There's a fascinating 10/1/08 article over at Slate.com by Michael Agger entitled "Blogging for Dollars - How Do Bloggers Make Money?" The article takes a look at how blogging has exploded in size and continues to grow exponentially each day. According to the stats there are 900,000 blog posts created daily across the world. So this post is just a fraction of that!
Even more interesting, the article takes a look at the big money some people command from their blogs. Examples you may have heard of:
The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month;
Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month;
Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.
(info source: Slate.com)
The article may state the obvious to us bloggers. That is in order to get the income you want from writing a blog regulalry, you need to have visitors and a high level of traffic. The example of 43f is given, which started out small then exploded and began to pay the bills.
Agger writes:
While monetizing your blog may be easier than ever, all of this comes with an ever-present hammer: the need to drive traffic. This month, the writer/blogger/productivity thinker Merlin Mann opened a window onto his angst with an anniversary post. Mann is best-known as the creator of the Hipster PDA (index cards clipped together by a binder clip)* and his Inbox Zero talk (turn your e-mail into actions). In a post titled "Four Years," Mann sketches out how his site, 43 Folders, grew from a personal dumping ground for his "mental sausage" into a full-featured destination for productivity nerds and life-hackers. In 2005, he experienced a key transition:
At some point that year, 43f became the surreal and unexpected circus tent under which my family began drawing an increasing amount of its income. This was weird, but it was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds. Which is to say, "very." But, my small measure of something like success did not go unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web's glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.
It is amazing the amount of money and traffic that some blogs generate. Shoutouts are given to Shoemoney and Problogger in the article, with link backs to their respective blogs. Both of their blogs command lots of visitors, subscribers and moolah. Yours can too if you follow in their footsteps, build something people return to and find often, monetize it properly, and you're well on your way...
Read the full artice here at Slate.com for inspiration and possibly some ideas on how to get your moneymaking blog into full gear!
