How Much Are Your Blog Posts Worth?

Here’s an interesting situation.

You’re ambitious. You desire to grow a fantastic blog, in fact possibly the best blog on your topic in the entire blogosphere.

You realize that in order to be the best you need to have the most traffic, a huge RSS readership and serious exposure.

With big traffic comes the potential for big earnings. With thousands of daily readers you can earn thousands of dollars per month. You know a six figure blogging income is not only realistic, you expect to be in the top 1% of blog earners.

In order to realize your ambition you need content – the best content on your blogging topic – and lots of it.

To meet these goals you have to commit yourself to some serious work. Your blog won’t write itself. You are quite capable of producing fantastic content – content good enough to make you one of the best in your field, but there is a problem. You are lazy.

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. You are not lazy, it’s just that you are not prepared to commit to anything that asks you for many hours of work each and every day of your life. What you crave is flexibility and independence.

You want an income source that is reliable regardless of how much work you feel like doing today or tomorrow. You like the idea of taking a few days off or even a few months off now and then. Blogging is still something you want to take seriously, you might even do it every day for a while when your motivation is strong, you just don’t want a never-ending obligation.

You are aware enough to realize that motivation and interest change, hence you must plan for a future where you are not feeling motivated about blogging or when life circumstances take you away from your blog.

You want the rewards of being one of the best, if not THE best in your niche, but are you committed enough to do the work necessary to get there?

How Top Bloggers Do It

That scenario I just described pretty much sums up my feelings about blogging. I consider myself very capable of producing a top blog, possibly THE top blog in my industry. I could publish multiple articles each and every day, driving significant traffic and pushing my profits above $10,000 a month and into the six figures a year arena. That’s if I decide to do not much other work and spend a good 4-8 hours a day on blogging alone.

I know this is a realistic outcome because I’ve monitored the top earning blogs. Nealy every single six figure blogger I’ve come across publishes daily content, at the bear minimum one article a day, but most of them post multiple times each and every day.

There are some very rare exceptions – Steve Pavlina and Brian Clark come to mind – but most high traffic and high income earning blogs pump out serious amounts of content each month to maintain their status.

I may yet attempt a period at my blog where I increase my article volume and marketing efforts with a goal of doubling my income and really enhancing the exposure for my blog and personal brand. However, I’ve always been conscious of not placing myself into a situation where volume dictates success, where I feel obligated to write multiple articles a day.

If you have read the Blog Profits Blueprint you know my policy of focusing on income sources that generate a full time income, yet only require you to work part time. Methods like recursive affiliate income and direct ad sales on subscription, are zero-to-low maintenance methods of monetizing your blog that produce revenue without demanding you increase pageviews by writing copious amounts of fresh content every day.

I think most people desire a similar situation to what I seek. Would you prefer $5,000 a month working only two hours a day, or $10,000 a month writing and marketing your blog for 10 hours per day? Of course $10,000 or even $20,000 a month from two hours work a day is ideal, but lets take this one step at a time.

For me that’s a no-brainer. Like Tim Ferriss says – there’s no point being financially wealthy if you are time poor. Time and freedom are what we really want. Money should help to faciliate those outcomes, not consume them.

Your Posts To Earning Ratio

How Much Are Your Blog Posts Worth?

I’m quite proud of a certain statistic that I expect I am in the top 1% for. I can’t say for sure because I have not done a blogosphere-wide study, but I expect I’m definitely up there (incidentally, if anyone ever decides to do a study on this – go for it – it would make for a great link-attracting blog post if you did a solid job).

I’m talking about the ratio of money earned to blog posts written each month. Look at how many blog posts you write each month and then the amount of revenue generated from that work. That ratio – how much money each post generates as an average – tells you how much each of your blog posts are “worth”.

I wouldn’t put too much credence into your posts to earnings ratio, but it’s a fun statistic to calculate. If you study some of the top blogs you will see what I mean by how hard they work. There’s not a lot of blogs out there that make five figure monthly incomes or more, and write under 30 posts a month.

I achieve my results because much of my income is recurring and not heavily dependent on the number of pageviews my blog generates (I do have to at least maintain my current output, but that is not even close to full time work). Many blogs have a strong link between volume and revenue, which in turn demands the blogger find ways to keep fresh content coming or risk seriously impacting their income levels.

How Can You Increase Your Post Value?

The simple answer is to follow the principles in the Blog Profits Blueprint (it’s a free download by the way).

In a nutshell, the key points are:

• Optimize your income sources so your revenue is not tightly related to pageviews. That means using monetization methods that pay recursively and leverage sources of traffic that are not heavily dependent on fresh content (e.g. search traffic).
• Locate monetization sources that are high yield – significant affiliate commissions or high paying sponsorships are common examples.
• Produce “Pillar Content”, content that is of such high value (be exceptional) people are eager to read what you write next. When every article is amazing, you only have to produce a few a week to generate solid traffic.

What Is Really Important?

When considering professional blogging as your main income source ask yourself two questions -

1. How much do you want to work?
2. How much do you want to earn?

I asked myself these questions and decided that given my work habits – I like a lot of variety – I should aim to produce income sources that are require limited bursts of my time. I don’t want anything that requires more than 2-4 hours on one task and I don’t want any tasks that have to be done every day or always require me to do them (outsourcing should always be an option). However I also wanted a sustainable income of at least full time equivalent, so there was a definite need to balance output against results.

Let me tell you from experience, and this is advice you will hear from many of the most successful people in the world, if you focus on a monetary figure as your main goal, you probably won’t make it and you will make yourself miserable all the time you are working towards it. An arbitrary number – the amount of money you hope to make in a given year for example, provides very little direction. You need to do know what you have to do, not just what your main financial outcome is.

When you ask yourself those two questions about your blogging, look at how you can make blogging something you enjoy at all times and give yourself the flexibility to leave your blog if needed. Again it’s very important to have a vision at all times during your blogging process. If you can’t come up with something concrete yet, start “throwing things against the wall” and see what sticks, both from a sense of the marketplace and how people respond to your blog, and your own feelings about blogging – how much you are enjoying it.

With some adjustment you can find a balance between a satisfying income and level of work commitment, so you enjoy the process and are content with your financial rewards too.

Yaro Starak
Finding Balance