No, I was thinking about a little update on blogging after see John Hawkins' post last week, "7 Things Every Blogger Should Know How To Do (Besides Write)." John has a comment about making money from blogging, but the more basic thing here is the traffic numbers he cites:
#5) How to make some money doing this: Here's an unpleasant truth. You can have 2,000 or 3,000 people a day reading your blog and make almost nothing off of it. In fact, from what I've seen, until you get big enough to stand out a little bit from the crowd, say at 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 people reading you a day, you will have great difficulty making enough money to do more than pay your bills for your blog. Then, even when you do get big, if you don't know what you're doing and dramatically underprice your ads, you can still make a lot less money than what you should. I've seen people who could DOUBLE their ad rates and probably not lose any ads.While I'd love to make a little more money than I'm getting now (mostly from Amazon and the ad at the sidebar), I blog mostly to make a contribution to the debate (and we need more regular folks in new media, so hopefully I can hold out for a while). American Power has been doing well. My traffic has doubled since last year, and I'm co-blogging at both Right Wing News and Theo Spark's. (And that's something to think about, for the newer bloggers just getting started. Get going on the networking and seek high-traffic blogs to post essays and increase exposure.) I'm closing in on a solid average of 2000 visitors per day. A good chunk of that is from SEQ, but more and more it's due to the relentless promotion that's integral to serious blogging. As I've said previously, don't be shy about pimping your stuff (although adhere to some limits, naturally). In addition, I suspect one should think pretty carefully about making blogging a career. I'll be honest: If in a few years from now I'm able to find a way to make some serious, long-term money from blogging, I'll be no doubt looking to speed up retirement from my college. After ten years of teaching at LBCC, I've realized I probably don't have the ideological temperament for academe. It's my career, and I'm a professional, but I think I'd like to leave college teaching sooner rather than later. Maybe I can write books, or something. But that's a matter I'll discuss more another day.
There's one more thing: the frequency of recent "babe blogging." I posted a ton of "Rule 5" last week. Linkmaster Smith has the roundup:
American Power went on a bit of a Rule 5 rampage this week, NTTAWWT:This is mostly experimentation, especially the frequency of the hotness. I may or may not post Rule 5 in the future, or at least at regular intervals. There's clearly a demand for it. But what's important is that I CAN POST HOTTIES whether I want to or not. IT'S ABOUT FREEDOM. So if you like this kind of thing, enjoy it while it lasts. Meanwhile, maybe we'll see some increased blog frequency over at Swedish Meatballs Confidential!
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