Petite Anglaise: couldn’t live from money made directly from blogging
Catherine Sanderson, better known to thousands under her pseudonym Petite Anglaise, is currently doing a run of media interviews to promote her blog-inspired book.
She gave an short but interesting interview on the BBC Breakfast programme this morning. As well as talking about what a blog is, the background to her particular blog, dismissal from her job and winning the French tribunal, she also answered the question that many people ask about blogging and money:
Interviewer (Bill Turnbull): Is there any money in blogging?
Catherine: Not really in blogging itself. You know, obviously if you get a book deal that’s quite nice. Some people put advertising on their blogs, but I don’t think you could live from that, really.
While it’s certainly not true that you can’t live off the direct earnings of a blog (or a series of blogs), it’s rarely easy. It also raises the interesting subject of making money directly versus indirectly from your blog (links point to two excellent articles by Darren Rowse).
If you’re in the UK, you should be able to catch Ms Sanderson’s Breakfast interview later on today on the BBC web site.
I saw that too.
My thoughts are that she’s the more, lack of a better word, “traditional” blog. She’s writes a personal blog about things that happen to her and her opinions of things, of course it’s going to be harder to make money (I write a personal blog, and it brings me in about £100 extra a month). A lot of these people, and I know a bunch of them, have things that a lot of SEO’ers dream of: strong domain names, branding, traffic and PR (one of my friends has a PR6 domain name, 3000 visitors a day, etc.), but do it for the love, rather than the money.
However, in the new sense of blogging (specifically niched and “make money online” blogs), it’s actually relatively easy to make an income, but not enough to live on via the most part, but a heck of a lot easier than writing a personal diary online.
It’s probably easier to use a blog as a way to advertise your other projects like affiliate sites, products, books, etc. Most of the bloggers who make 5 to 10k/month from blogging probably make 20k/month from doing other things.
I simply don’t get Petite Anglaise. Never found the writing, or her life, that interesting. Is it me?
Don’t worry Ian, me neither. The only reason I’ve paid attention is because it’s been worth a few articles from time to time. Then again, I’m not really into this “genre”.
I should probably get in the habbit of blogging every day (or at least put blogging on a set schedual so I can stream regular
visitors who keep coming.