Pace Press

Issue date: 3/12/08 Section: Features

Technology has changed the way our generation interacts, stays informed and promotes ideas and art. Blog sites allow users to relay information to the online community. Blogger.com and Wordpress.com have replaced the older generation sites like Xanga.com and LiveJournal.com, but they've all carved ways for people to take part in generating information online. While many people use them strictly for entertainment, blogs can become entrepreneurial, money-making tools.

Whether you keep a blog on facebook, Myspace or Wordpress, making money from it can be easier than you think. Advertising on sites has now become a way for both bloggers and large companies to gain exposure and create revenue. Many bloggers have reported making a few thousand a month by allowing advertisements on their sites. Users of Blogger, an affiliate of Google, can benefit from AdSense, which delivers ads to users.

Google AdSense uses a combination of cost-per-click and cost-per-thousand ads to establish pay for bloggers. The cost-per-click method pays each time a reader clicks on an advertisement, while the cost-per-thousand ads pays for each thousand ad impressions. "An ad impression is one view by a unique visitor over a set period of time," USA Today said. On sites like Amazon.com or Bloggingads.com, the pay one receives depends on the amount of hits on the blog and on the advertisement itself.

One of the most successful celebrity news bloggers, Perez Hilton, has become a household name by using ads on his site Perezhilton.com. Using up-to-date celebrity coverage, he has gained a great amount of media exposure as well as dedicated fans. His blog began as a Paris Hilton tabloid and quickly grew into a news source for celebrity culture. "Hilton's blog reportedly draws some 2.6 million unique hits per day. The traditional rags have been boosting their Web coverage, partly in response to Perez's success," Forbes.com said.

Another blog success story comes from Tucker Max, who is one of the most well-known bloggers-turned-writers of our generation. While attending the University of Chicago, Max began writing on his now widely popular site tuckermax.com. He describes himself by saying, "My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole," and writes under a genre he dubbed "fratire"-a combination of fraternity stories and satirical literature. His humorous tales of actual events made him an established blogger and eventually gained him enough exposure to write his own books. He released two novels in the past three years and was on the New York Times best seller list for "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell."

For hopeful writers, self publishing and blogging has been a favored way of gaining publicity. Reaching a large audience or being discovered has proven to be more difficult than the publishing portion. With persistence and use of ads, a blog can become more than just a pastime.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools