June 17, 2004 | View Comments (8) | Category: Web Business
Summary: Again exploring the options of generating some income from your blogs.
This was a topic that I have been wanting to revisit for some time, but always seemed to put on the backburner and forget about. Then yesterday the incomparable John Gruber wrote an essay (he doesn't write entries ;-) titled, Something Daring, which he begins to explore the option of making his blog a more full-time affair. I myself have explored this option in Independent Money so I could relate to what John was saying.
Most of us (especially the ones who came before Google Adsense) started a blog as a personal space for publishing. It is always on your mind that it would be nice to get paid for what you do, but in reality you know that the likelihood of that occurring was close to nil. Over the last 6-9 months with the emergence of Adsense and the media's acceptance of Denton's Empire, blogging as a means to making some money has become a viable plan for some.
Google's Adsense is easy to implement. Therefore some may get disillusioned with fantasies of making a large sum of money from it. In your mind it is easy to think “my readers appreciate what I do so they will click on my ads&rdqup;, but in reality life doesn't work that way.
There are blogs that try to force the ads down your throat by making them “standout” so to speak hoping that this will draw in the clicks. Let's get this out right now. Design blogs do not make good money just from Google Ads. Just doesn't happen. It's not your readers to blame, it's the topic. Web design is not something that brings in the high paying companies.
This is how Gruber is trying to make his money (along with the tshirt selling). This is more of a hope and a prayer type way and many times it usually comes along with:
This site is supported by you. So if you wish to keep us going please donate.
Problem is there are so many other sites out there as well that only the diehard fans are willing to donate and those encompass a small percentage of your overall audience. Therefore, hopefully you have a good size crowd coming to your site. I am guessing the highend for traffic in our community is a couple thousand visitors a day. The Vault does around 4,000-5,000 a day and I know it is popular than most blogs out there. In any case that might seem like a large number to some of us, but it pales in comparison to the big time blogs out there.
It can be hard enough trying to make a decent living as a web designer so what would make you think life would be any better trying to make your living as a writer of design?
Another method used by some bloggers to generate income is through Amazon affiliate links. As you may know I have a whole store (redesign in the works) just for this purpose and have just recently setup a Forever Geek store (70% complete) to see if I can diversify my product offerings. Basically, books don't pay that much. You have to sell a lot of books to generate a decent amount of money.
To give you a real life example, the Roe has sold more than $3,800 worth of stuff for Amazon in 2 months. Sounds like a good figure, but my referral fees are only $220. Admittedly, that isn't too bad for doing nothing, but goes to show that you have to sell a lot of those books to get enough to pay the rent. If you have purchased anything from my store thank you very much, every little bit counts.
There are plenty of other alternatives for ads on sites, but the majority of these border on being obnoxious. It's cool to have ads on your site to try and pull in a little bit of money, but it's not cool to ruin the experience for your readers. Hopefully I have placed the ads on my site in a place that will draw your attention, but not ruin the experience of this site.
Maybe you could write an e-book or a short PDF and sell that for a couple of bucks. You could sell merchandise with your logo on it. There are ways to make money, you just have to get creative if you wish to do it fulltime.
In any case if you are going to write on a blog do it for yourself and whatever passion you have. If you do it just to make money you will find that your writing suffers along with your happiness. You might be able to pick and choose the best topics to write about so you get high paying Google Ads, but most of the time those topics are not what will interest your readers so be careful.
For those that use Google Ads or Amazon or any other type of revenue generator are you getting the returns you expected?
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Yeah CafePress would be cool, but I think that requires a loyal following and a somewhat cool site that would make people wish to purchase your goods. Slashdot could get away with something like that.
However, CafePress is also good for publishing books if you wish to take that option.
Scrivs (http://businesslogs.com)
Let's not forget the future opportunity offered by RSS Ads (www.rssads.com). It's currently in beta, so they're just signing up publishers for now. Some of us have written about the idea of advertising via RSS, so soon we'll get to see just how well it works.
Chris Vincent (http://dris.dyndns.org:8080/)
Well RSS ads are dangerous territory right now as they will piss off many readers.
Scrivs (http://businesslogs.com)
In regards what you had said earlier, and I forgot to mention previously is your point about writing an ebook. I've seen this being done a lot more as of lately, and I think that when done by the right person, it has the potential to be a fairly decent amount of revenue.
However there are some major drawbacks to this, especially in the "web design community." First off, think about how many people you would give your book to free based on who knows what factors. You know them, you respect them, whatever.
Now think of this as well, you write an ebook and one designer buys that. Think about how many web designers you have some sort of communication with, and are willing to share what you have paid for with. Lets imagine that for a moment that everyone who posts to comments on whitespace has this ebook that you, Paul, have written, think of how many people have actually paid for it.
Everyone who is interested in it now has it, and maybe at best, a quarter of them actually paid for it. And I think a quarter is being very generous, a lower number than that is much more realistic.
And on top of that, not everyone can get away with this money making tool. You have to have a name that comes to mind right away when the word design is mentioned. I could write an ebook and have it contain a great amount of useful information that many might find useful. However, for me to try to sell it would be ridiculous, I wouldn't even be able to give it away.
Ryan Latham? Who the hell is that. Just some cracker from Ohio who wants me to spend money on some stupid PDF file.
Ryan Latham (http://worldoneweb.com)
Well... I'm not sure what you constitute as a large sum of money, but my Google AdSense has currently earned $xxx to date, from only five and half months of use. (DxF got started in January, but didn't find legs until March or April.)
The bigger entries I've had, both Gurus v. Bloggers pieces, Design Eye, the Photoshop giveaway and the RTFM entry all earned quite a bit of money.
I expect by the end of the year, if my ad rates stay current, I'll have earned some $xxxx for my blog. Now, I don't think of that as a lot of money, but it easily covers all of my hosting costs, and if I find a way to bump the revenue even a little bit, into the $xxxx range, it'll cover the costs of a new laptop.
To me, that's plenty. Covering the hosting costs alone was worth it, but being to buy a new machine would make it even more worth while.
Andrei Herasimchuk (http://www.designbyfire.com)
I would be interested to see just how much money you could make from an eBook as an experiement. At Paul's stage of the game I would like to think that he could put something together and then share the experience. Hmmm, I am going to have to check that out to see what it takes to do.
Also for a blog, if you get design business based of your blog promotions alone, does that count?
dru (http://www.drusellers.com)
I started serving adsense on Conspiracy Archive a little more than a week ago and have already made $xxx. I'm averaging about $xx a day and should make $xxx a month. Overall I'm very satisfied with the results.
Basically this site of mine was sitting there collecting dust for a year while I attended to regular clients. I re-designed it with standards and with the intention of generating some extra revenue to offset the extra bandwidth costs. Turns out that because of the redesign (using css and xhtml) I cut back the insane bloat in the pages and will no longer have to dish out an extra $70 per month on bandwidth. Now I have a steady stream of income from the ads that I can put in my pocket.
Its not a blog site by any means, more of a resource - for a targeted audience. I already have ideas for other sites designed specifically to take advantage of high value keywords and targeted ads - something a bit more mainstream. I'm sure there's many out there doing this and I'm also sure that it is very lucrative.
Terry (http://www.xdevdesign.com/)
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#1
I use AdSense on my site, and like you said, it doesn't generate as much revenue as people may assume.
But in the end when you take into consideration that you would be running the blog anyway, having the ad up there isn't too big of a deal. I would run the site even without AdSense bringing in the little profit that it does, why not keep the ads up there and make money for seemingly nothing?
As far as Amazon, it is something I have considered, but don't feel that it is in my area. What someone might want to consider after getting a semi-popular site is CafePress, which I have been told once you have a very popular site, that you can make some half-way to decent money that way.
Ryan (http://www.worldoneweb.com)