Earlier this year I started to look at advertising programs available to bloggers. A tenant in the building in which our small business is located started as a food blogger a few years ago and they have done very, very well. During the course of several conversations it's clear that making money in the blogging world is somewhat elusive with certainly more hype that reality. As is most cases a very small percent of bloggers are able to make significant earnings; most earn nothing.
Creating regular, creative content is the challenge. Readers are interested in shorter, hipper, and more upbeat posts than most people (I'm one of the 'most') produce. There is also considerable cross-promotion among the bloggers that are doing well. Much of the 'hits' on blogs are from bots and that is changing the world of data surrounding marketing spending and reimbursements. Successful bloggers also fall prey to the lure of talking about companies that advertised on their sites.
This year was challenging. This blog was ignored. Our dining/food blog is in its' infancy and two of my others are about two feet off the ground rather than the two miles as intended.
The goal early this year was to make $5,000-10,000 this calendar year. That was a reasonable goal and had I remained diligent it was doable. As of today, Amazon has dropped me for both of my prevalent blogs for lack of readership and orders through the context sensitive ads. Interestingly I've left those ads on my blog just to be a nice guy. If you order through the ads displayed by Amazon I get nothing...but I'm a nice guy and Amazon and I may still have a future.
Adsense, the Google advertsing program has not dropped me but they have not paid me yet, either, not because I've not earned anything but because I've not earn enough. I've earned $42.73 from Adsense. On one hand that's not very good. I've written a lot. On the other hand the writing has been inconsistent. I've still not found the sweet spot of this blog or an appropriate audience.
For 2016, along with finding a real job, I'm going to leave the $5,000-10,000 goal in place. I'll reapply to Amazon, anticipate payment from Adsense and work harder.
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