Blogging for Dollars and the Blogobubble (Part I)

June 17, 2007 @ 9:06 pm · Filed under Advertising, Blogobubble, Marketing, Money

If you spend any amount of time in the blogosphere one of the first things that you’ll notice is that you start to use a lot of stupid words like blogosphere. The second thing you will notice is that the world of blogs is a lot like the world of late night television. Everywhere you look you’re inundated with infomercials and pyramid schemes. Get rich quick. How to make money from home with no effort.

At the top of the blog world you have a few bloggers who are raking in serious cash. Six figures in some cases. The problem with this is that your average person isn’t very clever. So instead of saying, ‘wow, that’s amazing how do I learn from them’, your average person will say, ‘I’m going to create a clone of their website’.

To begin with, if you’re sitting on the internet reading blogs all day, you’re probably not the most motivated person in the world. Combine that with the fact that blogging is the new gold rush and forget it. You suddenly have thousands of people on the web trying to become millionaires by blogging.

To have any chance of making money through blogging you need to do two main things. 1. Learning from others & 2. You need to find something that you’re genuinely interested in (and no, getting rich quick is not a good idea, too much competition), and write about it consistently better than everyone else.

Be forewarned blogging is probably not going to make you rich. The blogosphere reminds me a lot of the tech bubble (we’ll call it the blogobubble because that sounds funny), a lot of people trying to get very wealthy in a short amount of time without any sort of plan. Advertisers are only going to pay for results/traffic and there is a lot of competition out there. That’s why the people at the top of the pyramid do so well for themselves, making money becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, so if you see someone out there making a ton of money, you’re drawn to their site to find out why and so is everyone else.

Now I can’t tell you what your niche should be and I can’t make you stick to it. But what I can help you with is the learning part. Below I’ve collected some articles concerning the ways in which you can make money online with your blog, the major revenue streams that bloggers use and links to some of the biggest blogs (yes you too can help hold up this pyramid). In part II of this article, I’ll teach you a little about long-tail economics and how you can do alright for yourself financially without copying the big boys.

Articles about Blogging for Dollars:

Some Blogs about … Blogging:

www.entrepreneurs-journey.com
www.problogger.net
www.stevepavlina.com
www.doshdosh.com
www.johntp.com
www.johnchow.com
www.copyblogger.com

The Major Revenue Sources:

AdSense:

  • Google’s text based ad service. The way Google makes all of its money and many bloggers do too.

Amazon Associates:

  • “Launched in 1996, Associates is Amazon.com’s affiliate marketing program. By linking to Amazon products and services you can add compelling content for your site visitors enjoyment and receive up to 10% in referral fees for doing so.”

Chitika:

  • “Chitika provides bloggers the opportunity to harness their independent original content and opinions to monetize the traffic to their site. Offers retailers a new channel to merchandise their products, and gives consumers better access to a broader base of independent expert advice from the blogger community.”

Link Share:

  • “As a LinkShare affiliate, you will earn revenue for driving sales, leads and traffic to partner sites. Find hundreds of affiliate programs from Fortune 500 and other leading businesses in the LinkShare Network. Registration is free”

Review Me:

  • Write reviews for cash.

Text Link Ads:

  • Inserts text links into your posts.

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