I see and adore many hobby webloggers and entrepreneurs on the Internet. People like Robert at Flight 404, who create the most amazing things. Following them and their stories, like Nathan at Coderspiel, you’re tempted to believe that this is what they do. This is how they live. But sometimes that spell is broken and it turns out, the blog is just a hobby. Jason Scott puts, what I think, a whole lifetime into archiving and documenting computer history, yet he has another life, to pay for the hobby one.
So how do you turn that hobby around and into a money making one? Your first question should be: do you want to start making money with it? And how much? Full time income? As you might judge from the adds on my blog, I haven’t yet answered those. I’d like to recoup hosting costs, but lately I’ve been thinking “why bother?”
If we’re really looking at the people earning their living online, it seems there are only two ways to go about it:
- Go big, deliver something for everyone. Try to attract the highest number of people to your blog/website and use adds and CPM to earn that money. Gizmodo is probably the poster child for this movement. This tactic will influence your writing, because you either need to write a lot of different articles, or you write articles that appeal to a large audience.
- Go small, go niche. This is the opposite way of dealing with the problem at hand. Once you realize that on the Internet, even a small niche can be huge. This will mean, you probably can keep writing the stuff you love, although possibly slightly tailored to your niche. It does mean you might have to do a little more to get the money flowing. Basic Google Adsense will probably not cut it for a niche site. You’ll need to do your own promotion, attract specific advertisers in your niche or create your own products. I’d like to give Chris Guillebeau as a great example, but I’m not sure if you can still consider his site small. He certainly started out that way.
Do you think there’s a middle ground between the two?