September 16th, 2005
Blogging for Dollars
There are over 30,000 new blogs created daily, studies show. Most people blog for fun or ego, but increasingly more are in it for the money, or at least the potential money.
With existing software, it is fairly easy to set up entire sites powered by blog software like WordPress (which is what I use). With WordPress, though, you need to register a domain, and find and pay for hosting.
With Google’s blogger.com, you don’t need hosting or a domain, it can all be self-contained, but blogger isn’t quite as powerful as WordPress.
James Torio, a student at Syracuse University, has recently published a paper, which was done for his master’s thesis there, studying blogs in general, and the ability for bloggers to earn a little or a lot of income.
Although the study was too small to be credible, 4% of the bloggers he studied claimed to earn over $100,000 per year by blogging. More significantly, 40% earn over $5,000 per year with their blogs.
I caution that blogging for dollars is not something you can do without some effort. It takes knowledge about a specific subject that people are interested in and advertisers are selling products for, it takes time, and it takes a long term commitment. I don’t know a single blogger who earns significant income that just started in the last few months.
With that being said, if you blog or ever considered it, here’s a great PDF to download and study:
http://www.everyhuman.com/work/theses8.12.low.pdf
