According to Daniel Lyons from Newsweek, growing rich by blogging is probably a high-tech fairy tale.
“For two years I was obsessed with trying to turn a blog into a business. I posted 10 or 20 items a day to my site, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, rarely taking a break…
My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job…”
Alex Iskold who writes for ReadWriteWeb did some analysis and shared that,
“At best, 10% out of 1,300+ respondents made decent money. And likely most of the people who indicated they made over $15,000 are likely blogging in one of a handful of lucrative niches. A quarter of the voters made no money at all. Of those who attempted to make money, most did not make much.”
These are indeed sobering statistics. I believe many of you who chanced upon this blog post might by now be very disappointed. But all is not lost!
If the numbers provided by ReadWriteWeb is true, it implies that will be quite impossible for most of us to join the pro-bloggers to become the top 10% earners in the world. But what we can do is to avoid becoming the bottom 25% who do not earn any money from blogging. I believe with the right methods and strategies, many of us can earn a decent living from blogging.
But how much is enough? Will you grow rich by blogging?
The thing is, the measurement for “rich” is actually relative.
To someone who is earning $50,000 monthly but spending more than twice his income on credit will probably feel quite poor. In the same vein, a mother working from home and earning $2,000 per month from her part-time blogging venture may feel quite rich as otherwise she may not have any other income. A struggling undergraduate who pays his or her own tuition fees totally from his blogging AdSense earnings will probably feel very relieved compared to their peers who graduated with a huge tuition loan but without a good paying job offer.
So to answer your question, no, most of us may not be able to retire from our day job and become a millionaire from a home business such as blogging unless we are very lucky.
But you will be able to generate a comfortable sum of money from blogging and become a semi-pro blogger just like Wayang Blogger as long as you put in effort. With this additional stream of income that you earn from the home Internet business that is over and above your salaried income, you will be able to leave a more comfortable lifestyle as compared to your peers.
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A comment to what Daniel Lyons said.
His blog is of purely entertainment nature. It is all about jokes centered around Steve Jobs and Apple Inc.
On the Web, people have certain expectations. One of them is “entertainment on WWW is available for FREE”.
Yup, access to Fake Steve blog is free. Many posts he wrote are hilarious. But there is no brand value in it.
AdSense works as contextual advertising. What kind of valuable “context” his blog offer to tempt the visitors to click on the adsense ads? When people visit such site, their goal is to enjoy hilarious contents, not to find information on products or services. How the heck could he expect to earn a lot just simply because he got loads of visitors?
It appears that many people owning websites believe that traffic = money. While this equation is not entirely wrong, traffic doesn’t equate to money. More traffic doesn’t simply mean more green papers either.
Content plays a part, very critical and vital part, in success of a site.
Personal branding is another intangible return blogging can give. But beware of what kind of image you are projecting. Building a brand is hard. Building a personal brand by posting hilarious jokes is harder.