Protoscopic

Today I was reading Skellie’s article on not posting for quite a while and it totally bummed me out. Not necessarily because she’s dealing with some issues regarding her blog and keeping up with it (I’m far too self-centered to worry about that). Instead I was troubled by her claims that she is only giving up $600-$1000 per month by not having ads on her site.

I discovered her blog during one of the periods she was guest blogging for Darren Rowse and I like pretty much everything about her blog. She re-affirmed my hope that you don’t have to make your persona completely public to be successful and she writes very useful articles. She has around 5000 RSS subscribers according to her post, of which I am one.

5000 RSS subscribers is a lot. We have one, me (Annie doesn’t even subscribe). So I find her statement that she could monetize at only about $1000 per month to be a little demoralizing. While I’ve never really wanted to “make money by blogging,” I think her site is indicative of the capabilities of Adsense based revenue. If someone as successful as her could be making a whopping $12,000 per year, what shot do we have?

All of this is validating my fears regarding our Internet Empire. I fear that if we work really hard and apply ourselves, we can make as much as we make now for roughly the same amount of work. Annie and I are both fairly successful people and I enjoy a lot of freedom in my work. It’s troubling to think that a large up-front cost of effort, we can duplicate my current situation.

I know all the super marketing pimps like John Chow will point out that there are way more ways to make money than just advertising. There are of course examples of plenty of people making good money from their websites. As I said we don’t intend our blog to be our sole source of income, or even primary. We’re building an Internet Empire after all. Nevertheless it’s a bit daunting to think that if we scaled the seventy five hundred levels, between our blog and Skellie’s that we would be in the 12k/year range.