blogging for bucks (part 2)

Now that blogging is famous, it has become commercial. Those of us who were online when the World Wide Web was introduced saw the same transformation. The web started as a free, unexplored medium populated by the primitive sites of early adopters. For the most part, those sites were lists of links to other sites, with a bit of commentary — sound familiar? The first web sites were similar in spirit (if not in design) to today’s casual blogs. It didn’t take long for the commercial potential of the new medium to explode into reality. Likewise with blogs.

You can make money on the internet in four basic ways:

1. Sell a product
   
2. Provide a service
   
3. Sign up subscriptions to content
   
4. Run ads
   

Some sites manage to conduct online business in more than one of the four basic ways. Currently, commercial blogs are adsupported, for the most part. Just as many thousands of small webmasters have earned online income from running ads on their nonblog sites, bloggers are doing the same thing. And with the emergence of some high-profile blogs attracting millions of readers, a few bloggers are making very good money.

Blogging is a legitimate and maturing genre of publishing. Some companies hire professional bloggers (or pro writers who have never blogged and learn on the job) to produce corporate blogs in the same way that these companies hire copywriters to produce marketing brochures. That is one path for writers who want to ply the blogging trade. Then there are the blog networks, which are pushing the envelope of the blogosphere as a publishing force. The entire venture (again, like a magazine) is supported by advertising. Magazines also sell subscriptions; blogs don’t do that yet, but it’s not beyond the imagination. So, advertising is the business format of necessity if you are to make any money from your blog. But before discussion of advertising options, you need to know the other half of the blog marketing equation. Like two sides of a coin, earning money from a blog requires two considerations:

1. Visibility: Ad revenue depends on site traffic (lots of readers), and site traffic depends on making the blog visible. Several skills and tools go into site visibility, and having a general understanding of them can help your site even if you never run a single ad.
2. Monetization: I have a friend who laughs every time I utter the word monetize. I don’t blame him for getting the chuckles over such a geekspeak term, but that’s what everyone calls it when a site earns money. Something that previously generated no income has been monetized.