Blogs can persuade the public, but can they make money? - Washington Business Journal:

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Before you quit your day job in pursuit of online fame and know a few facts abouty what it takes to runa Don’t expect to make any quicik money. Blogging takes a considerable amount of time and In addition, you will need to keep the content fresh and constantluy market the site. In othee words, it is just like startinf any other business. But the barriere to entry are considerablylower than, say, openin a restaurant, which requires tens of thousands of dollars. And as the numberd of bloggerskeeps growing, advertisersx are catching on. Blogs that are specialized alloew advertisers to reach theirtarget audience.
Bloggers whose sites attract morethan 100,000 unique visitors a month earn $75,0090 a year on average, according to Technorati a San Francisco company that collectd data on blogs. The average U.S. blogger, pulls in just $5,060 a year. Many new bloggers count on their savingss ortheir spouse’s job to pay the But low pay has not stoppex folks from entering the There are 452,000 bloggerd in the U.S, according to the Departmenf of Labor. That is 58,00o0 more than the numbere of computer programmers. One advantage of blogs is that they offer the ability for readers to post That means readers areengageed — something that attracts advertisers.
“It pushe the brand even further and gets peopler to talk about itamongst themselves,” says Chrias Walbert, digital media manager for Media Works Ltd. in Owinges Mills, Md. “That’s the powerful things about blogs and social Perhaps one ofthe region’s most successfulo blogs is TVNewser.com, startesd by Brian Stelter while a studenrt at Towson University. The cablr news industry blog was picked upby Mediabistro.co in 2006 and got Stelter a staffc job at The . But not everyone is so At leastnot yet. Take, for instance, Fern The former brew.com. Her blog boasta an impressive list of includingformer “Wired” writer Rafae l Alvarez.
But neither the site nor the contributorse are making any Shen says. She is givinhg free ad space to the Wine Market and additionak advertisers in hopes that others will joinand pay. But Shen believea the site will makemoney someday. She is talkin to an investor, whom she declined to and hopes the site will pick up traffic after a mentionb from online journalismsite Romanesko.com. “Withb the collapse of the everyone is trying to figure out abusinessz model, and I don’t pretencd to have one,” Shen says. The difficultt with blogging is that most journalists are not entrepreneursdby nature.
“We’re used to getting a we’re not used to gettingy the business side,” says Stephen Janis. The former Baltimore Examiner investigativdereporter co-founded Investigativevoice.com shortly aftert the daily newspaper closed in February. You have to decidw if you have the mentality of an Janis says, and if not, do you know someonr who does? Janis constantly promotes his site with appearanceas on the “Ed Norris and Fox 45.