Why you don't make money blogging

I first put Adsense on this website on June 19th, 2003. It was early afternoon when I enabled it and I was happily surprised to find that I had earned over $40.00 when I checked the next morning. I was even happier to find that I earned $51.99 on the 20th. Man, this could be pretty darn good..

The 21st was a Saturday. Earnings dropped to just over $10.00 but Sunday was double that, Monday and Tuesday were $50.87 and $56.00 respectively and Wednesday hit $61.66. I was ecstatic!

But it dropped off quickly after that - $33.00, $24.00, less on weekends and that's pretty much where it has stayed ever since. My impressions (ads seen by visitors) has more than doubled since then, click-through rates have stayed fairly constant, but earnings average out to about $20.00 a day. Nothing wrong that - that's a car payment and then some. All together, I've made over $50,000 from Adsense since June of 2003.

I have more than Google, of course. Chitika throws $100 or so at me every month and Amazon is usually good for ten or twenty dollars. There are some other small things that are worth a few dollars a month. I also sell e-books and that brings in about $200 a month or better - though I just doubled the prices on those so I don't really know how that will affect income; could go up, could go down. And then of course there's my consulting, which is most of my income and is strongly driven from website inquiries.

Why am I being so open about this? Because most people aren't and it's very difficult for a new blogger to know what to expect.

So should you expect to make at least this sort of money? No, probably not. Most bloggers make very little. Some make much more, but most do not. That's reality, and there are good reasons why.

First, let's consider subject areas. Most of this website is about technical subjects: Unix, Mac OS X, networking. Pretend for a moment that instead it were all just about what we're talking about here. Just blogging and all that. That's a common theme for many bloggers: writing about blogging.

Look at the types of ads that run on these types of pages - they aren't for high ticket items so they aren't worth much to the site that carries them. A few might carry decent payouts: an ad for high end hosting might pay well, but how often have you switched your host? I've been with mine since 1997; it's not a common thing. Most of the ads pay pennies and suffer more from the fact that they are ubiquitous: you've seen those ads at every blogging advice site you've been to.. contrast that with the ads that run on the technical articles here - more expensive, more variety, more chance of clicking, more money when they do click.

Now consider the psychology of the visitors. If you are reading this, it might be because you found it in a Google search but it's far more likely that you are either a regular visitor or someone sent you here to read this. You probably were not searching Google for articles about making money with Adsense and if you were, your chances of finding this page would be very slim.

With the technical articles, it's very likely that the reader came because of search - it's a 90% chance, in fact. If you are searching, it's probably because you have a problem and people with problems are much more likely to click on ads.. simply because one of the ads might be a solution to their problem. The ads themselves will often carry higher ticket items, so they will pay the website more. No mystery there, right?

Finally, let's consider raw volume. Let's say you are a relatively new blogger. You've been at it for two years, churning out three articles a day - which is a pretty hectic pace for most people, but you are dedicated so you now have almost two thousand pages that Google can potentially show to searchers. On the other hand, we have me, who has been at it for more than a decade. Google claims 30,500 results for "site:aplawrence.com" - I think they are confused because I actually only have about half that number of articles, but still that's seven times what you have.. if everything else were equal, which of us will get more traffic from Google search? Of course that's going to give me more potential buyers for everything: Adsense income, e-books, consulting services.. it's a numbers game and the bigger your number, the more you will make.

Before I leave this, let me mention something about regular visitors. A lot of blogging advice sites will tell you to work hard at getting regular readers - RSS signups, mailing lists, that sort of thing. Those are good things to do for some areas: regular readers will buy e-books, courses, consulting. In fact, regular readers are more apt to buy those kinds of things because they usually require trust: I want to know you pretty well before I'll fork over $30.00 for your e-book or several hundred dollars for your mentoring course. But when it comes to ad income, regular readers won't do much for you. First, they aren't there with a problem - they aren't searching. Second, they've seen your ads before, day after day - they are ad-blind for your site. Ad income comes from search traffic primarily. That makes logical sense, but I know it from statistics also: regular visitors aren't ad clickers.

I hope this was helpful and do feel free to ask questions in the comments.