Blogging for Cash

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Just finished reading an article by Dave Winer called How I made over $2 million with this blog. A lot of people nowadays are blogging just for money and many others would like to make a little cash from their blogs, even if that isn’t the main point of the exercise. The usual way of doing this is by putting ads of some sort on the blog. I’ve written about this before. With all the study of marketing that I’ve been doing lately it was interesting to get someone else’s perspective, especially a heavy-weight like Winer.

You may be asking Who’s Dave Winer? If you aren’t, you can pick up your official geek-trivia-champion badge at the door. I’d like to take that up at the end of the post, because it is important. Lets leave it aside for now, though.

The basic message of the article was this: Blogs don’t make money, but people with blogs can make a lot. Winer proudly states that he has never put any kind of ad on his blog, yet he has made a fortune because of his blog. He lists the sources of that income, and damn, they are impressive. According to him you should simply publish a blog with fantastic content, establish a real relationship with your readers and that relationship will result in a healthy income in other ways. Ads just get in the way of the relationship. Blog what you love and the money will come so to speak.

This is actually sound advice. The whole blog is in effect an ad so anything else you put up is just a distraction. In the best of all world’s good content would be enough. There’s something to keep in mind, though, and it goes back to the question about who Dave Winer is. I didn’t know, by the way.

Turns out that Winer is a big gun in blogging and internet circles. He developed RSS which is used to syndicate blog feeds. He pretty much invented blogging single handedly and developed the first public hosting platform for blogs.

Some people are what Seth Godin called ‘tribe leaders’. They established entire fields of discipline and remain among the foremost authorities in their areas. Eric Meyer is the same type of personality in the field of CSS and web standards. If guys like this never did another thing they could enjoy a very nice income on the lecture circuit giving historic overviews of how things came to be the way they are. When someone of this caliber says that great content is enough its like a great white shark telling a sardine to just be yourself and swim proudly.

Winer lives in a different world than you and me. I’m sure he never worried about search engine optimization or traffic building. In fact, his blog is a straight text blog without graphics, video or even color. Probably half his traffic comes from people googling his name. He really doesn’t have to worry about the fact that a new blog is launched every 28 seconds. People are looking specifically for him and they’ll persist until they find him.

Money blogging has its own firmament of stars, of course. John Chow, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak to name a few. And Sixty, of course (Hi Mark!). The rest of us have to slug it out. That means worrying about SEO, link building, social networking etc and still try to produce good content.

Believe me, we all blog out of love. If we didn’t love it, most of the time at least, we couldn’t continue. Frankly, its pretty hard work sometimes. But money is also a factor for many of us so there have to be ads of some kind.

If a blog ever achieves fame and begins to get massive amounts of traffic, things change. Advertisers get in touch with you and offer big bucks for the privilege of appearing on your blog. The ads they produce are done by professional designers and cost a ton. The perfect example of this is the australian car advice blog. That blog is around 3 years old and they now get so many cars sent to them to try out that parking is becoming an issue for them.

Such is the fame to which we tadpoles may aspire. Down here in the trenches, though, its adsense, banners and sidebars for the foreseable future. Sorry ’bout that.

Posted by: swampy | 02-13-2009 | 04:02 PM
Posted in: Uncategorized