Blogging for Money: Step II

When you look at blogging for money, there are a variety of income models.

Suite101 was where I started. I eventually stopped editing a site for them because the work load wasn't worth it to me at the time. They wanted a blog post a week and a short feature each week. The Suite pays based on ad revenue - a profit sharing model. It's entrepreneurial: the potential is there to make some money if you can attract traffic. It's also a fairly low bar in terms of getting in to start with.

They have a new model since I left that allows contributors to simply write content instead of carrying the responsibility for maintaining a topic. I will probably start doing that soon, without taking on a site for them...

I blog for Creative Webblogging now.
I have two sites with them: China Venture News and The Universities Weblog. I write 20 blogs a month for each. If I do that, I get $112.50 a month for each. They want me to go out once each week to another blog on each topic and comment there in a way that leaves a link back to my blog. That's not hard. If I meet some traffic minimums, there's the potential for bonuses. If my traffic does well, there's the potential to go to 40 blog posts a month for $250 a month.

I've mentioned Smorty before. Smorty will pay you to blog about products and companies. It's $6 and up for 400 words or less. You have to have a personal blog that's 90 days old and has a minimum of two posts per week.

The top end of the spectrum is About Dot Com. There was a service that used to do something like Neilson ratings for web sites. About Dot Com always ranked in the top ten. When I worked for them they had about 500 writers ("guides," they called them). My site was about the middle of the pack and I had between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors a week. About Dot Com is demanding. I probably spent 20 hours or more a week on their stuff. Their tools kept changing. When I left they'd started wanting me to look at making video content. They wanted a blog post a minimum of three times a week and they wanted original content articles at least twice a month and they wanted a catalog of links on my topic. They had a lengthy application process that judged you on something like a portfolio. If they liked you, your portfolio became the start of your site. There were people on the travel channel making a couple of thousand a month for them.

There are other places to make money by blogging, but those are some good starting points...