And interesting post on Techmeme started my day this morning called Time To Hang Up the Pyjamas. It was an article by Daniel Lyons who had set up a highly-trafficed blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs a couple of years ago. The gist of the article is that he put loads of effort into monitising the blog, but failed to generate anything that would surpass what he could earn holding down a normal job. Here’s a poignant part of his article:

My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81

A number of other blogs were quite quick to point out that the blog resulted in his rise to relative fame, a book deal and his new job at NewsWeek, but millions of bloggers around the world will never earn as much from AdSense as he did. What he DID DO, however, was raise his profile so that his net worth was much higher than it would have been otherwise.

Articles like this always help put blogging in perspective and help people focus on the why they blog. Using a blog to earn money isn’t impossible, there are a number of companies out there who will pay a blogger for their efforts, but it’s no different to being paid for dropping leaflets in someone’s mailbox. The amount you can earn is constrained by the time you have available and the moment you pull back you’ll see your earnings dry up. Selling advertising space on blogs is another money-earner, but without fresh, compelling content and the traffic it brings, well, that’s another non-starter. In my humble opinion, the worst reason to start a blog is to generate enough income to quit your day job.

On the other hand, a blog can do wonders for your profile, image and self-esteem. It can serve as an outlet for you to talk about your passion, to meet like-minded individuals, to show off your strengths and seek opportunities. A blog can help you build online relationships which will benefit you in the long term in many diverse ways. Monetary benefits are a possibility, but they’re always much harder work than you originally imagined when you decided to set down the blogging path.

photo credit: Dan4th

Did you like the video above? I got it from a website called The News Room who have a whole selection of news clips which get updated daily. The interesting thing is that you can embed as many news clips as you want on your blog and you can also get paid for the pleasure of doing it! It’s a great way of adding fresh content to your website and the monetisation is a great way to make sure that the idea spreads.

So how does it work? Well, when you browse their site, every video clip has a “Mash” button on it. If you see something you want to replicate on your site, just click the button and you’re given the code to add this to your site. It’s a simple as that! Monetisation comes from advertisement that is shown with the clip, so every time someone watches the clip, you get something (it’s tiny, but it builds up). You also get a commission when someone chooses to Mash content directly off your site.

It’s an interesting model that uses viral techniques to spread. Not only are the clips newsworthy, but the promise of monetisation will attract a number of webmasters to add the feature to their site. I particularly like the way you can create your own channel by selecting topics and embed this on your website. Your channel will then be updated whenever there is new news on those topics. How’s that for fresh content?