Do You Make Money With Your Blog?

There’s an interesting Poll on ProBlogger this month. The question was In October, How Much Did You Earn from Blogging? There was a wide range of options for this poll from I don’t make money blogging (780 or 28% of all votes) to Over $15000 (176 or 6% of all votes). My own humble efforts land me near the top of the list, without all that much money coming in. At this writing 2831 people answered the poll and I am a bit surprised at how many people are making thousands of dollars a month. My personal goals are to make around $4,000 a month with my blog. This goal is a long way off, but it can clearly be reached by some bloggers. But it is like everything else in life, that Top 2% are making all the real money.

When I first got serious about blogging I found a blogger with a lot of cool widgets and dodads all his blog. He had left me a comment with a link back to his blog. This might be called a spam comment, as he said something along the lines of, Hey, nice post-read this one that I wrote on the same subject. Is that spam? And if not, why not? I followed the link and found his blog. He was using Payperpost, Blogads, Newsroom feeds, Amazon affiliate links, and he was the first person I saw using those way cool little Digg buttons. I found all of these things to be pretty cool and gave them all at least a small try. I have since found other blogs with all kinds of other ways to make money with a blog. Interestingly this other blog now has a lower Alexa score than I do, though he seems to post on a regular basis.
Most blogs seem to have a Donate Button, but does anyone make any money from Donations? You have to do more than just slap the button on the sidebar. But I’m not sure putting a nag on every post would be all that welcome either. I’ve gotten no donations, at least none that I noticed. I will be working on the whole Donations idea in the coming weeks.
Sponsors are another level of giving, or selling as seems to be more the case in the blogsphere. A Sponsor pays for some space on the blog, or maybe pays for links to their page. As with all things bloggy and money there seems to be a pretty small payout for these sponsorships. But I am looking into this as well. If you never ask, you’ll never get, right?
I have also seen a number of beggar blogs, where the blogger just states their case that they are in debt thirty thousand dollars and could use a helping hand. One of the first beggar blogs actually worked and someone paid off a woman’s twenty thousand dollar credit card debt. There are whole networks of people begging for money now for one thing or another. Does this still work?
And how is begging different from asking for donations? I think that begging is a man on a street corner that doesn’t really want a job, while a donation is helping someone by providing them with a new computer as their old is a pain in the neck. A Sponsor is someone that wants a link to their website and nice write up in thanks for the donation.
As I said, I will be working on a few of these ideas in the coming weeks. If I start making enough money to take the occasional week off, I’ll write a bit more on the topic.
Until then, how do you make money with your blog?

Jon Herrera
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Published by Jon Herrera

Writer, Photographer, Blogger.