Click for Nick

Wired interviewed Harold Davis who is the author of Googles Advertising Tools.  His book focuses on manipulating keywords for the benefit of bloggers.

When asked if bloggers could live off blogging alone Harold answered: 

“There are people who make a living blogging, but if you’re going to do it on your own, you darn well better have a ton of traffic. There are 10 million lonely bloggers and people probably only read a few thousand. If you’re going to make serious money off this, it’s a serious time commitment.”

My opinion: Many bloggers just write for fun and not for monetization.  To make money requires more than just a blog and some content.  A lot of SEO goes into my articles.  If you want to stand out from those other few million blogs, you have to start using the tools to optimize it for search engines.

What do you need to start making money?

“You should have at least 100 pages of high-quality content in the can. Blogs are good because they keep content fresh, but that’s just a small part of it. Good reference material really draws traffic. On a photography site I run, for example, one piece I wrote on how to convert raw digital photos draws more traffic than 99 percent of my other photo pages.”

My opinion: Try to write high quality posts. Don’t just write to have content, but write content that people are going to want to recommend to their friends and read more than once.  A good website has good content.

To read the rest of the Wired article and the rest of the questions Harold Davis asked, click here.