It’s mid-January 2019, and the current state of the internet is that there’s a lot of bloggers out there. Take a spin on Instagram or Twitter and check out the wave of WordPress devotees publishing everything under the sun. Search “blogger,” or “travel blog” or “financial independence” and take your pick of the blog that catches your attention. I’m considering jumping on “bloggers that blog about bloggers blogging” as a niche site. Meh
If you look at what’s out there’s there’s quite a range. Some are fantastic. Some are still developing we’ll say. You may wonder why are so many people doing this? You may especially wonder what is the pay of a blogger?
Connection to a Blogging Community
If you do some research into finding happiness, you’ll inevitably end up with one of the answers being about being connected to a community. How can I say this without sounding too kumbaya? If you create a blog and give it a serious go, you’re going to end up looking to other bloggers to understand a lot of things. What is the difference between a page and a post? What exactly do themes do? How do you get these widgets to work? What are bloggers doing to get traffic? How do you get paid? Well like most things in life, you’re going to want to talk to someone who has experience doing it unless you want to try to recreate the wheel.
Connecting with other bloggers will generally improve your writing as well. Do a guest post and you may get some good feedback. I remember when Mr. Flexcents made me aware of the fact that I’m putting too many spaces after my periods. I’m getting better at stopping this decades-old habit. I’ve since followed the habits of other bloggers that use Grammarly to ensure their writing has good grammar. Good grammar is crucial if you want to start having good SEO and rank within Google’s search results.
While you’re making a go at blogging and learning all the quirks of HTML, PHP, plugins, marketing, monetizing, networking with other bloggers, it might be worth making a not of something. You’re learning and developing valuable business skills that you could market to others and get paid.
Friend or Foe?
Wait a minute. Aren’t you bloggers all competing with each other? Coke and Pepsi don’t help each other out. Well often in capitalism, it is this way. But I think winning depends on the game your playing.
After my first few years out of college in the work world, I remember comparing the vibe to my college days. College to me always felt a little bit like a utopia. I mean people sort of had common goals and weren’t exactly competing against each other in most ways. The goals were to meet people, have fun, learn, have great experiences and prep for the work world. People were comfortable to be their real self. Then after graduation we entered the work world.
The work world felt like the antithesis of college to me. Now we were no longer able to dress as we wanted but instead dressed in accordance with the workplace policy. Business casual typically, followed by a casual Friday if you’re lucky. Bust out the polo and jeans. Yay.
And then beyond clothes, there were the people. Personally, in the corporate world, I was often met with a certain type of phoniness in some of the people I met. The corporate personality. Someone who knows how to “play the game”. Someone well adept at maneuvering the strange office political climate and knows how to manipulate others to get what they want. It seemed to be evidence that we no longer had common goals, but instead had entered into some type of zero-sum game. After all, only so many people on the team can be promoted or get an exceptional merit increase.
This online community thing seems to be a lot more like college than the workplace. Someone else’s success doesn’t mean your failure. In fact, someone else’s success can be part of your success.
Getting Your Name Out There
A large part of doing the blog thing is getting traffic to your site. There’s a number of ways to do this, but one strategy is to create content for others blogging or podcasting on their sites. You’re helping them, but in turn, you’re also getting your name out. So from this perspective, you have an interest in their success as well.
When you get your name and story out there, you may find some people relate to your story and wish to connect with you. Before you are focused on trying to get rich from blogging, you should appreciate being a content creator as that it gives you a chance to share your story. It gives you access to a medium to make friends and connect with other like-minded people. I recently connected with Adrian over at Clever and Lazy who had a similar job loss experience during the financial crisis that landed him in Shanghai China for a while.
I was recently on a couple of podcasts to get my blog name out there. I was on Choose FI and The FI Show, both great podcasts with incredible content that I highly recommend. A shout out to The FI Show for their work editing a bit of my nervous rambling. (It was my first podcast!) .
Oh yeah. Money.
Ah yes, money. How much MONEY does a blogger make? There’s no one size fits all answer to this question. There are undoubtedly thousands of blogs out there that don’t make a cent. Many don’t intend to make money. And then there are those that make millions and millions of dollars and cents.
If I were to take an educated guess on pay, I’d say the following. A new blogger might make roughly $200 a month of income after maybe six to twelve months of writing. This figure is with the caveat that they do some hard work and have the dedication to create content as well as market their site. But the way the internet scales, this could increase exponentially if your content catches on or goes viral. Your results will vary. If you’re interested in starting a blog, read more here.
I wrote a post about how much I made early on with this blog here. Generally speaking, most of my affiliate links pay me somewhere between $10 to $100 for a sale. I only show links to companies I actively use and truly recommend.
This post contains affiliate links to Grammarly and I may be paid for signups that meet certain conditions. I only recommend products or services I use.
