Blogging all the way to the bank — or not

Future Bloggers?

Have you heard of Dooce? Mommy bloggers definitely have.

According to a Feb. 16 Newsweek article, Dooce, a personal-diary blog run by a husband-and-wife team, earns between $500,000 to $1 million a year in advertising revenue. All for blogging about the onesies she finds at CostCo, her choice of nursery wallpaper, and drama with her family. Good for her.

Daniel Lyons of Newsweek, who for two years kept The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs and blogged 10 or 20 times a day, earned a meager hundred bucks on the day the New York Times revealed his identity sparking 500,000 hits. Advertisers came calling, but he never made enough to quit his day job. His assessment: “I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.”

The same article says that Technorati, a blog researcher, estimates that bloggers who run ads earn an average of $5,060 per year. But they don’t say who they are and what kind of traffic they’re generating to reach those numbers.

 My jump into blogging came as my youngest started kindergarten and I began looking for opportunities to add to my freelance writing business. You would think that on-line writing would be a given for a professional freelance writer with 10 years of experience. Oh, there are many opportunities out there; however, most of them don’t want to pay much, if anything. Once you become accostumed to getting paid to write you have no interest in giving it away.

Blogging also made its share of promises. I could have ads on my blog or become an affiliate of Amazon or Shutterfly and for each click I would get paid. They are very vauge about what you actually get paid, and Lyons’ column solidified what I already sensed.

For me, keeping this blog is about writing regularly, exploring ideas that may turn into stories to pitch to editors, and keeping up with my profession and my family as technology takes us into new territories. Perhaps if my readership explodes beyond five, I might change my tune.