Seven things I learnt from one year of blogging for money

The first thing I learnt — and admittedly it took a fair number of months — was that I should not have given up my day job. Alright, I didn’t give up the day job as I didn’t have one to start off with. But still. I would have starved if I had depended on blogging as my source of income.

So to all those ever so hopeful people out there, think very hard before believing somebody’s story that they are making a fortune online. It ain’t that easy. In fact it is nigh impossible.

What are the nitty gritty principles behind the internet. This should be remembered by your common and garden blogger wishing to make a living off his or her words of wisdom.

It really boils down to two of them and they are called traffic and Google PageRank or also known as PR. Note the capitals. Important!

One thing is for certain, it is not content! This mighty word of magic is bandied around endlessly. However, if one were to believe that content is king then let us say outright, probably more than 80% of the blogosphere out there is populated with the most dismal of content. I’m guessing here, of course, but huge amounts of traffic, or eyeballs, are directed to the most inane stuff. I am just going to say Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. I rest my case.

However, back to the original point, which is, what did I learn? These are my words of wisdom and you are welcome to add to them or dispute them.

1) Traffic? How much do you need? Huge, “much” it seems. Yes, your blog is prime real estate on the www. However, no matter the size of your traffic, that is people coming to read your latest words of wisdom, advertisers are not interested in your prime bit of real estate.

Sure, Google will oblige very quickly with their AdSense program. No requirements here. It doesn’t cost them anything and they are grateful for every American cent they make off you. However, you will starve. I had 34 000 unique visitors through my blog in October and I earned $12,79 for the month. You do the maths.

2) Page Rank? I was doing OK with this, hovering around four and five marks. And yes it is possible to have both rankings. And then Google changed its algorithms and I got downgraded to four. And I have stayed there for the last four months. It was during the time a few people got caught selling their PR to search engine optimisation guys. Or SEOs. Did that backfire, or what?

However, it also backfired on me. I had not been selling any links as nobody is interested in a PR of four or five. I would have, had they been interested! And as Google has a lovely non-interface with its customers, ie it’s all automated, I really couldn’t be bothered to ask an automated computer application what its reason was to blacklist me. Hello Hal, you there buddy?

3) Advertising was not going to put the food on the table, so I tried the affiliate marketing route. Doesn’t everybody? Oh yeah. I have not earned one cent. American or other. I am sure that I could have done better by really pushing the products down people’s throats, but I really truly believe in freedom of choice. I do. Forcing somebody to buy something was just not something I was comfortable doing.

Of course if I had spent all the time writing articles focused on the niche that the product fitted into, it might have worked a tad better. But I just really wanted to write about a whole lot of stuff. And ranting about the war in Iraq was not going to help my affiliate programs. Oh dear. There went that idea then.

4) One thing I haven’t tried yet is trading products such as one would do on e-Bay. Check the internet/tech book shelves in book stores. The number of books that promise you wealth and fortune if you start working the e-Bay story are quite phenomenal. I didn’t even get tempted by the Dummies for e-Bay Workers book.

However, with the knowledge I have gained over the past 13 months, watch this space, I am going to be trading something. Not all is lost, methinks.

5) With that precious content of yours that you have slaved over for hours, you can meander through the internet and see who might like to pay you to use those pearls of wisdom. Of course there are some ruthless people out there who summarily scrape the content off your blog.

Besides those, there is Helium and Newsvine for instance. Helium I contributed about 100 articles to and in the last year I have earned a total of $12,01 on these. Huge! On Newsvine I have 128 articles and I have earned $17,47 in 13 months. Wow. Bring on the sparkling wine.

What wonderful cons. Imagine the many people who spend hours uploading their articles in the hope of earning some money and then receiving a return such as the above. I certainly have done my share. But never mind that, imagine the con when you upload an article to Ezines or Searchwarp for instance and you don’t even get paid that little bit. It’s all free. Phew.

6) Then there is the article writing for a fee. It depends on how well your blog ranks in the PR (remember that stands for PageRank) and has little to do with traffic. You get to write an article on some product and you get paid for doing that. I never tried it. My lowly PageRank only gave me a $5 earnings capacity, so I didn’t bother to pimp my blog. Even I have a higher fee than that.

7) So who makes the money then? This is the million dollar question, isn’t it? The money is in software applications. You offer to these millions of people, who are desperate to earn a living on the internet, a hope that they will earn a living. And there are thousands of people willing to join up to schemes and sell their souls to get others to follow them into a bottomless pit of no money.

So lets look at some of these. I have already mentioned Newsvine and Hellium. Lets add to this Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, De.licio.us and many many more. These are sites where you try and get your articles onto the front page which will result in a massive amount of traffic. And it does, if you do. But you have to sell your soul to get there. And almost none of that traffic bothers to click on any of your Google Ads. It’s in and out at the speed of light.

These are the more upfront and in the scheme of things almost honourable businesses. That is, at least they are fairly upfront with what they promise and they do offer some benefit to the people trying to play the systems. And they are free to use, if you consider the hours you have to work at it to be free.

There are many many out there that charge money for their bit of snake oil. It is incredible how much of that is being spent for that illusive pot of gold. eBooks on how to do the affiliate marketing thing, earn mega money on the internet thing, the law of attraction thing, the “I will teach you how to do something” thing. I’m not even talking about stuff like domain squatters here.

It’s like the Wild West out there. Buy a lotto ticket. That would give you as much chance of making a living as spending hours developing a blog for money.

So what about the people who are making it. The Seth Godin‘s of this world? They are making it because they would have made it in the non-internet world. They have real wisdom, something to teach and to explain that is of value and they are doing it with a combination of books, talks, podcasts, blog material, talking on the conference circuit and consulting for companies etc, etc. The internet is purely one other avenue for them to add revenue to their normal income stream.

For the man in the street, Joe Blogs, yep, you over there. Give up. It ain’t going to happen for you. However, if you enjoy writing, love chatting to the world, making new friends, learning new stuff about yourself and the people who populate this planet, then blogging is magic. Just don’t give up your day job.

Oh, and last time I counted and in case you might be interested, I was making £150 per month over and above the Google coins on my blog. But my daughter’s blog, which has a new article every three months, average visitor numbers of about 50 per day and has a page rank of seven, I am making £840 per month and going up. Is that fair?