[sandee]

"Tweaking a button and seeing conversions increase 8-fold is a beautiful thing. Seeing an hour of work turn into 120k visits is magical."

If you are a starter at HN, then do not get misguided by the quote above. If you are aiming for using blog writing as SEO for product marketing and reaching out to new customers then it is good effort. But if you are looking to get eyeballs for adv revenue then stop right there. There are better things you can do with your time.

[robfitz]

Completely agreed.

If you don't have a product, the benefits are more along the lines of finding your voice, learning what resonates with the people you care about, and getting comfortable putting content out where people will see it.

I mentioned the numbers in the sense that I used to think traffic and on-site behaviour was a magical thing that "happened". It was more about having that "aha moment" of how it all works than about doing anything particularly profitable.

Given all that, I think new & future founders would do well to try blogging for a while, reaching out to whoever your future customers would be. It lays a bunch of strong foundational skills that are tough to internalize through reading case studies.

[sandee]

Nothing wrong to marvel about getting 120K readers to your post.But in a startup community like HN, people put much more value on how many conversions happened, or in this case how many real critical comments from which you learnt something , how many new feed subscribers etc

[babuskov]

When is the last time someone earned a lot of money from blog? Maybe five years ago. These days blogs are only used to get traffic, either directly or via SEO, to pages where you sell the real product to the customer.

[petenixey]

For a long while I actually made about $500/month from my blog, webkitchen.co.uk. That was even 2 years after I wrote the last post.

I know this sounds like a "you can too" commercial but I actually did. I posted it on text-link-ads.com and sold a load of text-link ads (i.e. google juice) at the bottom of the page. From that more marketers discovered me and then bought ads direct on a year upfront basis.

The amount paid ranged from about $20/month (of which I'd see half) with TLA to $100/month (I kid you not) for direct sales. It's whittled down to nothing now but it worked out about $10k or so of revenue over the two or three years after I finished blogging which wasn't too shabby.

Obviously Google could wake up one day and kill you for it but since I didn't have any audience I also wasn't bothered by that.

(Great button btw Rob :)

[acangiano]

I make thousands of dollars from my blogs. I wrote a book on how people can do the same (or at least close to it) here: http://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical-blogging

[simon]

A great book and one that I am reading diligently as I work up to re-entering the world of blogging. I stopped blogging half a dozen years ago as I was making no money and using plenty of time. This time I intend to manage the time aspect more carefully and apply some gentle moneytization techniques.

[acangiano]

Thank you, Simon. I appreciate your positive remarks about my book.

[ryanwaggoner]

This is completely false; thousands of people are still making loads of money from blogging. It's just not novel anymore, so you don't see any articles about it.

And yes, they've also realized that all those subscribers are good for more than just ads, so they're upselling them books and videos and seminars and whatever else.

[mootothemax]

When is the last time someone earned a lot of money from blog

Certain blog posts of mine have made several hundred dollars. I refuse to believe that I'm the only one.

Edit: I'm talking about blog posts written in the last five or six months, just to clarify.

[mike-cardwell]

I've made a few hundred dollars total over the past year or so. I don't blog for ad revenue, I blog for the fun of it. Basically all I do is stick a couple of relevant Amazon affiliate links on most of my posts. Whilst it's not a lot of money, it more than pays for the Linode server that my blog runs on.

[babuskov]

Few hundred dollars over a year is nothing. Point of my message was that there are only a few people in the world who could live just by blogging and researching topics to blog about all day long.

[mike-cardwell]

Yeah, I know it's nothing. That's what I said. However, if I can make that amount of money for very little effort, blogging occasionally; somebody who does it full time, should be able to earn 50 times that. A reasonable salary in most of the World.