Blogging to Make a Living

Okay. I read sporadically, so just bear with me while I piece this together for you. When I'm online I go from one blog post/website to another, nothing keeping me for very long (which helps me to understand my son better, since he has the same trait). One of the reasons for this short attention span is I'm trying to kick the nicotine habit, but I'm pretty suremost of you out there do the same -- the internet is filled with too much information and we are incapable of taking it all in,yet we cannot get enough. Take, for example, what I'm writing about currently.

You see, I stumbled on a post by, Liz Strauss at Successful Blog, mentioning Guy
Kawasaki, about blogging for money (which is nothing new, considering Guy is one of the most well-known VCs in the world) so I had to check it out. However, this wasn't one of those 'fly-by-night', 'make-your-fortune-blogging' articles that inundate the search engines and drop a famous persons name to get traffic and sales.

So here's my point. Everyday these websites attract millions of people intent on making a living out of blogging. So, what are the odds of this type of success? According to Philip Kaplan, of AdBrite,

"only 3 percent of active sites make more than $1,000 a month from
advertising...only one in six blogs draws even 500 page views a day."

Three percent. Not the kind of numbers that would entice you to want to make the investment.

"Don't go into blogging to make a living"

says Mark Cuban, of Dallas Mavericks fame. Corbett Barr, from the Free Pursuits blog, wrote,

"My goal is to eventually earn a living from this blog. It won’t [be] my only source of income, but I do plan to make something meaningful from it. And that’s okay. You shouldn’t feel guilty about trying to make a living from what you do. Your dentist doesn’t, and your plumber doesn’t
either. The difference with blogging is that people expect to start making money right away, whereas your dentist went to school for like 7 years, and even your plumber was an apprentice before making a living at it.

So, I’m not going to rush the blogging income. I will start to review useful products here soon.... But I don’t expect blogging to support me anytime soon. Some people have become probloggers in less than a year. I’m not counting on it. The beauty of blogging is that it can be valuable in a lot of other ways before (or instead of) bringing in any income directly."

Paul Boutin, of the New York Times, offers these bits of wisdom:

Don't expect to get rich.

Remember what Kaplan said!

Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice.

Cuban's advise is to,

"Blog about your passions. Don’t blog about what you think your audience wants. Post because you have something you are dying to write about."

Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule.

One Mr. Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee, who posts multiple times daily, told Boutin,

"The blog is best handled by inserting it into the small bits of free time that rest among the bigger chunks of your work."

Just post it already!

Xeni Jardin, a freelance journalists for Wired Magazine, offers up this piece of advice

"Don’t bottle up your ideas forever believing you have to hit the same kind of mature, complete, perfect point as you would with a magazine or newspaper article."

Keep a regular rhythm.

It doesn't matter how often you post -- once a day/week/month -- just have a dependable pattern for your readership.

Join the community, such as it is.

As Tim Bourquin, at Webernetting.com, states,

"The “link” and “attention” [are] the currency of the Internet"

So get out there and share. However, keep in mind the rules (according to Boutin):

"When in doubt, give credit."

And, finally. Go on. There's no shame in it:

Plug yourself.

Use aggregators like Digg to get your posts more face time. The deal is that now it's all about social media: Twitter, Facebook, Digg. It's the who -- or, more importantly, how many -- you know, as much as the what. Bloggers are no longer solely at the mercy of the almighty search engines. And even that, popularity doesn't always spell cash flow. Says Bourquin,

"In the 'old days' anyone who was famous in the media had the big bucks that naturally accompanied that fame. But these days, there seems to be a whole lot of folks that are “Internet famous” because of blogging, podcasting, Twitter, flickr, etc. and yet need to ask their audience for donations in order to buy a better microphone. It’s a bizarre and ironic result of the ability for anyone and everyone to start producing content and gather an audience."

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Inspiration

Getting a job is like enrolling in a human domestication program. You learn how to be a good pet.

Look around you. Really look. What do you see? Are these the surroundings of a free human being? Or are you living in a cage for unconscious animals? Have you fallen in love with the color beige?

How’s your obedience training coming along? Does your master reward your good behavior? Do you get disciplined if you fail to obey your master’s commands?

Is there any spark of free will left inside you? Or has your conditioning made you a pet for life?

Humans are not meant to be raised in cages. You poor thing…

~Steve Pavlina