17 Jul

How Top Bloggers Earn Their Money

This morning an interesting article from BusinessWeek is making its way up the Digg rankings: How Top Bloggers Earn Their Money.

In summary: personality, originality and traffic.

From a journalistic perspective I would give the article about 6/10 though since some of the bloggers clearly weren’t approached for an interview.

Here are some quotes I found interesting:

Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney.com: “We’ve never had an open advertising spot,” he says. “We have a waiting list.” Yeah, me too. *cough*

From GoFugYourself.com: “Suddenly our inside joke was turning into a business, and it caught us completely by surprise.” Interesting. What are your inside jokes? Could you make a site out of them?

From the LOLcat site ICanHasCheezburger.com: “If you hit a niche and you can build a community, you might not have a $1 million idea, but you might have a $10,000 or a $100,000 idea.” I have a virtual boxful of discarded ideas in the attic. I wonder if any of them were valuable? Or if it’s too late to create another LOLcat site?

Pete Cashmore of Mashable.com: “Bloggers don’t get much sleep.” You tell it, man.