• Blogging For Fun and Profit

Perhaps the fundamental issue is, “Why blog?” Fame, fortune? Neither are likely from blogging—but possible, in the same way the becoming a rock start is possible. Some (few) people do achieve stardom, but there are an awful lot of garageband wanna-bes that never make a penny nor are noticed by anyone but their buddies. Nevertheless, they have fun making music, and maybe that is the pivotal criteria.

If you enjoy sharing your views, then blog! But keep in mind that unless you have something unique to say, can write it in an attractive way, and are willing to do it frequently, the result is going to be more akin to an online diary or journal than a business.

Part and parcel of blogging is creating and maintaining the blog, not just posting frequent pithy brainstorms or long heated diatribes. Blogger (owned by Google) and Wordpress (open source) are both free and you can set up a site in an hour or so. But it is a learning process. Once established, then there’s the expectation that you’ll have something to say at least daily, or even more often.

Viewership (site traffic) and pagerank is the name of the game if you want to make money with the site. There’s also a certain level of administrative responsibilities that come with the territory, such as comment moderation, spam filtering, update installs, and other tasks that will take some time too.

The rule of thumb on making-money from click-through ads (Google AdSense is another whole world to learn) is that you’ll make $1 for each 1000 visitors. So if you can attract 100,000 visitors you might actually make some money at it. But not a living. Still, if you add display ads or if you have something to sell on the site, you can make more than that. Ten years ago we wrote a book, a directory of venture capital sources, that was published by John Wiley & Sons. We retained the electronic rights and made 3 times more money from selling a downloadable database of venture firms than we did from book sales. And the nice thing was that those sales were a ‘ka-ching’ process, untouched by human hands.

So, should you blog? Sure, as long as it’s fun. Will you make a profit? That depends on what you think your time is worth.