Mike Stopforth

One of the themes that popped up at the recent Digital Citizens Indaba on Blogging was making money from blogging. Alec Hogg, in his address to the delegates, spoke to the fact that it has never been easier to ‘micro-publish’ and earn money from it, provided you can differentiate yourself, generate some significant traffic and capitalise on affiliate networks like Google Adsense or Commission Junction.

These are not the only avenues bloggers across the globe are exploring in an attempt to turn their blogs into a revenue stream. Steve Rubel, and A-list blogger and partner at Edelman, recently posted his A-Z list of Money Making Tools for Bloggers. They are as follows:

A - Amazon Associates

B - BlogAds

C - Commission Junction

D - Denton

E - Events

F- Federated Media

G - Google Adsense

H - The Honor System

I - Industry Brains

J - Jobs

K - Kanoodle

L - Linkshare

M - Minmalls

N - Netscape

O - Opine Research Reports

P - Packaged Content

Q - Quit Your Day Job

R - RSS Advertising

S - Schwag

T - Tagword

U - US Web

V - Think Viral

W - Washington Post Blog Rolls

X - Xray your life story with Dandelife

Y - Yahoo Publisher Network

Z - Zzzz. Earn money while you sleep.

Darren of ProBlogger.net also lists a variety of resources and tips for making the most of these tools, provided of course you have a site that is generating the kind of traffic that warrants them.

There are only one of three kinds of people that could be reading this - those that already have high-traffic sites and are employing Adsense and comparable tools (like MNY for example) for a bit of extra pocket money, those who have sites with high traffic but are not aware that they could be making a bit of extra money, even if only to cover hosting costs (you should be getting your’s into gear), and lastly those of you who have either very low traffic or have not yet ventured into the world of owning a piece of online, digital real estate.

The sad truth is that it’s only very few people who make real money from blogging and even then, it’s hard work and they’re not making millions. Guys like Mike Arrington and Om Malik have built micro-media publishing empires, and even our own Jonathan Cherry recently quit his job to start SA’s first micro-media company. John Battelle started Federated Media to link advertisers with niche markets through blogs and is doing well. There are success stories, but none happened over night.

Still, you might have a compelling story that isn’t being told or a skills set or knowledge base that isn’t being shared. Blogs can be a phenomenally cheap way of establishing yourself as a thought or community leader. Tercia, a 37 year old IT marketing executive, built a following a community online around the story of her personal struggle with infertility, through a blog. Her online story was (and continues to be) such a success that Tercia landed a book deal from it. Tercia appears to be doing really nicely from the site and is using numerous advertising channels to sustain it and hopefull earn a few extra bucks. Hers is a great story.

There are others like it, and you may well be another as yet undiscovered resource. The joy with blogging is that regardless of how non-techie and un-geeky you feel, you won’t find it difficult to set up and use and it’s impossible to break. Give it a go.