The best way to make money blogging is to blog about how to make money blogging. No secret there.How many people actually succeed financially at blogging? Recent estimates say maybe 2% of bloggers make a modest living, with the sweet spot somewhere about 100,000 page views a month.
"Brazen Careerist" Penelope Trunk, with 400,000 page views a month, says don't bother trying. Unless you already have a large and loyal audience, work for big media or are incredibly talented -- such as the alpa-female blogger Heather Armstong of Dooce.com.
Proceed directly to Trunk's straight-no-chaser post, "Reality Check: You're Not Going to Make Money From Your Blog."
Let me contribute this ugly sidebar: The amount of time it would take most of us to reach 100,000 page views -- via the obsessive link building that Google's search system pretty much demands these days -- leaves no time for actually producing content. That catch-22 drives most seasoned bloggers to the brink. Or the want ads.
Still, lots of bloggers are trying and some are succeeding, as Mark Penn of Burson-Marsteller reports in the Wall Street Journal: "Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters," he says. The columnist has taken some fire for his informal blogger census, and later issued a call for more reliable counts.
Penn's post remains must reading: "America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire."
Hat tip to ProBlogger Darren Rowse, whose roundup post on blogging and money completes this downbeat trilogy.
Oh and ... This blog makes no money; I don't really try. The best techniques I know are to work multiple streams of income across numerous Internet properties. Some of the projects can be time-consuming flagships, but most should not require much updating. Read the ProBlogger post for various approaches to monetization.
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