Can a personal blog earn you decent money?

In my opinion it is possible to earn money by blogging about the things you like such as music, website themes, web hosting reviews, website tips. I was simply curious to know what you guys think a personal blog can earn you decent money? and how is yours?

I wouldn't put all those niches into one blog - even if personal. The smartest way is to make a blog for each and focus in each niche. This will make it easier to rank for keywords and for you to optimize your traffic and sales funnels toward income generation. I also recommend you start with just one blog until it becomes profitable, then apply your "method" to your new blogs.

One of the biggest secrets to success is actually the amount of time and effort you put into bringing your blog to profitability. Diluting your efforts onto various blogs will certainly delay your profiting in all of them (if you are able to persist long enough, that is).

Personal blogs generally suck for the simple fact that most people's lives aren't really that interesting. And the ones who have interesting lives often aren't very good at articulating the stories to make them very interesting. I find these kinds of blogs to be great for making friends and very bad for making money. That is my experience.

If people want to build blogs that actually make money, I would tell them to first identify something that people would want to visit a site for. Find the demand first. Then go build a site to satisfy that demand. That usually means building a hobby blog or some kind of niche blog. Just make sure you start out with the intention to build an authority blog rather than an old school crappy niche site.

When it comes to personal blogs, unless you have some very interesting stories to tell and you can tell them in an interesting way, then you are going to find that hardly anyone wants to read what you wrote.

If your life story truly is interesting and you have a magnetic personality that comes through in your writing, then yes you can be successful. A good example is Heather Armstrong's blog Dooce. But people like her are rare exceptions to the rule.

I agree with the professor. Because of how the search engines work (and the fact that you hope to make money from your blog), you shouldn't mix niches. I've heard of people trying it with awful results. While their sites did get some traffic, the volume and the quality of the traffic was so poor (wasn't targeted), that they just had to start all over again. What you're describing only works for those really big celebrity and lifestyle types of blogs that already have a built-in audience.

Joey

moneytech said:

Quality reply!

In your opinion, is a single niche or multi niche site better for affiliate marketing/sales?

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Multiple sites each in a different specific niche. In fact, I recommend going very deep into a niche and building a site that helps one type of person solve one problem, dilemma or decision they are facing.

Miguelito203 said:

I agree with the professor. Because of how the search engines work (and the fact that you hope to make money from your blog), you shouldn't mix niches. I've heard of people trying it with awful results. While their sites did get some traffic, the volume and the quality of the traffic was so poor (wasn't targeted), that they just had to start all over again. What you're describing only works for those really big celebrity and lifestyle types of blogs that already have a built-in audience.

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Yes I agree. Personal blogs tend to bring in less targeted traffic because you can befriend a teenager from Africa and a forty year old soccer mom from Wisconsin. Those people have next to nothing in common except that they want to be your friend and want you to be theirs. I imagine some personal blogs do a better job of bringing in targeted traffic like Heather Armstrong's blog that I linked to above. But most of the personal blogs you come across are just bloggers trying to make friends with other bloggers.

When someone first starts blogging, they are tempted to build the kind of blog where they talk about whatever tickles their fancy at the moment. And they build a blog that they have to post to on a regular basis forever or else lose the attention of their audience. Eventually they realize they can't generate a meaningful amount of traffic for that kind of site. And they realize they can't monetize it well enough to make it worth their while.

Eventually they realize they need start over with a new site and try to attract a more specific type of audience that is more easily monetized. And some of them learn that they are better off focusing on evergreen topics that stand the test of time rather than needing to publish a new blog post every other day or every week or whatever.