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...

Blogging for Money: Step One

A friend of mine asked me recently how to get started in blogging for money.

You can think of blogging for money a couple of ways. On the one hand, I've never made a living at blogging. Over the last decade, some years I've made pocket change. Most years I've made about what I would have if I'd worked 25 hours a week flipping burgers for six or seven bucks an hour. One year I made about $20 thousand; that's a pretty good second job in my part of rural Appalachia. In fact, it's more than the median household income in some of the counties around here.

If you don't want to think about it in terms of yearly income, think of it like this. In the last ten years I've made between $75,000 and $80,000 off of a hobby - something I can do in my spare time at home. It's money I wouldn't have seen otherwise. And time is really the only expense I incurred...

Step one on the road to blogging for money is to start a personal blog. It shows potential employers that you CAN in fact blog. Creative Weblogging, for example, prefers 30 to 60 days blogging experience. Smorty pays bloggers to do adverts on their personal blog; but they require that your blog be up for 90 days before they'll consider you.

To start an free personal blog, go to Blogger Dot Com and apply for a blog. It's run by Google.

What do you blog about?

Blogging is like any kind of writing. You can sit and wait for enlightenment, for the same apple that hit Newton or Buddha to fall on your head. You won't write much. Or you can see writing in the same light as any task. Then you decide to do it, prepare to do it, and then (you guessed it) do it.

I keep a list of idea, start drafts, and eventually finish them. Screw inspiration: I make myself write.

I've blogged about places I've been:
Pipestem
Pigeon Forge
My In-laws

I've blogged about my daily routine:
9/18/07


I've blogged about professional issues:
Why Labels Matter

I've blogged about places to eat:
Carino's or Olive Garden

I've blogged about politics:
Could I vote for Hillary?
Naïve and Irresponsible...
The Reincarnation of Bobby Kennedy

I've blogged about phonemes:
I love Phonemes

I've blogged about blogging:
Why Blog?
Writing Online

I've blogged about my dog:
The New Dog

I've blogged about my culture and environment:
Chickory

I've blogged about philosophy (and about what I've reading):
Pathagoras, Ben Franklin, and America
I've blogged about what I enjoy:

That's just a sample.

So, you start a blog. You keep a list of things you haven't written about yet. You write about them. Someday I'll write about how Hemingway treats women in his novels. And I'll compare Hemingway to Steinbeck on their use of time: For Whom the Bells Toll covers 3 days in 400 pages while East of Eden covers 40 years or so in 700 pages. In November I'll write about being an election worker.

Be Walt Whitman and write about experiences (I'm waiting for the first snowfall).

You get the idea...

Why Blog? (Have a Smorty Day...)

I talked last month about reasons to blog. I enjoy writing, but (as I said in that blog) three different companies in the last 10 years have paid me to blog. Kind of. Two of the actually paid me to create content - articles like I would have written for a newspaper or magazine - and blog about my content. One, China Venture News at Creative Weblogging, pays me to maintain a blog on a particular topic.

In recent years it has become possible to generate income from your personal blog. Having Google ads in your blog will get you a few pennies if you manage to attract significant traffic to your site. But a more realistic option is a service like Smorty, where you can get paid for blogging...

Smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers can then pay bloggers to write opinion posts that include links back to that advertiser's site. (Haven't you always dreamed about getting paid for saying what you think about people and products?)

There are a few basic requirements, but they're not hard at all to meet if you're a serious blogger. You're blog has to be at least three months old, for example. You also have to have a history of publishing something at least twice a week. And, of course, there are a few very reasonable content requirements; if your blog is about how much you hate people who are a different color than you are(for example), or about some topic that involves violence or pornography, chances are good that no advertiser cares what you think about their product or service and your log won't get accepted.

So if part of your reason for blogging is to make a little money, get connected with the advertisers who want to pay you to do it by. Smorty seems like a good place to start, in my opinion...