If you’re thinking of starting a blog, you should start one. It’s pretty easy to create content, and you get long term traffic. The only struggle is that it’s a bit of a slow grind, and getting started can feel painful, like you’re pulling teeth. Unless you have a product for sale, or are somehow able to go viral, the first hundred articles will likely not yield enough traffic for you to make a full-time living. It takes 6 months of your domain name being live to get any worthwhile traffic at all. So why do it? Because blogging has made people into millionaires. Blogging platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Popular micro bloggers such as Zuby are able to bootstrap their own success using the internet, allowing them to earn 6 figures with relatively little effort. All this being said, starting a blog is an investment. When you write a lot, you’re putting your time at risk. This blog has about 150 articles on it. It’s taken me a year to write this much, and that’s not enough. But it looks like the work I’m doing will be worthwhile. People still read; you just need to put in a lot of time in order to cultivate an audience that follows your work.
Blogs are still lucrative
The equation for how much money you make from a blog is as follows:
Revenue = Number of Posts X Number of Monthly Views per Post X Revenue per Thousand Views
If you want to get the total revenue for your blog, you need to make this number an average number and multiply it by the total number of months that your blog is active.
RPMs can vary wildly. Professional bloggers without any other skills seem to be making around $40 per thousand views. People selling digital products can report RPMs up to $500. By contrast, CPMs for Television ads can get to around $60, some will reach $80. Here is a slightly dated list of CPMs for super bowl ads.
So basically, blogging is really easy money if you do the work and leave the blog up. This is true if you get any views at all. Think about all the work that goes into producing a TV show. A single episode of television requires dozens of employees to create, and the stars are often paid tens of thousands of dollars per episode. If you can build a blog that gets as many views as a small TV show, you’re basically making the same amount of money as a medium-sized business all by yourself. Even if AI were to make blogging 10 times easier to do, writing articles would still be lucrative for most of the world’s citizens.
Blogs will still be around for at least the next 30 years
I’m in my mid 20s, and I was reading blogs. I still read blogs from time to time today, but they take on a different role in my life. I look to blogs for answers, and it’s rarer for me to use them as entertainment. But I still do. I read blogs on Medium, and while a lot of the best content has moved to YouTube, I will voraciously read any good blog on business, travel, or being a digital nomad. It’s rare, but I do stumble on some gems every now and then. By the time I’m in my 50s, blogs might be rarer, but the space will also be less competitive and will serve a fairly wealthy set of consumers.
AI content still needs to be targeted and deployed properly
Blindly writing content doesn’t really work. Content that’s actually helpful is what gets to the top. AI writes articles quickly, but the person who decides what the articles are about still needs to be intelligent enough to prompt the system to produce the correct content.
The money in blogging is flowing to the top
This is happening with YouTube and TikTok too, but in different ways and for different reasons. The largest and most prolific content creators are walking away with the lion’s share of the spoils. In the world of blogging, this is because high quality content is what attracts real people. Low quality blogs not only get less traffic, but advertisers are willing to pay less for that traffic. People who write lots of high-quality content are going to be the ones getting all the money. This is natural, but the differences are being exacerbated due to writing teams, along with the fact that Google is a winner take all platform. The first few results get pretty much all of the clicks. Good bloggers will be able to create blogging teams, and big blogs will not only rank better than small ones, but they will also have more content.
This set of facts might make blogging seem daunting, but I think it’s good for those who are truly dedicated to the craft. Once you get over a certain “hump”, you’re in a league of your own. 50,000 pageviews per month is a good starting point, and this is doable with 200–400 articles. If you get over 100,000 pageviews per month, you own a piece of the internet and should be making at least as much as the average American. That’s a lot of money, considering your competition is global. There aren’t many jobs which can take you from $0 to $40,000 per year in 3 years with no skills from anywhere on the planet. Even if things get a bit harder, blogging will remain a solid gig for those who take it seriously.
Blogging is a safe career choice for three types of people: qualified writers looking to work for large companies, writers living in low cost of living areas, and winners. If you fit into either of those three boxes and can write, you should definitely get into blogging. All you need to do is post and be patient. If you have a decent amount of articles you’ll get traffic, which should put thousands of extra dollars in your pocket with relatively little effort. It all depends on how you monetize, but even at the low end blogging is highly lucrative. Just make sure your website is registered for a long time.
Thanks for paying attention.
