Question: Earning from Blogs

Can it work? Sure. Should you quit you day job as soon as you set up the subscription process? I wouldn't.

It all comes down to content. If your content isn't bringing hundreds -- if not thousands -- of hits per day, I wouldn't expect it to bring in any subscription money either.

I can't think of many subscription blogs that do all that well. A few erotica or get-rich-quick ones. I'd agree that unless you have thousands of uniques a day, it's unlikely to add up to much. All my (20+) blogs put together make about $1000 a year, which on an hourly basis would be not very much at all.

I actually moved away from ads on my blog because I looked at the number of ads and how much they detracted from my blog, worked out the click-thru rate. Basically it wasn't worth the hassle for me. Even at 1000s of hits a week it was still not doing much more than a few dollars.

To put it into context, we get around about 2,000 visitors a month, which sounds like a lot. We have ads that pay us for amount of visitors, not amount of clicks (we're part of a couple of blogging networks).

We'll STILL be lucky to make the cost of hosting back.

If you're like Hyperbole and a Half and you get tens of thousands of views a day you can probably rely on it to bring in some decent money. Otherwise, consider it a success if you make enough to buy a chocolate bar.

I believe even Hyperbole and a Half makes much more through merchandise than she does through ads.

veinglory said:

I can't think of many subscription blogs that do all that well. A few erotica or get-rich-quick ones. I'd agree that unless you have thousands of uniques a day, it's unlikely to add up to much. All my (20+) blogs put together make about $1000 a year, which on an hourly basis would be not very much at all.

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Once in a while I'd contribute to my friend's blog, which I believe makes over ten grand or so a month, but that took her four years to get going. She deserves it too, trust me, the girl lives online and she's a fab girl. I think Perez still makes the huge buckaroos. I had a blog, I don't have one now. I'm thinking about the right thing to blog about.

You've gotta get some kind of sales funnel going. If you like you can start with AdSense, which might pays you $2.50 per 1,000 page views, and when your site gets bigger add a Premium Membership section for $9.95 a year which includes access to, say, a critique group where you critique any short story sent in within a month, some free ebooks about the craft of writing, etc.

And make you can capture a list of subscribers so that when you put out a new produect you can offer it to all of them at once.