im going to be headed to austin for sxsw in about 10 days and i know im gonna run into people who are either gonna ask me for tips on how to make money blogging or introduce me to some of these make money bloggers and im just gonna take another sip of beer and head back to the bbq.
theres a word for people who try to make real money blogging.
its the same word they have for people who try to make real money fucking.
lost.
blogging should be something that you do for love. something that you do because you wanna send and s.o.s. to the world. something that you do because you want to be creative and express yourself and get the attention of the hot girl who youre too shy to say hi to.
when people write songs for money or manufacture bands to make money we know what those records sound like – total shit.
we will be talking about bob dylan for generations to come because fucker kept it real. still keeps it real.
blogs that do it for the sake of money are so clearly full of bullshit that they never make it to the top. which doesnt mean that the How to Make Money Blogging blogs arent successful or have good ideas – they are and they do (some of them), but theyre never written by people who could write a real blog about something that would interest a large group of people.
which shouldnt be the point either.
what the Blogging Experts dont tell you in their how to make money blogs is that there are about 100 people making money blogging today out of 130 million. you have better odds marrying and divorcing britney spears for the money. so do that. those 100 people, by the way, are on the Technorati Top 100, and those people probably arent millionaires, so befriend a trainwreck pop star or play the lottery.
plus some of those 100 are bloggers who have been doing it for years and year and who are actually pretty fucking great at what they do.
heres another thing those make money blog writers wont tell you: most of the blogs in the technorati top 100 are group blogs, meaning you have to share that revenue with 5-10 people. meaning no one is getting rich. plus you have to blog 6 times a day. plus you have to network like crazy. plus you have to write about the exact right shit at the exact right time.
a few years ago you could be a right wing hack and probably make a few bucks. today you’d be better off writing about iphones and grownup toys. but still you have to compete with the boing boings and the engadgets and the gizmodos and techcrunches and all of those sites have several writers, so how are you, alone, gonna compete?
you arent. and you shouldnt. you should give up on making money blogging and do what you shoulda done in the first place – write for the joy of writing.
and get a fucking job.
– Google gives SF homeless 