Dawn of the Geeks

Can Bloggers Strike It Rich?

Calacanis employs 120 bloggers and publishes 90 blogs — including Engadget (which covers consumer electronics) and Blog Maverick, typed by billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban — with his writers making anywhere from $200 to $3,000 a month. (One presumes Cuban doesn’t do it for the money.) On average, Weblog salaries are about a quarter to half what a mid-level editorial job would pay, without the daily office commute.

“Not to mention (bloggers) get to write about the topic they are most passionate about,” said Calacanis, who claims to be on track to collect more than $1 million in Google AdSense payments over the next year. “So, for our folks, it is like they are making money off their hobby. Think a scuba diver or video-game player making $500 to $1,500 a month writing about scuba diving or video games.”

So what does it take to get profitable?

Whether you are Calacanis, Denton or Hauslaib, to create a profitable blog requires much more than a keyboard, an internet connection and too much caffeine. You need a talented writer entertaining enough to hold an audience, a consistent publishing schedule, content worth linking to by other bloggers and worthy of press coverage, marketing savvy to sell advertising or enlist third-party networks and, as a culmination of all of this, plenty of traffic.

Says Hauslaib: “If a blog debuted with virtually zero startup costs, then it takes little to earn a profit. One ad will do it. But at the bare minimum, a lone blogger will likely need to attract high four- to five-figure daily visitor figures to even attempt a blog-based livable wage.”

What I’ve found is that the combination of a blog and a wiki is the best tool to drive visitors. The blog is an ordered list while the wiki is unordered. By linking the ordered to the unordered you point Google in the right direction so that wiki entries are quickly indexed by Google. Wiki entries rank higher than blog entries. Often it’s not just being first to report a story but being first to be indexed on Google. When other people start linking they generally link to the first handful of results on Google.

The other big tool is the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia tends to rate very high for any given topic. The trick then is doing extensive research on a story, doing a blog summary pointing to the research in the wiki and then linking to your wiki entry from Wikipedia. My Saaya Irie, Cindy Sheehan and Air America wiki entries are all getting referals from Wikipedia. By being linked to from Wikipedia, your ranking will go higher.

For revenue, I then rely on Google Adsense which gets me enough to cover hosting costs and then some. I’m certainly not one of those webmasters that can quit their day job.