Is Problogging Sustainable?
Entrepreneur’s Journey has an excellent analysis of whether problogging is a sustainable endeavor. Yaro Starak writes:
Even those professional bloggers who do realize full time income from blogging and enjoy the independence of the occupation, eventually realize that rather than creating a business with a sustainable income model they have created a job for themselves. Essentially professional bloggers are like freelance journalists, dependent on their ability to perpetually type day after day in order to keep the content = traffic = income equation functioning.
Yaro argues that while content + traffic = money (yes, the math’s a bit off, but you get the picture: good content and good amount of traffic translate to revenues, assuming you do monetize your site), for most people earning from their blogs, it becomes a job. True enough, you have to write, you have to research, you have to give attention to your blog or blogs if you intend to earn good money.
Not that there’s anything bad about that. But Yaro is approaching the concept of problogging from an entrepreneur’s perspective. And to an entrepreneur, having something that you would have to continuously work on to get returns is not the ideal situation. The ideal is to pour your heart out starting something so that after some time you can simply reap the rewards even when you’re not actively working on that endeavor. In short: passive income!
Yaro then gives examples of how you can be assured of passive income. It won’t come easy, though. For one, you might have to be really popular before this can happen.
Steve Pavlina is perhaps one of the best examples of a blogger who could stop writing and currently doesn’t write every day (although he does write some nasty sized articles) and can expect reasonable income – very high income compared to most bloggers and salary workers – for many months and even years to come thanks to his blog archives.
The conclusion?
Professional Blogging Is Not A Sustainable Business ModelAs far as I can tell there is no way to create a sustainable business model if you are the only person doing the work as a professional blogger. The best result you can hope for is a very well paying scenario of self employment.
Probloggers can explore other possibilities, though. Start a blog network! Or, build up blogs to sell afterwards! I know of a couple of people who follow these business models.
Of course, being a self-employed problogger can be a good start.
Hi Jangelo,
Thanks for the write-up on my articles. I have at least two more in the series yet to come as well.
By the way I explain my formula content = traffic = money because it’s the content that brings in the traffic and the traffic the converts into money. Content isn’t added to traffic specifically, it is a cause and effect relationship – but I can see where you are coming from as well with your version of the formula.
Cheers,
Yaro
Yaro said this on January 18, 2007 1:10 pm
Hi Yaro. I understand the difference. I actually stated it as content + traffic = money because I believe you cannot have a good income stream without either content or traffic. In some cases, though content can bring you money (i.e., with career/network problogging), and raw traffic only even without much relevant content will bring you money (i.e., aggregation). But it’s a combination of the two that’s the best, IMHO.
Perhaps a better way to state it is
content -> traffic -> money
Cheers.
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