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| allow this photo to give you the wrong idea |
this is not a success story of a writer earning lots of money by blogging. consider yourself warned.
since i started blogging people have asked me how
much i earned from it.
“should i?”, “could i?” were two of my consistent replies. i
didn’t give much thought about earning from it although at one point, i got
curious and joined an asia-based blog advertising company. it was fun during
the first two months since they hosted contests, and a lot of blog millionaire
wannabes raved about the parties (which the 99% of my being refused to go to, no questions asked). i became nothing more than a spectator to people
talking about things i couldn’t care about. i learned though how a certain
brand of deodorant could change lives, yackityyackityyack. bloggers would be asked
to write about their experiences with certain products as a ticket for them to
become featured bloggers or become winners of something unobtainable in a normal
non-blogging life (like a couple of free starbucks coffee).
besides their yuppie-looking logo on the face of my blog and
a suffix to my virtual name when i signed up to become a member, i realized
that there was nothing earth shaking in it for me, so i removed their logo and
unlisted myself from their members page.
along that i also removed another advertising company from
my blog because my pages began to explode with highlighted/hyperlinked words. i replaced
them with dainty blogger buttons and i found dalai lama in me.
“it isn’t much, but it’s okay”
i met a guy at a literary criticism seminar who told me that
he was happy to be earning a little something from his blog. i have read success stories of bloggers who have left their day jobs to blog full time.
i give them all virtual high fives for their success because i know it entails
a lot of hard work, pr, popularity and dedication to earn from blogging.
what i discovered later on was that opportunities for
filipino bloggers and bloggers from other countries were way different.
there’s no such thing as a "universal
rate" for pay-per-click methods and for all other schemes for bloggers out
there.
to start earning, you have to have at least 1,000 unique
views in a day, and unless i reunited with 1,000 of my relatives everyday (dead
ones included), i was not going to get
all the views that i needed even if i cried buckets.
sacrificing content for marketing was nothing more but pure
sacrifice for me.
i finally got to the bottom of how much mr. nice guy earned
and it was less than 2usd per month.
“it’s not much, but it’s okay,” he told me.
“i believe you,” i replied earnestly.
why the hell not? just because i can’t make a six-figure income from
blogging does not mean i should be miserable doing it. i made such a fuss about
it for some time when i was yet a benighted blogger who thought others had blog
fairies and i didn’t.
to date there are more than 164 million blogs and although a
huge percentage of those who maintain blogs have all sorts of advice on “how to
make money blogging”, there is only a relatively small community that's actually making
money from it.
content is king, but marketing is god. it’s a full time job
and i have nothing grand to say to make readers turn my way, unless they want
to know why my carbonara tastes so great. i may be blogging for ghosts, but
these ghosts surprise me by writing me “thank you” letters and request for a
few meaningful topics. my husband also discovered that in the realm of the
blogging universe, a few people from other sides of the planet have
actually linked back to some of my articles and threw in subtle admiration for them, and it’s enough to make me feel like a
million bucks.
purpose defined
i have defined my purpose as a blogger. my perdu existence
has meaning to a very few readers and it’s all that matters to me. i have very much
liked meeting other writers like you through ubc and i’m ever thankful to
michele and michelle for hosting it.
i blog because like french fries and coffee, it offers a
lot of good vibes to my senses. i like it that it makes me happy and giddy and
that i can do whatever i want to my page and not worry about advertisers and how many people are going to read me.
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| i write, not blog, for a living |
so, how much do i earn blogging?
zilch.
kill me for the cliché
do what you're passionate about and money will follow. if it's blogging then just do it and happy days will follow. in my case, i do something else in my life that allows me to earn enough to buy me a slice of cheesecake. that's more than i could ever ask for.
virtual high fives and happy july blogging to everybody!
