Remember the year 2000? Sisqo topped the Billboard charts and Fastclick was the best way independent content producers could monetize theirs sites. If you were lucky, the $0.40 CPM you got covered your (then expensive) bandwidth costs.
Enter contextual advertising, Google, and efficient pay-per-click markets. Six years later, lazy bums like me can get rich wearing pajamas to work, getting paid from our content archives. I thank the gods every night that content is once again a profitable business model.
But I wasn’t always so bullish on content. When I was in college, I started blogs as an experiment. I really had no idea how far they could go--could they make me a fulltime income? Could they make me rich? Could they even make me enough to pay for beer?
Going into it, there was really no way to know. But actually, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that blogging is a slow, steady race, and the returns are *gasp* fairly predictable.
The Money’s In The Archives, Stupid
There is one single point I’m trying to drive home in this post, and I’ll even spell it out for you: in the blog business, the money’s in the archives.
We’re actually not so different from Hollywood investors. In the movie biz, execs are happy if they can break even on a film’s theatre release. Why? They know they can make a lot money on the film’s DVD release (a high margin item, which doesn’t cost them much to distribute). Even after the initial DVD sales, the movie will be monetized for the next 50 years--every time a person buys the (then old) DVD, the owner of the content (the DVD) gets a cut.
Content Producers are Like Snowballs Rolling Down a Hill
With this in mind, reexamine your business model. You may only be making $1, or $100, or $500 a month--not enough to live off of, and not enough to give you bragging rights. But in this business, it takes time to gain momentum, pure and simple. In the beginning, you have no archives, no Google juice, no regular readers linking to you. If you do nothing but maintain your posting, you will have all these things in time. And meanwhile, your income will grow exponentially.
My rule of thumb for content producers: you’re doing great if you can break even on content production within one or two years (and don’t forget to count your opportunity cost -- what you yourself would be earning if you weren’t working on blogs).
6 months ago, I’d been doing this a year, and had little to show for it. I was getting mighty frustrated, knowing what others were making (a lot), knowing what I was making (a little), and not being able to figure out what they had that I didn’t (a head start). But six months have done a lot for me in terms of Google juice, inbound links, and overall presence, and my blogs’ incomes are rising month over month (mostly, the money is being made off the archives).
Looking back at this growth, it makes me wonder, where can I be in 18 more months? It puts a great big smile on my face. I’m not any smarter than anyone else. It just takes time. Patience wins.
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