It’s true, but not because there’s not plenty of money to be made…its just that people don’t know how to make it. You’re not going to make a lot of money as a “writer”, but if you’ve got a good niche for your blog there’s no reason you can’t make killer money by utilizing a few lesser-known marketing tactics. You can’t just keep writing and expect the money to roll in. In most cases you need to proactively TRY to make money!

What kind of century are you living in? For you and your wife and anyone else who eats in your house!

If you are dedicated and write good content, I don’t see what the problem is. Be original, and give people a reason to come back.

As for the whole WIN payment thing, after seeing how quickly I was able to hit $500 a month, without tying myself down with any sort of exclusivity contract, I don’t see any incentive. For example, if a magazine wants you to write for them and ONLY them, they HIRE you and pay you a salary or hourly wage to keep you from the competition. If not, you are free to write for as many magazine as you wish – be they competition or not.

The other thing, though, is that competition is vastly different on the Internet. For example, in the real world, Burger King and McDonalds want your business. You have $5 to spend, you are going to choose one of the two places. One wins, one loses. On the Internet, if I want to get tech news, there is nothing stopping me from going to Slashdot, Gizmodo, Gear Live, and Engadget. There is no limited resource that I need to give up. They will all get my traffic, and that is frankly what many people do.

Damn it, I need to CHECK my links.

(pvrWIRE is a WIN blog, but Haughey is not the writer.)

Duncan, excellent post. Also note that full-time WIN bloggers like Karina Longworth post far more than 4 entries a day. On Slashfood, TV Squad, and Cinematical, I found 8 posts from her today. I browsed a few other WIN blogs, but I might have missed other posts from her. I think she also does some recruiting or backend work, but I’ve never asked.

Anyway, there are several full-timers doing that. At the contractual rate, that would net $1000 a month. My bet is that Longworth earns more (this is a guess; I’ve talked to her, but I haven’t asked her salary).

Several WIN bloggers, like PVRblog’s Matt Haughey and, obviously, Mark Cuban, are running their WIN blogs as little hobbies and work only at the pro-rated level. I have no idea whether Haughey earns extra for his street cred in the blogosphere (he runs Metafilter.com).

All in all, the rate seems fair for what WIN bloggers write, but it’s not enough to pull me away from my own plans.

Heh, my plans are pretty cool. If I told you, you’d dig them.

“I can imagine some one at ThreadWatch writing in response to this that if pay rates are so low with bloggers why not get into some other business (like being a black-hat SEO for example).”

Actually, I think someone on TW is more likely to say :

“If you’re only making $100/month with your blog, you really need to hire an SEO or Internet strategist to help you”.

In fact, if your post here was published on Webmasterworld, I would have been quick to suspect it was a shill trying to convince bloggers making $3/day that they’re doing just fine (leaving more profits and opportunities for the rest of us).

More on Blog Pay Rates

Duncan writes an excellent piece in response to the criticism of Weblogs I [...]

For example, blogs are not mainstream, yet. While I was pitching my business model to various entrepreneurs and business people over the last 4 months, I’d begin by asking if they knew what weblogs are, let alone are they reading any. Unsurprisingly (we all know that blogging is still in the early adopters stage), most people didn’t know what a weblog was.

10 years down the road when RSS become the next ‘email’, imagine what sort of traffic (read: money) that influential blogs will be getting? That’s going to translate into more money for people who publish quality content.

It’s a great time to be in this space!

And I would add that if you’re upsetting people you’re probably doing something right.

; )

I did try to calculate the monthly income of WeblogsInc network here
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/08/weblogs-inc-vs-average-programmer.html

According to this post, $4 per post is just the starting pay, some bloggers get even more at Weblogs Inc.

At $4 they might be earning some $100 per day – but if they are paying more to some bloggers, are they really making any real money ?

Amit

BUT, most people don’t fit that category. And it is good money for blogging. I’m fine with that. I’ve seen elsewhere that other bloggers at Weblogs Inc make more, so I imagine that it depends on how well the blog does. The pay is pretty fair for the kind of writing required. If they wanted 125 750-1000 word articles then I’d call them nut jobs, but they are asking for blog posts, which should be a breeze.

I think one reason many bloggers struggle to make more than $500 a month from their blogs is because they focus on themselves and their own needs more than on their readers.

Being a best-writing author pays nothing; being a best-selling author pays a lot. $500 per month is not difficult to make with a blog part-time, and you don’t need to post 4x per day to do it. 5x per week is plenty, but this only works if you’re writing something people seriously want to read and which provides a genuine benefit to them for doing so.

$500 a month is not a small amount of money – it’s a third of my mortgage for example – and more than what my rent was in college just ten years ago – and as you outline here, it’s alot more than what many bloggers make from their sites today.

Matt

Cool. I’m in the top 5% of something, but am investing it all back into the network and then some. Invest small amounts now and reap great rewards in the future, that’s my plan ;-)