Blogging for Fun, Blogging for Money

When I first started blogging it was just for fun, my first blog was more or less a message board for me and about five other like minded people to bounce ideas off of each other. If we had other readers, we didn’t have tracking software to watch them come and go. On that older blog I got comments from my little group on every single post and we had interactions and conversations. It was fun and I never thought about selling anything-never thought about pagerank, Alexa, or another of the other countless ways that bloggers use to keep score now.

I am not getting rich from my blog, but I have hopes of making enough to take a few days off from the dreaded real job. I read Bloggernoob from time to time and I don’t agree with most of what he says. But he is all about make money blogging. And he is not alone, there are tons of people with no pagerank telling you how to get pagerank and tons of places talking about getting rich with your blog. We all want to get rich, so what’s the problem?

There is small backlash going on in the blogsphere when it comes to making money blogging, there are bloggers that see using a blog for profit as an act of evil. Selling out. Selling your blog is akin to selling your soul. I don’t spend a lot of time at the Big Blogs in the varied and sundry Top 100 lists, but the ones I have stopped by have all kinds of ads. The only big name blog with no ads that I have seen is Post Secrets-but that blog is a really an ad for the Post Secret books. I predict that there will be a Top 100 Ad Free Blogs showing up before too long. If I were a bit smarter and had more free time I’d start my own Social Network for Ad Free Blogs-just to see if I could sell ad space like Digg and StumbleUpon.

I don’t see any special virtue in not writing Paid Posts, not using Adsense, not selling 125×125 ads, or any of the other ways that people make money blogging. It might be a question of how much money you make from blogging is enough money. Is it worth annoying your readers for 5 dollars a day? Or do you want to make 500 dollars a day? Or is it just the purity of the blog, you would never sell out, even if a publisher came by and told you they wanted to turn your blog into a book, and then it would later be optioned to be a movie. Julie/Julia Project is kind of the dream blog success story. A blogger that wrote a best selling book which is being turned into a movie. Is she a sellout unworthy of being called a blogger?

I don’t have the focus to make these pure for money blogs that are basically online catalogs, and I can’t seem to make much from my random thoughts either. So is it a waste of time to even try? I don’t think it is. I don’t think its wrong either. If I could narrow my dream down to one thing and blog about it and make it happen, how would that be bad?

On the other hand, if you want to blog without ads, fine-just don’t expect the rest of us to jump on board.