Blogging for money

Most people would like to earn a living doing something they enjoy and one of the things bloggers enjoy is blogging, unfortunately earning money through blogging is not particularly easy. Lasica points to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how to make money from your blog. Whilst the emphasis is on the different ways to make money by including advertising on your blog, for the majority of blogs the number of hits they are likely to receive means that including advertising may adversely effect the growth of traffic to a blog whilst failing to make any money.

Within the article the 'good rule of thumb' is suggested that every 1,000 page views will make the blogger 50 cents. Whilst this will vary a lot according to the topic of the blog and how ad-click-friendly the users of the blog are, it is clear that the vast majority of bloggers will fail to make even 50cents a month, and these few cents will have to be accumulated for a long time before they can be cashed in; by which point the blogger will probably have given up. Personally I find ads to be off-putting on some blogs, especially where you get the feeling that rather than being focused on the content of the blog the bloggers are more concerned with the revenue stream. Rather than ads making you money, they can make you seem very amateur.

Rather than making the blogger a few cents, the real value of blog to the blogger is through selling the blogger. Whilst few blogs are likely to make the blogger rich through adverts, they may drive business, job offers, or invitations to give talks to the blogger. Alternatively the blog may just provide additional useful contacts in a area of shared interest. All of which are of more value to the average blogger than the few cents from adverts, and all of which may be put off by adverts.

Obviously my blog is nowhere near having enough traffic to warrant the inclusion of ads, but neither is it interesting enough to drive business, job offers or invitations to talk my way, but there again, what would I really do with the 50 cents I could make over the next year?