Success Online.IN Success Secrets For Your Online Venture

Businessweek carried an interesting article which profiled 13 blogs that were making a decent amount of cash. They did a quick mini-round up and brief on these blogs. I’ve made a quick summary of them below, including their Alexa Rankings, Earnings etc. As you can see, blogging can be serious business and serious money to many - specially those in third world countries. So, pick a niche - something you are passionate about - and get started!

1. BoingBoing

BoingBoing, a “directory of wonderful things,” might be the king of moneymaking blogs. Always at the top of Technorati, in June the site garnered 22 million page views from 2.6 million unique visitors. Advertising costs range from $350 to display a small button ad for one week to between $2,000 and $3,000 for the minimum 170,000 impressions on banner ads, all sold exclusively through Federated Media. Frequent posting—the four authors update the site 20 to 40 times each day—drives high traffic to the blog, which Mark Frauenfelder and his wife, Carla Sinclair, started as a print zine in 1988, to write about comics, science fiction, computers, and technology.

• Launched: January, 2000
• Niche: Humor/Cyberculture
• Revenue: $1 million and above per year
• Traffic: 22 million pageviews per month
• Alexa Rank: 2,199

2. I Can Has Cheezburger

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,” says Nakagawa, who gave up his job as a software developer to play Cheezburger full-time.

• Launched: January 2007
• Niche: Humor
• Revenue: Estimated $5,600/mth
• Traffic: 15 million pageviews/mth
• Alexa Rank: 4,996

3. Shoe Money

What better way to make money online than to write a blog about making money online? Jeremy Schoemaker, a 33-year-old Web entrepreneur, did just that. The half hour he spends each day writing ShoeMoney attracts 20,000 unique visitors daily, brings in $12,000 a month, and gives him a platform from which to launch his own Web products. His other Web businesses—AuctionAds, which displays ads for live eBay auctions on relevant sites, and NextPimp.com

• Launched: October 2005
• Niche: Making Money Online
• Revenue: Estimated $12,000/mth
• Traffic: 20 unique visitors daily
• Alexa Rank: 4,990

4. Overheard in New York

Overheard in New York, a collection of anonymous comments submitted by readers that range from the hilarious to the outrageous. Started in 2003, the blog is profitable, but Friedman says revenues can fluctuate by a factor of 10 over six months.

• Launched: July 2003
• Niche: Hilarious & Outrageous User Articles
• Revenue: Estimated $8,000/mth
• Traffic: 6 million page views /mth
• Alexa Rank: 30,178

5. Kottke

As one of the earliest blogs, with a committed audience interested in design, Kottke attracts advertisers looking to reach Web professionals and creative types. And he wants to keep his niche appeal, rather than try to maximize profits by littering the site with ads, and changing the content to boost traffic. “I’m doing a lot of things to deliberately limit my income,” he says. “Providing a good site and a good service for a smaller group of readers is really what I’m shooting for.

• Launched: March 1998
• Niche: Graphic Design
• Revenue: Estimated $5,300/mth
• Traffic: 300,000 unique visits /mth
• Alexa Rank: 16,706

6. Talking Points Memo

Political reporter Josh Marshall grew his blog, which he started during the 2000 election recount, into a small media company with a Manhattan office, three spin-off sites, an editorial staff of six, and a reputation for digging up stories that major papers ignore. The shift from a blog of mostly commentary and analysis to a network of sites more focused on original reporting began after the 2004 election, Marshall says. He started accepting ads at the end of 2003, when Blogads approached him.

• Launched: November 2000
• Niche: Political
• Revenue: Estimated $45,000/mth
• Traffic: 500,000 page views per day
• Alexa Rank: 15,866

7. Perez Hilton

Celebrity gossip wag Perez Hilton revels in his role as one of the most-hated figures in Hollywood. He may also be the hardest-working blogger making fun of show business, with 24 posts on an average day—and as many as 40 on a day with talk of a Britney Spears meltdown. “Advertisers come to me because I get a lot of traffic. I get a lot of traffic because I work hard,” says Mario Lavandeira, Perez’s creator. By “a lot” he means as many as 4 million unique visits a day, according to Lavandeira, although independent estimates put his traffic much lower. How much does that translate into cash from the Blogads on his site? Lavandeira stays uncharacteristically mum on the subject of exactly how much cash he rakes in, but Blogads lists a one-day “takeover” (all three banner ads on the site, plus a custom wallpaper) for $40,000.

• Launched: September, 2004
• Niche: Celebrity
• Revenue: Estimated $111,000/mth
• Traffic: 4 million pageviews/mth
• Alexa Rank: 929

8. Gothamist

Gothamist, with estimated monthly revenues of $250,000, evolved from two friends writing about New York City to a full-time news operation and a network of local blogs across 14 cities on four continents. Publisher and co-founder Jake Dobkin, who owns the company with co-founder and editor Jen Chung, sells ads direct to maximize revenue. They’re on the verge of hiring a full-time ad sales director to complement their team of five full-time editors in five cities, part-time associate editors, and paid contributors. Together they generate 20 to 25 posts daily on their most popular sites, and draw 7 million page views a month. Advertisers like the demographics: young, educated, and often wealthy readers. A real draw for the city-based sites is the ability to target online ads geographically: “It’s a benefit that some of the other independent publishers or blog networks can’t offer,” Dobkin says.

• Launched: January, 2003
• Niche: News
• Revenue: Estimated $50,000/mth
• Traffic: 7 million pageviews/mth
• Alexa Rank: 23,345

9. Techcrunch

Another blog that always tops the Technorati list, TechCrunch became Michael Arrington’s full-time business in 2006, with $200,000 in monthly revenue from job boards and ads. Arrington began blogging about startups two years ago. The blog has since spawned a network of spin-offs for gear, mobile technology, and sites for Britain, France, and Japan. Federated Media handles ad sales for the sites, which get a total of about 5 million page views a month: $300 buys a small text ad for a week; banners start in the thousands.

• Launched: June, 2005
• Niche: Tech News, Web2.0 News
• Revenue: Estimated $200,000/mth
• Traffic: 5 million pageviews/mth
• Alexa Rank: 646

10. Go Fug Yourself

Last year, this blog, devoted to ridiculing celebrity fashion, made enough money through ad sales that its two authors, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, quit their television industry jobs so they could mock full-time. The Los Angeles-based duo insists that the blog’s title uses the verb form of “fantastically ugly,” their term of art for stars’ over-the-top outfits. The mechanics are simple: They take celebrity photos from a wire service, add snarky comments about the getups, and click “publish.” The result? Some 3.5 million unique visitors a month, a book coming out in February, and two full-time jobs.

• Launched: July, 2004
• Niche: Ridiculing Celebrity Fashion
• Revenue: Estimated $6,000/mth
• Traffic: 3.5 million unique visitors/mth
• Alexa Rank: 646

11. Mashable

Pete Cashmore started Mashable two years ago, to write about the emerging trend of mashups, which he defines as “the fusing of multiple Web services.” Now it’s more than a full-time job. “Bloggers don’t get much sleep,” he says. Mashable, a Technorati favorite that ranks in its top 15, focuses on social networking and other online trends. With 4 million monthly page views, Cashmore says it’s the most-trafficked blog on the subject. But he didn’t expect to make a living from it when he began. “The idea that top bloggers would be making large sums was laughable,” Cashmore says. “The folks who held on, however, are doing pretty well these days.” Mashable uses Federated Media for its ad sales. Text ads start at $100 per week, banners at $2,000.

• Launched: July, 2005
• Niche: Technology/Web 2.0
• Revenue: Estimated $166,000/mth
• Traffic: 4 million pageviews/mth
• Alexa Rank: 1,493

12. Problogger (multiple sites)

The top question people ask Problogger author Darren Rowse is how much money he makes from blogging. He doesn’t disclose the details, but across the many blogs he writes, he clears six figures a year from a mix of private ads, affiliate deals, and ads sold through platforms such as Chitika, Google AdSense, Text Link Ads, and Amazon Associates. An Australian minister who discovered blogging in 2002, he has written sites devoted to religion, digital photography, camera phones, the Athens Olympics in 2004, and, of course, blogging. “Like most small business operators, I fall into the temptation of doing more than a full-time load from time to time (it’s tempting when you love your work, and when you work from home),” he writes in a FAQ on his site.

• Launched: November, 2004
• Niche: Blogging
• Revenue: Estimated $100,000/yr
• Traffic: unknown
• Alexa Rank: 2,635

13. Michelle Malkin and Hot Air

Between her eponymous blog and her video blog, Hot Air, conservative author and columnist Michelle Malkin gets more than 220,000 visits per day, but says her sites still operate at a slight loss. “We’re doing what few other blogs can do. We serve up terabytes of bandwidth,” Malkin says. “I’m shelling out for gold-plated servers. That’s expensive, and we want to be able to withstand huge traffic surges.” Hot Air, a group video-blog, in particular needs the bandwidth to stream videos. The rest of her ad revenue, which Malkin declines to detail, supports a small staff and a basement studio to produce original video clips. Malkin also sees the blogs as promoting her print media, and vice-versa. “Blogs have been the most recent development in my career, but my bread and butter has been the newspaper column that I’ve had since 1992. The integration has been really interesting, and I think that attracts people as well.

• Launched: Michelle - June, 2004. HotAir - April 2006
• Niche: Group Video Blogging
• Revenue: NA
• Traffic: 220,000/day
• Alexa Rank: 18,300

Conclusions?

• Niche topics like Tech, Humor and Celebrity draw in huge traffic and earn a lot more.

• One needs to be able to monetize the traffic using a vriety of technquies. For example Cheez Burger earns lesser than Go Fug Yourself even though it has four times as much traffic! Traffic is important - but so is monetizing it!

• Choose a niche that is easier to monetize and that you are apssionate about.

• A highly unique blog, with a unique topic - can quickly become popular and spread virally.

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