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A $30,000 per month blogger shares his secrets

Posted Mar 18th 2008 5:58PM by Timothy Sykes
Filed under: Internet, Blogs, Google (GOOG), About the stock bloggers, Next big thing, Entrepreneurs, Serious Money, Lehman Br Holdings (LEH), Bear Stearns Cos (BSC)

Even though I just recently started blogging in October 2007-- after I closed my hedge fund -- I first began to understand that there was some real money to be made when Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney.com posted THIS picture of a check for $132,994.97 from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) as his AdSense income in August 2005.

Later that year, John Chow of JohnChow.com also started blogging about ways to make money online and now he, too, regularly earns $30,000 per month from blogging, all broken down and detailed on his site. Since my monthly blog income on my own personal blog is just a few thousand dollars, I decided to ask John Chow for some pearls of wisdom, here's the interview:

1. What have been some of the keys to your success?

I think one of the biggest reasons for my blogging success has been consistency. There has never been a single day that has gone by where I did not have a new blog post for people to read. One of the biggest mistakes a new blogger makes is by being an on again off again blogger. You can't build a blog this way.

Another key is just being myself. I show the good and the bad and let the chips fall where they may. A blog is not CNN or News.com. Your readers are there to read your opinion. You should give it to them instead of just giving the news without an opinion.


2. Give us wanna-be professional bloggers some do's and don'ts

Do pick a posting frequency and stick to it no matter what. Don't do three posts a day for a week and then nothing for a month. Do build relationships with other bloggers in your niche. Attend some trade shows in your industry. Blogging is all about networking. It is as much about who you know as it is what you know. Also, it's a really smart idea to read my site!

3. What are some trends you're seeing in the blogosphere?

One concerning trend I see is the rise of the "Make Money Online" blog by bloggers who have never made any money online. I've been blamed for this. Bloggers see me making $30K a month from my blog and assume a make-money-online blog must make a lot of money so they start one too. Big mistake. That's like people who have never shorted, shorting stocks because they see you make a lot of money doing it. (I agree 100% John, learning to short stocks like Lehman Brothers Holdings (NYSE: LEH), The Bear Stearns Companies Inc. (NYSE: BSC) and MF Global Ltd. (NYSE: MF) is not for the inexperienced or faint of heart!)

I see video hitting big for bloggers. If you haven't embraced video blogging, then you need to. It's the next blogging frontier and you don't want to be left behind.

4. Just how much do you think a blogger can earn, are we ever going to see a blogger making a $1 million month? If so, what would they have to do to get there?

Yes, I think it's possible for a blogger to make over $1 million a month. I doubt the revenue will all come from advertising, however. As the blogger gets bigger, there are other ways to leverage their brand name. For example, Perez Hilton leveraged his blog to his own TV show. TechCrunch leveraged their blog to create their own trade show (TechCrunch 40) and award show (The Crunchies). I doubt it'll be long before TechCrunch hits the million dollar per month mark, if they haven't already.

Timothy Sykes writes the blog timothysykes.com, is a former hedge fund manager, star of the TV show Wall Street Warriors and author of the book, An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund

Tags: make-money-online blogs, Make-money-onlineBlogs

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