Think Blogging is Easy Money?
We all wish that blogging was an easy way to earn a decent income but let’s be realistic and honest here. Blogging needs to be a passion of yours regardless of whether you earn any money from it or you will not last very long or earn very much.
There are fast track success stories but these are akin to the 1% of all new startup companies that make a profit their first year. Starting a blog is very similar to starting up a new business but one reason it is so popular is that you need relatively little capital to test your earning with a blog.
I have met and run across about 12 blogs that have started and died in the past two years. It just takes following Entrecard and Technorati to see blogs just suddenly stop having more posts and then vanish when their hosting account or DNS name expires. Heck, I myself scrapped two blogs last year because I was spread too thin and unable to effectively maintain 5 blogs at once.
You can make money blogging but realistically most bloggers will barely make more than $500 their first year if that. After two years I have only earned about $5500 from my blogs and it takes constant effort and seeking to earn nearly every dollar. This is because unless your site gets 100k visits per month or has a Google pagerank of 5 or higher you will have very few advertisers coming to you. You must aggressively seek advertisers and convince them thant investing in your blog will benefit them.
You need to not only create a constant flow of compelling content, but you must constantly promote, advertise and expand your audience. For every hour you spend writing content, it takes another two hours to effectively promote and spread your article as far as you can online. Though you can run a successful niche site with only a few articles per month that heavily rely on search engine traffic this is rare and the niche markets are shrinking rapidly as everyone is trying to find small niche topics to cover.
Blogging is at least a three year commitment and provided you are constantly adding content you should see steady growth over time. The constant work with little payoff will leave most people burned out after that initial excitement and passion that many new bloggers start with. I wish you all success and some of you will hit the right marks and get surges in traffic in your first few months, but this won’t translate to income without at least a year under your belt as advertisers also want longevity. Why pay for a link or post on a blog that may expire next year?
Blogging is not easy money, but as you start to see more traffic the opportunities will start to present themselves. Remember in many cases advertisers will find you and if you start seeing interest and offers then you can start backing away from doing all the work looking for advertisers and start letting them come to you.
I have been trying to show people how to make money blogging by being completely transparent with my blog earnings here on DragonBlogger.com and the traffic sources for my earnings. I think for new bloggers the best way to earn money blogging is by leveraging third party companies to broker the transactions between advertisers and bloggers. Only after your blog is established and getting steady traffic would I suggest going out and hitting advertisers up directly, you need to have something concrete to show companies why they should advertise with you.
-Dragon Blogger
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I started blogging purely for personal purposes, to track my progress in my work and blog about things I learn, hopefully which people may find interesting or useful.
The idea of actually making money with my blog had never actually crossed my mind! It's definitely an interesting proposition and something to think about in the future, but I'm just going to let things take its course and see :)
Thanks for your post!
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