Making Money From Blogging

I don't make any money from this blog.  My total revenue since I started it is about a pound.  I don't really aspire to make any cash from it.  It is just a handy place to write down thoughts I might want to refer to again in future.  I did wonder when I started it if it would be a surprise money spinner.  But it has been going long enough that I know now that it won't.  But I have another blog that is producing a steady £100 plus a month from Google ad sense earnings.  It gets hundreds of visits a day and on current trends by some time this summer it will have chalked up a million page views since it started.


A three figure income is nice but obviously not enough to live on.  But blogging has some big advantages as a way of making a living.  I tend to write stuff anyway even when I don't even intend to even read it again myself let alone anybody else.   So spending say an hour a day on a blog is no hardship.  It also doesn't require any capital or any special equipment.   And the business model is attractive.  You produce blog posts that become income generating assets.  So effectively you are steadily building a portfolio which tends to pay steadily more money.

So it is certainly an attractive option. Type away and cash goes into your bank account.

The trouble is that is not at all easy to work out what you should write to generate an income.  I have spent just about the same amount of effort on a second blog as my successful one.  All that work has only built up to about £5 per month.  There was absolutely no way of predicting which one would fly and which one remains no more than a hobby.  I'd love to boast that the one that has taken off was the result of careful planning and deep insight.  In reality it was all dumb luck.  For several years I was writing purely for myself, and it was a complete fluke that one post caught the eye of google and I started pulling in some traffic.

So although I make a very good return on the 3-4 hours a week I spend on it on average, I am not at all sure I could generate the 20 times or so more traffic I'd need to make it into a living wage.

But even getting traffic is far from the answer in terms of making money.  I have posts that regular views but never generate any income.  The income I do get is highly variable.  It seems to depend a lot on who is advertising.   Sometimes the money pours in for a few hours, or even days.  But equally I can have days which pay only a few pennies.  Basically it all feels a lot more like a lottery than a serious business proposition.

There are other ways apart from passively receiving advertising income to make money from a blog of course.  My blog is a potent source of contacts that frequently lead to consulting business, so I would still do exactly what I currently do even if I didn't make a penny from it.  I think that on the whole the best way to regard any money made from blogging as purely a bonus.


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