Turning a Blog into a Business

As a precursor to the upcoming class focused on Technorati.com, I decided to do a little research. The site recently posted its annual report called “State of the Blogosphere” (and, strangely, that word, blogosphere, did not trip up my spell check).

Some fun statistics:

• Bloggers post some 900,000 posts per day
• Bloggers with 100,000+ views per month earn an average of $75,000 annually (a somewhat skewed figure, because the top few blogs earn much more than that)

Some of the biggest blogging money makers are Perez Hilton (celebrity gossip raking in $111,000 per month) and Overheard in New York (quotes that the author hears on the streets of NYC while earning $8K per month). Some of technorati.com’s other big money makers are just regular guys and gals blogging about their lives without specific purpose.

Making money on a blog is becoming easier than ever. The Amazon Associates program gives you a referral fee if someone buys a product from a click-through on your blog, and Google can analyze your site, places relevant ads and give you a spif for every click.

When your blog is making money, and you’re beginning to rely on that income to live, your life pressures are different. Namely, blog and blog often. The revenue stream from ads is entirely dependent on traffic to your website. If you decide to slack off and go on vacation for a week, your traffic slows way down and ads start to be pulled.

While the idea of making money writing about something I personally enjoy for a full time job is enticing (my personal fantasy includes rolling out of bed way past 7am, making my way slowly to the nearest coffee shop, drinking latte after latte, happily posting about my thoughts and feelings for a couple hours and promptly taking the rest of the day off) the pressure to remain popular is difficult for me to really wrap my head around. I think I’ll wait to begin my blog career until after payment via the “click” method expires and bloggers are paid by the genius of their words – a world in which I’m bound to be much more successful!