Can You Make Money From A New Blog?

A few common questions about blogging and more particularly, starting a new blog that keep popping up are:

• Can you make money from blogging?
• How much money can you make blogging?
• How do you make money blogging?

This post will deal primarily with the first and second questions; future articles will cover the last one in the list in more detail. As the article is quite long, I have broken it into two separate posts, with this being the first installment. The second will come later, so check back for it, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Can You Make Money From Blogging?

The short answer is, Yes, it just depends on what you consider ‘Making Money’. It is relatively easy to make some money from a new blog. There are plenty of MFA blogs out there that do that every day; often the people running them can churn out several thousand sites a day, with each one making some money. Now I am not even going to discuss my opinion of that topic here, I mention it only to provide an example that even a blog with basically no thought given to the content can make money.

Obviously, ‘Some Money‘ is not what most people reading this blog hope to achieve; they want real money; enough that they can make a living from blogging. For many of us, that is the goal, to be able to throw off the shackles of a 9-5 job and be our own boss. But is this a realistic goal?

The simple answer is that it is attainable, although many factors will affect how successful you become and how quickly you attain that success.

Monetizing A New Blog – The Negatives

When you start a new blog, there are many things working against you making any significant income for you effort. In the beginning, just like any business focussed endeavor, it really is a labour of love. Some of the things that work against you making money on a new blog include:

• No one knows about the blog – it is difficult to bring in readers if you simply rely on them randomly finding your site
• Lack of reputation – you have not established a reputation to rival the big boys of blogging
• No significant traffic
• Poor ranking on Alexa and Google PR
• No search engine traffic
• Lack of content – you will not have a lot of content, unless you are very productive
• Lack of incoming links
• Inability to be accepted to some ad networks – this limits the type of ad programs you can participate in

Well enough of the sugar coating you say, so tell me the bad news. Well, that’s it, now onto the positives.

Monetizing A New Blog – The Positives

After all the negative things working against you making money, there must be some positives. There is, although they may not seem as strong in relation to the negatives. It is simply how you look at things.

• You will be fresh and enthusiastic, not jaded like some long term bloggers can get
• You can create your own reputation
• Your traffic can only get better
• Your Alexa rank and Google PR will increase
• Write a useful quality post and you can gain traffic straight away
• Your enthusiasm should help you generate good quality content quite quickly
• As above, if you write a useful quality post, people will link to you
• This is true, without most of the above, you cannot get accepted into some ad networks, but there are other ways to monetize your blog, including Google Adsense

Give Me Some Examples

OK, if you think it is not possible to earn money blogging, how about I give you some examples. BusinessWeek in a July article posted details and earnings for some of the top blog earners on the web and how they make their money. You can check it out yourself, but I’ll provide a quick list of the more relevant ones, as well as add a couple myself.

Name	Established	Revenue
I Can Has Cheezburger	January, 2007	Estimated $5,600 a month
Started as a joke, this blog features funny captioned photos of cats.The blog’s usage has doubled each month and as of July 2007, gets half a million page views a day. Says Eric Nakagawa, aka Cheezburger. “If you hit a niche and you can build a community, you might not have a $1 million idea, but you might have a $10,000 or a $100,000 idea,” A week of ads on Cheezburger, via Blogads, starts at $500 and tops out at $5,400 for a premium position. The site also sells through Google AdSense and AdBrite platforms. It recently ranked No. 26 on the most-linked-to blogs list on Technorati.
ShoeMoney	October, 2005	$12,000 a month
Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog, ShoeMoney, deals with making money online and gets 20,000 unique visitors per day, earning him $12,000 a month. It ranks among the top 100 top blogs on Technorati. Schoemaker had no ads on the blog until January, 2007, and the five spots sell out quickly. “We’ve never had an open advertising spot,” he says. “We have a waiting list.”
Overheard in New York	July, 2003	Estimated $8,100 a month
Six people run Overheard in New York, a collection of anonymous comments submitted by readers. Started in 2003, revenue can fluctuate by a factor of 10 over six months. A small one-week buy on Blogads costs $375, and an ad with Flash in a prime space costs up to $6,000. Overheard draws 6 million page views a month and gets 100 submissions from readers each day.
Kottke.org	March, 1998	Estimated $5,300 a month
The blog has a single ad on it, with the site receiving 250,000 to 300,000 unique visits a month. The site ranks in the middle of the 100 most-linked-to blogs on Technorati.
TalkingPointsMemo	November, 2000	Estimated $45,000 a month
Josh Marshall started his political blog during the 2000 election recount, grew it into a small media company with three spin-off sites. Weekday page views approach 500,000.
Perez Hilton	September, 2004	Estimated $111,000 a month
Celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton (Mario Lavandeira) claims to get as many as 4 million unique visits a day, although independent estimates put his traffic much lower. Lavandeira stays uncharacteristically mum on the subject of exactly how much cash he rakes in, but Blogads lists a one-day “takeover” (all three banner ads on the site, plus a custom wallpaper) for $40,000.
TechCrunch	June, 2005	$200,000 a month
Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch frequently is near the top of the Technorati list. Arlington blogs about startups, and earns $200,000 per month from job boards and ads. There are now other sites in the network, which receive 5 million page views a month. $300 buys a small text ad for a week; banners start in the thousands. “Our advertisers are people who want to reach a tech audience and an early-adopter audience,” Arrington says. “It’s a targeted audience that spends a lot of money.”
Go Fug Yourself	July, 2004	Estimated $6,240 a month
Celebrity fashion blog started by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, which receives 3.5 million unique visitors a month. All the ads are sold through Blogads. One week of a bare-bones text ad starts at $60, and deluxe banners top $3,000. Cocks says what started as a goofy joke between friends three years ago has become a successful company.
Mashable	July, 2005	Estimated $166,000 a month
Mashable, another top Technorati site focuses on social networking and other online trends and receives 4 million monthly page views. Mashable uses Federated Media for its ad sales. Text ads start at $100 per week, banners at $2,000.
Problogger	November, 2004	Over $100,000 a year
Fellow Aussie blogger, Darren Rowse makes six figures a year from a mix of private ads, affiliate deals, and ads sold through platforms such as Chitika, Google AdSense, Text Link Ads, and Amazon Associates across his blogs.
John Chow Dot Com	December, 2005	Over $20,500 for September 2007
John’s sub-title for his blog is “I Make Money By Telling People How Much Money I Make Online”. That pretty much sums up what his blog is about.

Probably the blog of most interest to you from this list is the first one, I Can Has Cheezburger. This site only began in January 2007 and in a relatively short space of time has grown to develop sufficient income to make a living from it.