Meg Hourihan: Giving Rise to the Professional Blogger:
“During that weekend, I came to a realization that I’ve been mulling over ever since: a lack of money is hindering the growth and potential of blogging. Free–or personal–blogging can only take us so far.
Most financial discussions focus on blog content and explore donations, advertising, or some type of sponsorship/patronage model as the means to compensate bloggers. Very little progress has been made towards finding viable economic models because people still think of Weblogs as personal sites. If you aren’t Andrew Sullivan (who purportedly makes $6,000 per month on his site through donations), it’s hard to imagine how you’d get the traffic and donations to generate such revenue…
What I propose is slightly different: make it a commercial endeavor and hire an experienced blogger. Engage someone who’s already proven they can filter, condense, and write. Work with someone who can blog day in and day out for more than a month or two. The idea here is to find an enthusiast, empower them, and fund them, not to dump blogging onto someone’s day job, or it’s not likely to succeed.
Think of what some of the best bloggers could do if they were financially able to do focused, full-time blogging? Pick a topic you’re interested in, now imagine someone had 40 hours per week to cover everything related to that topic, and you get the idea. ” O’Reilly Network
