Blogging as a Publishing Business: How Much Money Can You Make?

I’m not going to tell you that blogging will make you rich. As I’ve already said, blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Your goals need to be realistic and you must be willing to put effort into your site. I understand that people want to see dollar signs when somebody discusses making a living, so I will share mine.

In the past year, my blogs have earned about $17,000 from various advertising sources. Before you get turned off by that number, however, understand that this has been a part-time income for me. For most of the past year I have both worked a full time job and been a full-time graduate student. I generally spend about two-to three hours a day on my blogs. I estimate that I dedicated 700 hours to my blogs in the past year. That means my hourly income was about $25.

This is my second full year of blogging (although some of my sites are older than that). While I would love to have made more money, I believe my profits were very realistic considering the hours spent. Now that the sites are up and running, I am moving towards full-time blogging and I hope that next year’s income will continue to reflect that hourly rate.

My advertising revenue comes from several sources. These include direct payments from individuals as well as affiliate advertising though Amazon, Google, Commission Junction and Yahoo. There are several other services and I will discuss affiliates at length in a future post. Some people may also look to sell items or services directly through their sites.

Because of confidentiality agreements with the various advertisers, I cannot give you exact numbers about how much money one service pays versus another. I can give you this general number for my site however. I have found that between all of the advertisers I average about $9 per every thousand page view on my sites. My blogs are about a variety of subjects, so they probably earn about an average amount. Some topics (such as medicine and finance) will earn more than others, but this is a good yard stick. By this measurement, you can see that the more visitors you can appeal to, the more money you can make. A site with 30,000 visitors a day will probably make a substantial amount of money while one with 300 visitors a day won’t even buy your lunch.

One of the facts that needs to be clear from the beginning is that you won’t be making money the first day. Your blog will require time to build an audience and for a long time you will need to write with the knowledge that not too many people will be reading your original posts. You will still need to write them as if you are writing for a large audience though, because quality and continuity is what will bring people back and get them to recommend the site to their friends.