I’ve had an article called How to Set Up a Blog (For the Long Run) open in a browser tab for long enough that I no longer remember what first sent me to it. Which is probably a good thing, because it’s irritating as hell:
Life-saving market research tip #2: Use Google. If you do a search for the biggest keyword for your potential blog topic, you want to see lots of organic results and sponsored sponsored results. You especially want to see sponsored results if you want to have any hope of making money with your blog.
The presence of sponsored results means there’s action in the marketplace over traffic and dollars. No action means there’s no money to be made. Traffic and search volume alone are not good enough, because some markets are “freebie” markets. Freebie markets consist of tons of free information, which means nobody will pay for that information. You don’t want to come in selling what everyone else is getting for nothing.
Because, really, what blogdom needs is more cynical assholes trying to “monetize” the medium from the very start. I’m not big on the whole utopian transformative blogosphere idea, but this is going just a bit too far in the other direction. And it gets worse from there, providing a long list of suggestions of particular software packages that, after the opening, reek of product placement.
The advice for people who are thinking about starting a blog in order to make lots of money is really very simple: don’t.
Seriously, don’t. There are better ways to earn money, that will let you keep your sanity. Trying to make big bucks off of blogging is a fool’s game.
“Yeah, sure, you say that now, Mister I’m-Paid-to-Blog-at-ScienceBlogs,” you may be thinking. But I’m not saying this to try to keep down the competition– I’m serious. And I’m not making any significant cash off this project– I’m slightly overpaid relative to my actual traffic, and my take from the blog has been less than $5,000/year. There are maybe ten bloggers here who are paid more than I am.
Now, that’s nice to have, don’t get me wrong, but the hourly rate sucks– we’re talking 3-4 hours of reading and writing posts a day, all year long. I’m not even getting minimum wage for this.
I started this blog as a hobby, and I try to keep it on that basis. It’s a bit more than that now, but whenever I find myself starting to think of it as more of an obligation than something I do for kicks, I find myself not liking my own blogging output. Attempting to significantly increase my traffic leads to bad things– tedious political ranting, cheap provocations, long and pointless arguments with screechy monkeys. None of these are good things.
I probably could make more money off this than I do, but to earn even a grad student stipend’s worth of blog payments, I would have to become something I’m not interested in being. I don’t have the kind of passionate attachment to red-meat issues that would let me blog naturally about the sorts of things that drive big traffic, so if I were to go that route, I’d essentially become the irritating douchebag whose post I linked at the beginning– cynically manipulating my output in an attempt to cash in.
So I’ve more or less consciously decided to stop worrying about traffic levels and all that sort of thing. I looked at Google Analytics for the first time in probably a month in order to write this; I’ve mostly stopped checking my Technorati links (I’m aided in this by their having become dramatically less useful in recent months), and I no longer remember how to access the FeedBurner stats.
The impact of this has been more or less negligble. The last month saw around 60,000 page views to this blog, which is pretty much what it has been for a while now.
Now, to be sure, there are still some traffic-related things that I do. The various “Poll” posts are thrown out there with the express purpose of trying to drum up comments. This doesn’t necessarily increase the traffic to the blog, but it does provide a sort of immediate feedback that I enjoy a lot. At the same time, there are a lot of things I do that have nothing to do with traffic or comments– the weekly Baby Blogging posts, for example. Very few people comment on those, but I put them up because I enjoy it. Even if nobody outside our immediate family reads them, I’ll keep putting them up.
So, bringing this back around to the initial topic: if you’re thinking of starting a blog for the money, don’t. You could make more money flipping burgers than you’re likely to by starting a blog, unless you’re willing to become an asshole to get some cash. Now, granted, with Wall Street in free fall, blogging may be the best money-making option for asshole, at least those who lack the talent to play wide receiver in the NFL, but, really, there are better things you can do with your time.