I've had an article called How to Set Up a Blog (For the Long Run) open in a browser tab for long enough that I no longer remember what first sent me to it. Which is probably a good thing, because it's irritating as hell:
Life-saving market research tip #2: Use Google. If you do a search for the biggest keyword for your potential blog topic, you want to see lots of organic results and sponsored sponsored results. You especially want to see sponsored results if you want to have any hope of making money with your blog.
The presence of sponsored results means there's action in the marketplace over traffic and dollars. No action means there's no money to be made. Traffic and search volume alone are not good enough, because some markets are "freebie" markets. Freebie markets consist of tons of free information, which means nobody will pay for that information. You don't want to come in selling what everyone else is getting for nothing.
Because, really, what blogdom needs is more cynical assholes trying to "monetize" the medium from the very start. I'm not big on the whole utopian transformative blogosphere idea, but this is going just a bit too far in the other direction. And it gets worse from there, providing a long list of suggestions of particular software packages that, after the opening, reek of product placement.
The advice for people who are thinking about starting a blog in order to make lots of money is really very simple: don't.
Seriously, don't. There are better ways to earn money, that will let you keep your sanity. Trying to make big bucks off of blogging is a fool's game.
"Yeah, sure, you say that now, Mister I'm-Paid-to-Blog-at-ScienceBlogs," you may be thinking. But I'm not saying this to try to keep down the competition-- I'm serious. And I'm not making any significant cash off this project-- I'm slightly overpaid relative to my actual traffic, and my take from the blog has been less than $5,000/year. There are maybe ten bloggers here who are paid more than I am.
Now, that's nice to have, don't get me wrong, but the hourly rate sucks-- we're talking 3-4 hours of reading and writing posts a day, all year long. I'm not even getting minimum wage for this.
I started this blog as a hobby, and I try to keep it on that basis. It's a bit more than that now, but whenever I find myself starting to think of it as more of an obligation than something I do for kicks, I find myself not liking my own blogging output. Attempting to significantly increase my traffic leads to bad things-- tedious political ranting, cheap provocations, long and pointless arguments with screechy monkeys. None of these are good things.
I probably could make more money off this than I do, but to earn even a grad student stipend's worth of blog payments, I would have to become something I'm not interested in being. I don't have the kind of passionate attachment to red-meat issues that would let me blog naturally about the sorts of things that drive big traffic, so if I were to go that route, I'd essentially become the irritating douchebag whose post I linked at the beginning-- cynically manipulating my output in an attempt to cash in.
So I've more or less consciously decided to stop worrying about traffic levels and all that sort of thing. I looked at Google Analytics for the first time in probably a month in order to write this; I've mostly stopped checking my Technorati links (I'm aided in this by their having become dramatically less useful in recent months), and I no longer remember how to access the FeedBurner stats.
The impact of this has been more or less negligble. The last month saw around 60,000 page views to this blog, which is pretty much what it has been for a while now.
Now, to be sure, there are still some traffic-related things that I do. The various "Poll" posts are thrown out there with the express purpose of trying to drum up comments. This doesn't necessarily increase the traffic to the blog, but it does provide a sort of immediate feedback that I enjoy a lot. At the same time, there are a lot of things I do that have nothing to do with traffic or comments-- the weekly Baby Blogging posts, for example. Very few people comment on those, but I put them up because I enjoy it. Even if nobody outside our immediate family reads them, I'll keep putting them up.
So, bringing this back around to the initial topic: if you're thinking of starting a blog for the money, don't. You could make more money flipping burgers than you're likely to by starting a blog, unless you're willing to become an asshole to get some cash. Now, granted, with Wall Street in free fall, blogging may be the best money-making option for asshole, at least those who lack the talent to play wide receiver in the NFL, but, really, there are better things you can do with your time.
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The ways to get more readers seem fairly clear: either go down market to do more sensationalist pop-sci stuff; or change topics and spread rumours about pop-stars or politicians.
Oh, and do it well and frequently... ;-)
Maybe you and other bloggers don't make much just from traffic, but the exposure can lead to a lot more. Your book deal owes a lot to your blog. Among other physics books, I'd say Sean Carrol's upcoming book owes much to his blog as did Peter Woit's. I'm sure there are plenty of books in other fields that were also launched from blogs.
Maybe you and other bloggers don't make much just from traffic, but the exposure can lead to a lot more. Your book deal owes a lot to your blog.
Absolutely.
But I wouldn't count that in the expected income from a blog, for the same reason that I wouldn't include lottery winnings in a household budget. It's great if it works out, but you'd be crazy to count on that.
I like baby-blogging but never comment on them because I have nothing intelligent to say.
... How very sad you have just made me DM. That's about 1/4 my yearly income (even though I'm a grad student, this still stung)....
[wipes a tear and walks back to her little cave]
Chad #3:
That's true. I think I agree with your basic point that there isn't a real business model with blogging that can assure a decent living.
And btw, I also like the baby pictures.
I agree with what you say, and I get a ton of spam that promises otherwise. "The Internet Guru will show you how to monetize your blog!" When I first blogged I used Adsense on my site, and watched by traffic. I joined blog networks to increase my traffic to build my adsense accouunt, but after a year I had accumulated about $11.00, and realized that Google were the only ones making money from the millions of blogs on which they place their ads.
This isn't to say that for businesses which have an actual service to provide that blogs don't help boost traffic and awareness. Blogs and social netwroking are a vital portion of marketing. But blogging in itself is not a goldmine. It's a hobby. If bloggers would keep this in mind and just write the way that they want to write, they will go back to enjoying it and not finding it a chore.
There is a very good correlation for me between how important a post is for me, how much it means to me, how relevant it is to me, how much I wanted to write it, how good it is in my view, etc. etc. and how much traffic it gets. Unfortunately, it is a negative correlation. My most read post is a cartoon someone sent me that I put on the blog, and my most viewed photograph is a chicken from a PLoS article.
There is also an inverse correlation between how much I understand about what a post is for ... what it does, who reads it, and why it is read ... and it's statistics. In other words, I don't know why the cartoon post was so widely read. I know the proximate mechanism, but not the ultimate reason. And it is a nice picture of a chicken, but really, it is a picture. Of a chicken.
The only way to make money blogging (which might not work) is to go into the business of telling people how to make money blogging (as you point out with your example).
My blogging is part of my professional as well as personal and creative life. It is working for me in this regard, and I'm happy about it. But the number of hits is not part of that. I don't use any of those extra add on counters, but I do look at Google Analytics (because Sb has it set up for us) now and then partly because I'm a data slut and can't help it. And more is better, etc. But if real success was measured in hits and success was important I'd feel pretty sad.
Now, Emmy, SHE knows how to blog, and she has a kick ass facebook page too.
Most importantly, I'm hoping that by putting this comment her people will click on my name and visit my site.
Don't know if it matters to anyone, but I block both google-analytics and technorati (and lots of similar stuff) because practically all blogs load faster without them. Plus, about once a year or so, one or the other will break down and render thousands of blogs unreadable (I know, I know, thousands of blogs are unreadable anyway...) except by those of us who block silly doo-hickeys like technorati.
The baby-blogging is my favorite part! I mean, really, sometimes you're just not in the mood to think about physics. But adorable babies? Always.
How do you block google analytics and technorati?
My all-time record number of comments on a post was about tomatoes, and how I couldn't find a certain kind in the grocery story. It was a complete fluff-piece. If I had to do that all the time to drum up traffic, I'd go nuts.
Writing about stuff that interests me means I get comments from readers who read stuff that interests me. Fewer, maybe, but better.
The weekly baby blogging is my favorite thing. I rarely comment... There she is again! Wow, she's really growing! But I love them. Thank you for sharing the pictures of Steelykid with us. She is a gem.
Actually, I'll add that I especially liked the link to the old picture for comparison -- I had been wanting just such a thing, but hadn't yet mustered the initiative to grovel back through the archive.
If you're open to requests, I'll make this one: When she hits the 1-year mark, include a shot from a year ago with each current week's picture.
Cheers.
I kind of like looking at the statistics on my site because I like to see which pages change in popularity as the year goes by. For example, the one on "carpet beetles" is very popular all winter with a spike in the early spring, probably because people find them under furniture while cleaning. The "box elder bugs" and "lady beetles" pages are popular in the fall and spring, when they are either coming into the house to hibernate, or breaking hibernation to go back outside. Other insects have particular peaks at the times when they hatch out, become pests, or are otherwise noticeable. And, of course, the "wood ticks" page gets really, *really* popular starting . . . right . . . about . . . *now*. It's kind of an on-going survey on how people relate to little crawly things. It is also interesting that "carpet beetles" get a *lot* of comments, while "wood ticks" (which gets just as many hits in the course of a year) doesn't have *any* comments yet. I guess people really don't like to talk about ticks.
I was never under any illusions about making money off of the site, any more than I would have expected to make a pile of money by publishing a hard-copy nature guide. As it is, the advertising revenue neatly covers my hosting costs, with a little bit left over to pay for occasionally upgrading my camera a bit. So, I have a nice hobby where I can spend some time, but don't actually have to spend any money. It's all good.
Yeah, I think the babyblogging is underestimated as a source of traffic. I read (and enjoy) many of your more extensive posts, but the babyblogging was what really kept me coming around the blog itself frequently.
Steelykid is awesome.
FWIW, I like the babyblogging, too!
Baby blogging is a great public service. Looking at pictures of a smiley baby greatly improves my mood during stupid phone meetings.
Definite thumbs up on the weekly baby blogging. How can you (meaning us) not love a weekly adorable baby pic?
There's no comments because how often can you (meaning us) say "Squeeee! Adorable baby! How cuuuute!!1!" without it getting old?