Sunday, May 16, 2010

Why You Will Never Make Money Blogging










All bloggers have, at one time or another, dreamed of a retirement from our 9-5 jobs facilitated by the enormous success of our blogs. We imagine sipping drinks on the beach on some remote island that we own, all while millions of adoring fans continuously click on our ads and buy products from our affiliates to feed our privileged lifestyle. I hate to tell you this, but . . .

It's not going to happen!!!


Why?













1. No one reads your blog:
Lets be honest folks, out of the twenty people you associate with closely on a daily basis, how many of them read or follow a small blog on a daily basis? Unless they are bloggers themselves, I would guess that the answer is close to zero. Note that for "small blogs", I don't count sites like Tmz or Huffington Post. They resemble my blog about as much as I resemble the little snake creatures from the movie Alien.

Even among the few internet users who faithfully follow blogs, the competition is pretty intense. Unless you happen to somehow stumble into a niche that has a lot of interest yet hasn't been overly published, your chances of holding an audience are particularly slim. You're especially unlikely to do so with the kind of "shotgun" approach like I use.




























2. No one clicks on your ads: Even if they do come to your blog, people probably aren't interested in the type of crap your site is selling. How many ads do you click on in the typical blog that you visit? I click on ads as a matter of courtesy for the other bloggers I enjoy, but most people don't. Even if they do, how long is it going to take you to become a millionaire from the 35 cents you make from two pity clicks a day?


























3. People don't visit your site to shop:
When is the last time you went to a small Wordpress or Blogspot blog to buy something from Amazon, Kohls, Revlon, etc? Even if you did see something you really liked on there from one of those companies, would you really trust the link in the blog, or would you go directly to the company websites?




























4. Someone can do your site BETTER that you: Even if somehow you do manage to find an absolutely brilliant series of ideas for your blog that make it a money generating engine, be assure that someone, actually a lot of someones, can write the same style blog with the same type of content even better than you do. Heck, I can think of at least a dozen blogs that I read on blogspot alone that are better written, updated more frequently, and have better content than my blog. Since I haven't seen any of them posting from their retirement homes in Maui, I am assuming that they continue to write more for fun than for the huge bump to their income it generates.

In summary, don't believe the crap that you find online about becoming a billionaire blogging. Not gonna happen. You could always click on my ads to support me though :)



6 comments:

  1. sniffle..really..I sold everything I own to buy this computer and start my blog fortune..laughing..You are very right..on all points..I do it because it seems writing down my daily insanity level is fun and free therapy,also because I don't really have a life and want to feel somebody somewhere is laughing because of me..
    And I love your blog,,so there!!

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  2. Hmmmm.... If only I could make a million dollars from my blog.... I've come to terms with not making money.... Now I just try to read and be read....

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  3. I try to help out where I can with the bloggers that I follow on here by clicking periodically on their advertisements. Other than that, there is not much I can do. I don't shop online much, and, when I do, I always type in the site address directly.

    If I had to make a fifth point for this post, I would say that, in my estimation, there are probably only a few thousand people (at most) in the "active Blogger" category. What I mean by this is people that follow others blogs, comment on blogs, post frequently, etc. So, there isn't much money to be made there in any case.

    However, bloggers could actually help each other in a small way if they followed the advice in one of my previous posts and periodically click on the ads of blogs they follow. Let me lay out the math.

    Say that you have 100 followers, and each of those followers clicks on an ad on your blog about 2x per month. Lets say that each click nets about 25 cents. In a month, you'd have 200x.25= 50 bucks -- not enough to retire but enough to pay for the coffee you drink while writing blog entries.

    Even so, as I said previously, it's probably a losing cause. I doubt that anyone really makes a lot of money blogging unless they have some kind of scam going.

    ReplyDelete

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