Just Two Posts A Day

At Do you see Ads on this page?, the author paints a grim picture of the likelihood of bloggers making money from advertising. By the way, he or she also violates their Google Adsense agreement in at least two ways in that post, but that's not my purpose for pointing you to it.

First - the prognosis isn't necessarily inaccurate. I've said as much myself at Advertising Strategies for Bloggers: most bloggers probably aren't going to make much money from ads.

However, some of us do, either because our sites attract high paying ads or just because we have so much volume that even the low priced ads total up to a good sized check. In my case, it's a bit of a mixture of both: some of my writing has higher paying ads, but mostly is the sheer mass of more than twelve thousand articles and six thousand visitors per day across my various sites. It's still not fantastic income, but considering the effort put in to it, it's not bad pay at all - probably something close to $45.00 per hour for the time I put into writing the articles (actually, quite a lot more than that because I also get consulting opportunites from my sites, but here I'm just counting advertising income). That's not bad, and it continues to get better.

So.. how did I get twelve thousand articles? Well, last month I brewed up a giant pot of coffee and.. No, of course not. I've been doing this for nine years now. Day after day after day, cranking out a little here and a little there. It averages out around two to four posts per day, and since each post averages about 275 words, I apparently have been writing about 550 words a day. That doesn't take a great deal of time; it's something you can easily squeeze in to most days without giving up your life. This post took about a half an hour; that's pretty typical. Can you find an hour a day to devote to blogging? I think you can.

I checked the archives of the site mentioned at the beginning of this post. Apparently it's been up about three months and they have a total of 26 posts as I write this. By my reckoning, they should have something closer to two hundred, but maybe this isn't their only blog. Let's pretend it is: at that rate, it's going to be close to a hundred years before they have 12,000 posts. Maybe they are very young and can afford to wait that long, but I sure can't and I bet you can't either.

My suggestion is that you treat your blogging efforts like you treat your 401K investments. Small, regular investments now can pay out big dividends later. I've made this suggestion to dozens of people: start now, write about what you love. Do it well, and do it every day. For the first few years, you probably will generate very little income. Don't think about it. Your day will come. If you keep plugging, chances are you will get a pay off. Maybe not: you may be dull, uninspiring, and completely uninteresting. If you don't see the numbers starting to climb after a year or so, maybe you should forget it: this just isn't your "thing". But you aren't going to find out unless you start doing it, are you?

So.. are you ready to write your two posts for today? I've done mine..

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