SubscribeMon 2 Apr 2007
Most people want to earn more money. The best way to do that is to do something you love, and if not at least do something you’re good at. However, most personal finance bloggers – myself included – look for alternate sources beyond the day job. In a series of posts I will scatter over the next two weeks, I will examine some of the more popular supplemental income sources that are popular with the personal financial blogging community. In no particular order they are:
Obviously there are many other ways of making money. I still think the best way is to concentrate on your job (or potentially look for a new line of work – including going to business for yourself - if your current job isn’t working out). A raise because of hard work easily wipes out whatever credit card arbitrage profits I’ve ever engaged in.
Blogging
I’ve been actively blogging for about 3 months now. I’ve put in about $15 in total hosting fees in that period. So far, I’ve earned exactly 0.0 cents and spent a total of 25 or so hours working on the blog by either writing or attending to technical/design issues. Of course I’ve only put up ads in the last week. I’d be happy if I could get my advertising revenue to cover my costs. My blog is relatively new and has limited readership so my results are not representative of a successful blogger. Below I will try to extrapolate what more popular blogs may generate in revenue using what I could glean from different postings. What I’ve learned is that there is actually very little publicly available from which I can work with. There’s googlecy around the topic. One of the conditions of using AdSense is that you do not share information with regards to “(b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by Google.” The first rule of Google Club is you don’t talk about Google Club. Got it. Beyond just the Google rules, many bloggers just don’t feel comfortable talking about the money that they make blogging (nor should they have to if it’s off topic from the blog).
I’ll quickly profile a couple people on which I’ve tracked down some information on:
Mr. pfblog.com is rather cagey about his “sideline” business, but I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that it’s related to his blog. It’s doubtful his revenue is purely advertising derived as commentators have speculated. It’s most likely a combination of advertising and referral income.
Lazy Man and Money in March attributes most of his $225 gain in alternative income due to advertising from his blog. Not enough to live on, but certainly enough to cover his blogging expenses. Given his rather prolific posting, and cross marketing, I doubt it’s really enough to compensate him for his time if it were something he didn’t enjoy doing.
The data for ohgizmo.com is a little older, but he supplies some of the most detailed data that I could find; $700 in Adsense revenue, and another $1000 in other advertising/referral income. Not too shabby for a college student. I could barely rub two nickels together at his age and I had to walk uphill both ways to my classes.
Then, there is the case of at Problogger.com. He’s one of the top 50 in Technorati, so he’s certainly not representative of the average blogger. According to him, he made over 6 figures in the past year. I’m gonna assign him a conservative income of $200,000 a year from all his online activity. According to him his take from AdSense revenue is about $15,000 a month (or at least it was back in August). That’s a nice piece of change.
| Blog | Daily Page Views | Technorati Rank | Feedburner Feeds | Monthly Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ProBlogger.com | NA | 50 | 20969 | 15000 |
| LazyManAndMoney.com | NA | 24270 | 359 | 250 |
| pfBlog.com | NA | NA | 22465 | 5833 |
| askDong.com | 20 | 2963909 | 20 | 0 |
| www.ohgizmo.com | 15000 | 1060 | NA | 1700 |
I do believe it’s possible to make significant money blogging, but it’s not easy. Getting appreciable viewership that would lead to significant advertising revenue is a difficult task. If you’re doing it just for the money, it’s probably not a good reason. Like any other job, it’s best to love the job rather than love the money from the job. Given the incredible earnings I’ve generated from this venture, clearly it’s for love not money. If you are interested in learning more about making money via blogging, I would visit problogger’s site. He’s well informed, and writes openly and accurately.
p.s. I added the banner ad on top of this post since the banner ad seems almost topical for this post - besides it’s not like I’m making any money from it….
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April 2nd, 2007 at 3:36 pm
I’ve updated the number today as I do the first (or so) of every month. I will mention that I don’t break my alternative income into blogging income and other interest/dividend/etc. income. I could have a large portion coming from other sources - you never know :-).
You are correct that blogging has not been a good way to earn money when you factor in the time spent. I think it’s like starting most businesses though. You go through a period of growth where you are either losing money or not making enough to make it worth your while. I’ve found that I’m becoming more and more efficient in blogging, so the time I spend on it is less and less. Obviously this has to level off at some point, because I don’t think I’ll get where I can write 10 articles in a minute. At the same time, the money I’m making is growing more and more as well. At some point, the wage per hour could be attractive. I’m sure it is for ProBlogger.com. As you said, it’s far from easy to get there. Given my niche, I wonder how close I’ll get to it.
One other thing to factor is intangibles. What are these? Well, it’s helped me network with a number of people that I normally wouldn’t have found. For instance, I got to meet the people at Mint and give them feedback on their product. I also have been talking with the people behind ProProsper.com and it’s helped me lend money smarter. There’s also the advice that I can get from my readers. Whenever I have a really tough financial question that I can crack, I feel confident in opening it up to them. Lastly, I’m developing valuable writing skills that can help me in my other day job. What kind of the dollar value can you put on all this?
Also you can get my daily page views by clicking my Sitemeter icon.
April 2nd, 2007 at 6:37 pm
I certainly haven’t hit the efficency wall yet - someday maybe I’ll get there. I think blogging is a great way to stay focused on something you care about - tha’s part of the reason why I do this blog (that and all my friends think I’m a know it all). I completely agree with you about the writing skills. I barely write at work, so this blog is the only real opportunity I have to write at length.
April 18th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
The links for problogger and ohgizmo don’t work. Thought you might like to know. Nice blog for only 3 months old! Congrats on the guest post at Lazy Man. That was a great read and it made a reader out of me.
April 18th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
The links are fixed. It’s nice to have some readers catch my mistakes. Thanks for the kind words.