There are a lot of bloggers on the web. In fact there are more than 100 million bloggers in the sphere, in fact I think that there are way more. I wonder how many of them are making money. I tend to think that very few of them are earning more than a couple of dollars a month for their efforts. So why do they do it? Most bloggers blog because something bothers them or because they are passionate about a subject. As a result there are a lot of political blogs and sports blogs and personal blogs and so on. For instance, political blogs. Do the big political blogs make money? I would bet that they don’t make a lot. In fact I don’t know if any of them are profitable. And that my friends points to one of the problems of blogging for income.
Let’s say you’ve got a really popular political blog. You write from the left or from the right (it doesn’t really matter) and you’ve got a loyal readership. Why aren’t you making any money? Because readers don’t make you money. It’s that simple. What does a reader do when they come to your site? They read. They freaking read. That’s all they do. Do you think that makes anybody any money? I know when I go a blog that I like, I consume the information that they present and then I leave. I do not buy anything. I don’t click on adsense ads. I read their piece of information and then I go about my day.
The fact of the matter is that blogging for most people is not a lucrative endeavor. I bet that the majority of blogs that I read for their content make less than $500 a month from their blog. Certainly there are exceptions like a few of the top internet marketers that know how to monetize traffic. But, for the most part, blogging is not a money maker.
I started this blog, for instance, about a year ago, and I haven’t made one red cent from it. In part this is because I choose not to monetize it but in part this is because blogging doesn’t lend itself to making any money. I’ll get back to this in a moment.
The blogs that do make money do so in two ways. They either sell a product, and usually this is through a recommendation of something that they get an affiliate referral for, or they make money by redirecting their traffic to someone who is willing to pay for it. There are lots of examples of bloggers who make money by recommending products. Johnchow.com is the prime example here. On JohnChow the author recommends certain products claiming that they will help people make money online in some form. For every person that buys one of said products, Mr. Chow earns a commission. His only responsibility is to keep the traffic flowing in and interested in the notion of making money online. He then recommends some service through an affiliate link and is paid a percentage on every sale. Mr Chow claims to make more than $40,000 a month through his blog and he accomplishes this by mainly by pitching products/services for which he is an affiliate.
The other way to make money from a blog is to sell your traffic to others for them to try to convert. The easiest way to do this is to display Adsense on your blog which will show text ads relevant to the content of your content. In other words, if you have an article about consolidating student loans then Google will display ads about student loan consolidation for your visitors to click. Each click takes your visitor away from your site and onto your advertiser’s site. In exchange for diverting your traffic to a third party site you will receive a fee (minus Google’s take) and if you generate enough traffic you can earn a substantial amount of money re-routing traffic.
So the fact remains that most blogs make nothing (or very nearly nothing) a month. But the big problem is that people do not want to do the things that it takes to make money. You can make money from a blog if you are willing to write C+ content. If you write A+ content you might eventually make some money from your blog if you can generate a book deal but, for a very long time, you will simply be writing just to be writing. And, if you are okay with blogging for pleasure than go for it.
On the other hand, if you write content that, while being informative, still leaves the reader with a thirst for more information they might take an action. That could be following through a link on your site in search of a product or information and in some cases you will be able to make money from that action. The thing about it that you have to realize is that reading is not a money making activity. The only way you will make money from your blog is if your readers do something. No money exchanges hands when someone reads your beautiful words and leaves.
What this really boils down to is making choices. Do you want to be a famous blogger or do you want to make money? In many cases they are mutually exclusive and you will have to make a choice. I choose to make money. That’s the reason I write. I don’t think that it either correct or incorrect. I am not among the people that think that you are somehow evil if you are trying to make money from your activities online. The only thing that I am saying is that you need to make decisions in advance. Decide if you want to make money or not. If you do then you need to act like it and if you do not then why are you reading my blog about… making money online.