There's gold in them there words
Steve wrote:
Yes, you can totally make money off blogging. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's easy. The subject matter of the blog is less important than the traffic it gets. It's all about the traffic. Traffic and subject matter often have a lot to do with each other, however. It's hard to make money off a personal blog, for example, because there's so many of those out there it's hard to get a good readership base. In most cases people just aren't interesting enough to carry an interesting personal blog. Of course, if you're famous, or if your blog is so witty it makes you famous, personal blogging has worked for some people. [Note: This personal blog makes $0]
The easier way, and this has worked for me, is to pick some niche you're interested and make daily posts about that. Then the blog's mostly about that subject and less about you. People show up to read about, I don't know, stamp collecting for example, and come back because they liked what you had to say about it, or the way you said it.
The niche can be anything. If you want to do it as a hobby and make just enough to pay your internet bill, you can pick a really small niche, like 17th century American poetry (since the colonies were just being formed then, that's a really small niche). Then there's mega-niches. That's something not being covered by mainstream media but still has a huge interest. There's this one guy who makes a fortune just talking about mobile phones, for example. Then there's the stuff that is so over-covered that you might as well not even bother with it: politics, porn, celebrities, and so on. You'd have to be pretty good to carve a spot for yourself in those areas.
The way you make money off the blog is either passive or active. Passively, you can just put up Google ads. They pay you a few cents for every ad that's clicked on. The more people who visit your blog, the more likely an ad will be clicked, the more money you make. You can get as creative as you want in making blog posts, but making money off it is all statistical. X traffic divided by X clicks = X cents, that sort of thing. There's roughly a 1.5 to 2 percent average click-through rate in relation to to page views. It's a science and there's even a formula for making it successful. Actively making money off your blog means you're hitting the streets selling ads. I'm lazy, so I usually go the passive route.
Here's my formula: You find some niche that isn't being covered and that you're interested in. You have to be interested in it or else it will get old real quick. You write daily posts about the topic. The daily posts are important because you want people coming back daily. If people are interested in the topic, and you write interesting posts, and you make daily posts, they come back daily. Simple as that.
The posts don't have to be long. A paragraph or two is best. The secret to writing for the web is that nobody actually reads anything anymore. It's a post-literate society and people are more likely to train their eye on a symbol than a really long article. People skim articles. If you've read every word of this post, you're abnormal.
Really what you're doing in making blog posts (according to my formula) is summarizing things other people have posted to the web and then linking to it. You write a paragraph or two explaining what it is and why you think it is important, and then you link out to the original content. The reason readers come to you is because the web is huge place, and it's easy to get lost. You become a guide. You're like a daily digest about whatever the topic is.
And then... you just give it all away. Seriously, you let people rip you off and put the content on their sites. You even make it easy for them to do so. The reason why is because search engines rank sites with a lot of links to them higher in the search results. Doesn't even matter if your content is good. It's all about the links. Your job is to make this linking really simple by letting them just steal the content. If your blog is about 17th century American poetry, you make it really easy for other people interested in 17th century American poetry to syndicate your content to their site in exchange for a link.
I used this method to take a completely obscure website about a niche topic, buried along with the hundreds of thousands of other sites about the topic, to number four in the Google search engine results for its keyword. This was all within a year, and that's pretty darn tough. So basically the formula works.
Of course, that's passive money making. You make daily posts, people show up, you get paid. It's not a lot of money and it's completely related to how much traffic you get. Some people earn enough to live on, but they all cater to mega-niches and work the site as if it were a job. Might as well treat it as a job and take the active route. This entails going out and selling ads directly. You end up making far more than you would passively.
In short (and this is what the post-literates skim for), yes, you can totally make money off blogging. It depends on 1) How into it you are, 2) If you've got a viable niche, 3) How much traffic you get, and 4) Your money-making model.
The thing I left out above is that sometimes it's not about the money, it's about the SWAG. If you picked the town you live in as your niche, you get freebies from people. Go to a restaurant and say you want to review the place for your local blog and see how you're treated. Sometimes the perks are better than the pay : )
You were telling me something about making money blogging, how does that work? Is it something I can do, or do I have to know something about something?A couple of other people have asked the same thing, so I thought I'd post a response.
Yes, you can totally make money off blogging. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's easy. The subject matter of the blog is less important than the traffic it gets. It's all about the traffic. Traffic and subject matter often have a lot to do with each other, however. It's hard to make money off a personal blog, for example, because there's so many of those out there it's hard to get a good readership base. In most cases people just aren't interesting enough to carry an interesting personal blog. Of course, if you're famous, or if your blog is so witty it makes you famous, personal blogging has worked for some people. [Note: This personal blog makes $0]
The easier way, and this has worked for me, is to pick some niche you're interested and make daily posts about that. Then the blog's mostly about that subject and less about you. People show up to read about, I don't know, stamp collecting for example, and come back because they liked what you had to say about it, or the way you said it.
The niche can be anything. If you want to do it as a hobby and make just enough to pay your internet bill, you can pick a really small niche, like 17th century American poetry (since the colonies were just being formed then, that's a really small niche). Then there's mega-niches. That's something not being covered by mainstream media but still has a huge interest. There's this one guy who makes a fortune just talking about mobile phones, for example. Then there's the stuff that is so over-covered that you might as well not even bother with it: politics, porn, celebrities, and so on. You'd have to be pretty good to carve a spot for yourself in those areas.
The way you make money off the blog is either passive or active. Passively, you can just put up Google ads. They pay you a few cents for every ad that's clicked on. The more people who visit your blog, the more likely an ad will be clicked, the more money you make. You can get as creative as you want in making blog posts, but making money off it is all statistical. X traffic divided by X clicks = X cents, that sort of thing. There's roughly a 1.5 to 2 percent average click-through rate in relation to to page views. It's a science and there's even a formula for making it successful. Actively making money off your blog means you're hitting the streets selling ads. I'm lazy, so I usually go the passive route.
Here's my formula: You find some niche that isn't being covered and that you're interested in. You have to be interested in it or else it will get old real quick. You write daily posts about the topic. The daily posts are important because you want people coming back daily. If people are interested in the topic, and you write interesting posts, and you make daily posts, they come back daily. Simple as that.
The posts don't have to be long. A paragraph or two is best. The secret to writing for the web is that nobody actually reads anything anymore. It's a post-literate society and people are more likely to train their eye on a symbol than a really long article. People skim articles. If you've read every word of this post, you're abnormal.
Really what you're doing in making blog posts (according to my formula) is summarizing things other people have posted to the web and then linking to it. You write a paragraph or two explaining what it is and why you think it is important, and then you link out to the original content. The reason readers come to you is because the web is huge place, and it's easy to get lost. You become a guide. You're like a daily digest about whatever the topic is.
And then... you just give it all away. Seriously, you let people rip you off and put the content on their sites. You even make it easy for them to do so. The reason why is because search engines rank sites with a lot of links to them higher in the search results. Doesn't even matter if your content is good. It's all about the links. Your job is to make this linking really simple by letting them just steal the content. If your blog is about 17th century American poetry, you make it really easy for other people interested in 17th century American poetry to syndicate your content to their site in exchange for a link.
I used this method to take a completely obscure website about a niche topic, buried along with the hundreds of thousands of other sites about the topic, to number four in the Google search engine results for its keyword. This was all within a year, and that's pretty darn tough. So basically the formula works.
Of course, that's passive money making. You make daily posts, people show up, you get paid. It's not a lot of money and it's completely related to how much traffic you get. Some people earn enough to live on, but they all cater to mega-niches and work the site as if it were a job. Might as well treat it as a job and take the active route. This entails going out and selling ads directly. You end up making far more than you would passively.
In short (and this is what the post-literates skim for), yes, you can totally make money off blogging. It depends on 1) How into it you are, 2) If you've got a viable niche, 3) How much traffic you get, and 4) Your money-making model.
The thing I left out above is that sometimes it's not about the money, it's about the SWAG. If you picked the town you live in as your niche, you get freebies from people. Go to a restaurant and say you want to review the place for your local blog and see how you're treated. Sometimes the perks are better than the pay : )
posted by Jeremy at
12:01 AM
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