called Darren Rowse who made 250,000 in 2007 from ProBlogger which is about professional blogging.
Even if you don't make money it strikes me as a good way of spending your time especially if you are unemployed. If you create a decent blog related to your area of professional interest, it's definitely something you can put on your resume and use to demonstrate your writing ability and expertise. It's also a good way of networking and getting your name out there.
While there’s no magic formula when it comes to how much money a blogger will make, this quote is downright comical for its wrongness.
I think of myself as a web savvy guy and I am curious - what is the unique non-bouncing visit to $ ratio? To simplify things I am willing to assume that the blog is only supported by google ad words.
Doing a little cursory googling, it seems that Google AdWords average a 1% clickthrough rate (roughly, many AdWords users reported rates of .5% or .25%) and about $0.50 per click (again, this is a VERY rough estimate).
So a person with 100,000 views in a month and a 1% clickththrough would earn around $500 per month from AdWords before any website hosting costs (or staff if it’s a multi-person blog). Quite a far cry from $75,000 a year as a salary.
Well, let’s look at it another way. Look at how many people post here on the Dope for free. Now I’m sure you guys hang on every word I write here, but how many people would read what I wrote if it wasn’t on the dope? Two or three maybe?
Clickthrough rate is clicks / impressions, isn’t it? 100,000 unique visitors was the figure cited for the 75k/yr income, which is vastly different than 100,000 page views.
I bet Perez Hilton is doing pretty well for himself.
I recall reading in the Guardian, I think it was an article by Jeff Jarvis that blogging comes into its own when you use it to highlight your area of expertise and as others have mentioned, to network. Although he hadn’t made all that much money from his blog, he claimed it helped generate more income from other means.
I put a single page on the internet a while ago which showed how to make a home theater screen. Never promoted it, never advertised it, never updated it. One day I decided for yucks to sign up with Google Adsense, and put their ads on the page.
So far, it’s earned me $139, which works out to about $50/hr for the time I put into making the page. And I imagine it will continue to earn income.
I wrote a blog a few years ago, and never tried to monetize it. But we had an average of about 5,000 unique visits a day, and once in a while a post would hit Digg or Stumbleupon or Slashdot, and suddenly we’d get 100,000 hits in the space of two or three days. That would have generated sme real income had I set up adsense or something similar for it.
I’ve done some reading about making money this way, and there is a reasonable path to profitability, and it doesn’t involve just setting up a blog and writing about whatever you feel like. Rather, you have to have a strategy. That page I mentioned? Write dozens of them. Link from one to the other. Write several blogs. Make sure you’re writing about things that are current memes, and have something to say that makes people want to come back in the future.
There are people out there who will write a page telling you how to press coffee, then another on how to clean drill bits, and one on making origami, or whatever. Every day they crank out new content. Each one of these pages earns very little (like my theater screen page), but over a few years you might have hundreds of them. It adds up. Track the hits the pages get, learn what stuff works and what doesn’t, and zero in on it. It’s tedious and it’s real work. If you do it causally and expect to make a living by just throwing your thoughts into the blogosphere, forget it.
Then you have to be smart about your advertising. There are lots of strategies for maximizing ad revenue. Adsense is just one way to get money. There are other types of tageted ads, search UIs, keywords which turn certain words into links.
You can write reviews of books and CD’s, and link to the actual book or CD through Amazon’s referral program. Or if you’re writing a page on Origami or whatever, put references to the Amazon books in the copy. There are other companies which pay for similar referrals. None of it will earn you very much by itself - but the cumulative effect of doing this day in, day out can add up.
I doubt if you’ll get rich, but you could do at least as well as your typical J-school grad. Most people writing for a living the traditional way are making peanuts as well. For every Woodward and Bernstein, there’s 500 writers for local newspapers and tabloids making not much more than minimum wage.
Unique visitors and impressions have no correlation. Knowing one doesn’t mean you’ll have even the slightest idea what the other is.
Good stuff, well said.
It has occurred to me that there is a lot of good content here on the SDMB. I just have not figured out how it could generate revenue. Obviously the Chicago Reader is trying but I’d be surprised if this site is a money maker for them.
Not a Blog but I think the notion of making money from it is similar.
I’d be surprised if the SDMB so much as breaks even…probably a money loser for them overall (although the Reader may gain other benefits making it all worthwhile).
That said I doubt the SDMB is all that expensive to run either such that the Reader is willing to keep it running.
Meh…no clue really but interesting to think about.
Someone (Ed, I think) has disclosed this place’s finances before. IIRC, when all is said and done, they’re left with a couple hundred bucks of raw profit every month. I got the impression it was a lot more before internet advertising “crashed”*.
*Seems like every webmaster I’ve talked to for the last ~10 years tells me that web advertising was HUGE EASY MONEY 6 months ago. How the good ol’ days are always 6 months in the past evades me.
Welcome to the Dope Lemur866, always nice to see a new first time poster. Have fun.
Apparently, when a major sponsor “takes over the site”, that is, floods it with advertising for a major film or event, Perez (aka Mario) makes $10k per day.
He and Drudge are probably the most successful “single personality” bloggers ever.
Here’s an example of the right way to do this:
This morning I needed to do a search on setting up a dual-boot system for Windows 7 and Vista. This was on the first page of the google search for “Dual Boot Windows 7”: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-dual-boot-windows-7/
This blogger took the time to document the process for dual booting, and he’s optimized his keywords and linked to enough other articles and such that he got his page on the first page of the google search. The adsense section is right at the top where people will see what’s in it, and due to the subject matter (discovering that you need a partition manager for XP), he’ll probably get a higher-than-average clickthrough on the google ads, and clickthough rates are critical.
The subject is something that everyone’s talking about right now, and with the RC of Windows 7 just being released, he’s probably getting tens of thousands of hits on this page.
In addition, he’s got a section for related articles he’s written at the bottom, which will multiply his aggregate hits.
And if you look on the right side, you’ll see that this blog is just one of a number of blogs in the “Taragana Blog network”, whatever that is. But what it means is that this person or company or group of individuals maintains blogs on several subjects, so that whenever an issue hits that will drive clicks, there’s a blog that can be used to write about it. And linking articles from one to another helps move eyeballs from one blog to another, where hopefully some of them will become regular visitors. Having different blogs for each topic area helps ensure that the google adwords will be targeted more efficiently (if you have one blog page with articles on many subjects, the adwords aren’t going to target as well).
If you’re trying to make money by ‘branding’ yourself, which you need to do if you want to do a political blog or some other type of blog where the attraction is you rather than the specifics of the content, then you also need to network like crazy. Post lots of comments on related blogs (hopefully thoughtful ones that make people want to read more), and put your URL on it. Use trackbacks to link to other blogs, and ask them to do the same. Offer to guest-blog on various group blogs, and consider trying to write articles for online magazines.
I think making money off of topical or political blogs is very difficult. However, even if you write a more general blog, branding can be important. My wife follows the Pioneer Woman blog. This is ‘just’ the blog of a woman who lives on a ranch and blogs about food, her ranch, photography, or anything else that interests her. But it’s becoming one of the most successful blogs on the internet. How does she do it?
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Knowing her audience. She’s relentlessly upbeat, for example. She’s selling a lifestyle, and dour angry comments aren’t part of it. This is true for most blogging, btw. Resist the urge to bitch about everything. Oprah didn’t get where she is by complaining, she got where she is by making her audience feel good.
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Quality. this blog has high quality graphics, very high quality photos, good writing, and very good advice. My wife makes a lot of the recipes she gets from this blog, and they are almost always excellent.
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Constant updates. You want your regular readers to be in the habit of checking you out as part of their internet routine. If you fall off the wagon and start going days between blog posts, you’ll lose your regulars, and you can’t afford to do that.
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Find a niche. There are a million tech bloggers, gadget bloggers, political bloggers, etc. Not a whole lot of ranch housewives with something valuable to say.
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Be the best in your niche. Whatever you decide to blog about, try and make yours the best blog of its type. There are so many blogs now that it’s hard to make a go of it if you’re just one of hundreds or thousands of relatively similar blogs. Yours has to stand out from the pack. Whatever niche you pick, look at other bloggers doing it. If they’re doing much better than you think you can do in terms of quality and content, consider finding another area that’s a little less competitive.
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Be careful how you pimp your blog. It’s tempting to troll message boards and constantly plug your blog under the thinnest of pretenses, but you can suffer a real backlash from that. Occasional mentions of your blog are okay in message board posts, but only if you’re a valid contributor to the thread and your mention is to something relevant that will advance the discussion. And do it very sparingly.
Anyway, enough rambling for now. I hope this advice helps.
I’m just posting to say thanks for a very informative post there Sam Stone.
One sense I am getting is that some of these successful blogs aren’t really blogs; they are full-fledged websites where the blog is just one component. Which makes sense since the blog format isn’t really suited to creating content with lasting value.
Secondly some of these websites may be a missing a trick by not having a message board. Once you reach a certain size, keeping your readers becomes the priority and a board is a great way of building a community which sticks around for the long haul. Ideally the board itself generates quality content which attracts new readers.