How Do Bloggers Make Money?: a house log

Like previous blogiversaries, we are gonna use this week as an excuse to take a look at the business side of blogging (at least as we know it). As you’ve likely gathered by now, we never intended to start a business when we wrote our first post back in Sept 2007, nor did we ever construct a formal business plan. So this whole adventure has been a learn as we go / roll with the punches / adjust along the way / insert more cliches here kind of deal. And simply like we do not claim to be Hands-on experts or trained interior designers (we are simply two people with a chihuahua and a baby), we are not about to pretend that we are the savviest business people out there either. But like everything else we do, we are simply gonna share our experiences in an effort to assist someone out there who might be trying to grow their journal… or is simply curious about what we do all day.

We have lightly touched on some of this info in past blogiversary posts, but this year we have brought in a lot more details along with some new visuals: PIE CHARTS. Oh yeah, you read that right. Sherry’s math-teacher dad is about to do the glad dance. So get your fork out and prepare to dig in.

Let us start with a look at how we spend our time… a slice (har-har) of which was somewhat encapsulated in yesterday’s day in the life post. But this is a more global look at all the things we do as opposed to the somewhat random and consistently-changing things that we do in a day. Oh and to be clear, this is a look at when goes into running Turbodizin (so it excludes things like parenting a sixteen month old and other general I am-an-adult duties like cooking and cleaning). Behold, a quite simplified / approximated breakdown (all the pie charts in this post are quite general guesses, btw):

The main thing that might surprise you here is that we in fact spend a quite fairly small sliver of our time in fact doing projects (aka “DIYing”). In fact, some weeks it feels like we barely have any more time to tackle our to-do list than we did back when we both had full-time jobs in advertising (that was pre-Clara too, so we might have had more energy, haha). Our weekends (along with weeknights after 7:30 when Clara’s in bed) are still our most productive days in terms of making house progress because the journal is “quieter” (as we say around here). So we can focus more on tasks and less on answering comments and proofing & posting posts. But that pie chart is not complicated sufficient, so…

Here is a further breakdown of the breakdown above (yup, we broke down a breakdown) to give you a better sense of what we truly do within those general categories:

INTERACTING:

• Comments: Our philosophy is that if you take the time to read what we write, the least we can do is return the favor. So we manually moderate all comments so that one of us – typically Sherry – can read it before it risks getting lost in the count and so that we can answer any questions that come up (the only exception to this is giveaway entries, which get approved in bulk since they routinely top 3K and in fact topped 10K yesterday, and stopped loading, so we had to start a second giveaway post). Yes, it is time consuming. And no, it is likely not the most efficient system. But being part of the conversation on our journal is quite essential to us and we hate leaving any question unanswered. Farming that duty out to someone like an intern simply feels too “answering service” to us, so we are glad to stay grass roots and hands on.
• Twitter, Facebook & Email: Similarly, we try to be as responsive as possible on other social media. We do not hover on our Facebook page as much as we used to, but we still try to poke in to respond where needed. And Hootsuite helps us track @mentions on Twitter so we can do our best not to let a tweet question or comment flutter by unnoticed.

WRITING:

• Posts: Well duh, a journal has to have posts right? We are wordy and we know it (clap your hands!), so this is another major chunk of blogging. And we write around 35 a month, so it keeps us busy. But we are not sure how you can be a good blogger without spending a good portion of time on your posts. Plus it is our first enjoy, along with Hands-on. Writing posts is what we used to do on nights and weekends after long days of working in advertising simply for lively. And we still feel that way – it is a good time.
• BabyCenter & Do It Yourself Magazine: We have been lucky sufficient that writing our journal has spawned other writing gigs, like our weekly post on BabyCenter’s Momformation journal and a regular column in BHG’s Do It Yourself Magazine. So between coordinating those with our bosses over there, coming up with ideas, writing them, taking photos (or briefing an illustrator or photographer in the case of Hands-on), and answering comments (on BabyCenter), they are sort of a part time job on their own.
  
• Book: We are writing a 260+ page book (due out in Fall of 2012) full of hundreds of projects and photos (more on that here). Some weeks this slice of pie should be muuuch bigger, and some a little smaller. Now that we have 90% of our manuscript turned in (whew!), this slice may in fact get permanently larger since it is time to in fact do all of the projects that we talked about and have them photographed at our house by a pro before Christmas (yes, hundreds of them). Should be interesting…

Hands-on-ING:

• Projects: This is the actual doing of stuff to our house, which we then journal about. Most of these projects might have gotten done even if we did not have a journal (Hands-on is simply something we enjoy)… but we certainly take on projects sooner, faster, more thoroughly, and with more gusto than we may have if we did not have an audience. The fact that you folks are watching adds pressure, but it is the good kind that keeps us going. Promise. You folks = momentum.
• Gathering Supplies: This is the part that makes us best friends with the employees at our local thrift stores, home improvement stores, craft stores, fabric stores, lighting outlets, etc. Sometimes running errands (aka: gathering supplies) can take less than an hour. Sweet. And sometimes it can take more than a day to track down something we need. Hunting stuff is consistently kind of a wild card item on the to-do list. But you know what they say about the thrill of the chase…

PHOTOGRAPHING:

• Photo Taking: Sometimes this is simply taking a few moments during each step of a project to snap a few shots. Sometimes it is cleaning up and styling rooms for “after shots” or “house tour” pictures (Hurricane Clara can leave quite a mess before we swoop in and straighten up so you folks do not have to stare at a giant stack of books in front of the new desk that we built). This also includes the technical aspects of photography that still take us more time than we’d like (using the tripod, adjusting the aperture, waiting for distinct times of day to see which light is better, etc), which is why we have…
• Photo Editing: These are things like adjusting the color, exposure, size, and the way that our photos are cropped (sometimes even after thinking we have mastered the camera things are too blue or too yellow or too wide or off-center, so we try to adjust them so they look as true to life as possible). This also includes uploading and sorting through the hundreds of pics that we take each week. Wish I were kidding about the “hundreds” part, but we typically average 50-200 photos per post (which can pointer the scales at 1,200 photos snapped each week). We then boil them down to under 20 per post and size & upload ’em).

BUSINESS RUNNING:

• Sponsors: This is where most of our money comes from (more on that later) so it involves a lot of fielding advertising requests, notifying sponsors about renewals, sending invoices, and uploading ads to our sidebar. (FYI, we use Google AdManager to serve our sponsors’ ads to our site, which takes a bit of “supervision” but not too much beyond the whole client-relations thing that we do via email).
• Giveaways: We make no money doing this, but it is our way of “giving back” to our readers (and a way to deflect the free products that we are offered but no longer accept). Coordinating each week’s giveaway involves a bunch of emails to confirm the prize details, notify the winners, and facilitate the prize delivery. There is also the task of being the bearer of bad news to folks since we simply do not have room for every prize that we are emailed about (and sometimes they do not feel like the right fit for you folks). Which leads me to our next point…
• Saying “No Thank You”: We are people pleasers, so this is a hard one for us, but we get so many requests each week that we 1) simply do not have sufficient hours in the day for (i.e. attending a local – or not so local – event), 2) do not truly journal about (i.e. “could you fairly please write about my dog walking service?”) or 3) have a policy against doing (i.e. reviewing a product, adding paid text link ads to posts) that we find ourselves having to decline a lot. Sorry if you’ve been on the receiving end of this. We have learned that saying no is difficult, but sometimes it is necessary for reasons of principle and/or sanity.
• Bookkeeping: Ugh, this bores me too much to talk about. Simply pretend I said something interesting about paying bills, filing quarterly taxes, renewing our business license, paying for our own health insurance, managing our site-hosting fees, and organizing receipts. Wish it was less yawn inducing, but it is a necessary evil when it comes to running your own business (more on that here).
• Technical Stuff: On a good week this slice could all but disappear, but on a busy week we may be installing updates, dealing with server glitches, craaaaaashing entirely (which gives us approximately 50 gray hairs each time), or even doing a whole journal redesign like the one we did a few weeks back (we likely spent 40 hours total on that over the course of about four weeks). Since we are not technically trained I am sure all of this takes longer than it should.

So now that we have taken a general look at the time aspect of running our journal, let us talk money. Before you get your hopes up, we are not gonna detail how much we earn. Call us old fashioned, but we feel like “how much do you make?” joins “who’d you vote for?” and “are those real???” in a our list of conversations not to be had with the whole planet (anything we do not talk about with friends at dinner typically = off limits here in journal world). In a general sense, we like to say that we make a modest living (we are not rolling in cheddar, especially after we pay our business-related expenses like hosting fees – which we outline at the end of this post). But we in fact think is a good thing because we journal about living modestly, so it all goes hand in hand. But we are glad to talk about where our money comes from and how that has changed over the last four years. Let us do it.

Waaay back in 2009 we spoke on a local panel about making money blogging. At the time we sung the praises of a “multi-channel” approach to earning income from your journal. Because, at the time, we (though mainly Sherry, since she was the only full timer then) got money something like this (again, this is a quite general guestimate):

We will breakdown some of those terms further under the next pie chart, but let us talk generally for a second. A few years back, despite our best efforts, money from advertising simply was not cutting it. So Sherry branched out and began selling inexpensive art prints that she had printed locally and shipped herself (she’s got a fine arts degree). It was sort of like being an Etsy vendor (but she created a shop page on our site to vend them instead). At that time Sherry also began offering custom mood boards to assist readers with their “Design Dilemmas” (and briefly even offered smaller services like paint color advice and even short phone consultations).

When it came to pricing those mood boards out, Sherry did some for free first, simply to get interest up and a few under her belt. Then she slowly raised her rate using supply & demand as the guide. After being free for a while they were $30, then $60, then $100, and slowly built up to $250 when supply/demand increased over the years (Sherry refused to sell them for more than that, even when the two per week that she would offer up would sell out within two minutes). Oh, we were also writing for Do It Yourself Magazine and our local R Home design magazine, so that is where we got the whole multi-channel method thing from. We were doing plenty of stuff to make a small income. Which was necessary because ad income alone simply was not cutting it (I should mentioned here that Sherry took a large pay cut to go from advertising to blogging, but she simply hoped to see it through, and looking back it was a risk that we are so glad we took).

But now let us look at a new pie chart. Times have changed, and luckily for the better. As our traffic grew, so did our ad revenue, which meant that we were able to spend less time on services and selling prints (both of which we discontinued after Clara’s birth in May 2010 out of sheer no-time-at-all necessity). The elimination of these services allowed for more time that we could spend focusing on blogging. In fact, while baking making these pie charts I noticed that our right now weekly Google Ad income is larger than what we pulled in our whole first year via Google. This is not to indicate that we are making an enormous amount now, but rather that what we began at was so laughably small. Hopefully this encourages anyone who is right now earning a few cents a day to stick with it for four years and 2,000+ posts (if you enjoy it I guess, haha, do not stick with it for the uncertain years-down-the-line dividends). So now our income sources look more like this (this chart might be fully inaccurate since we did not truly calculate things so it is not made up of actual percentages – it is simply representative of the general shift in our income sources):

It is still “multi-channeled” in a way, but the majority of the channels are advertising-based. We still keep our income split across distinct sources so that if one falters, we are not sent into a panic. And in case you are scratching your head at any of those labels, here is a swift breakdown:

• Google Ads: These are labelled as such on our sidebar or at the bottom of a post (they are by the geniuses at Google who take words from our page – or hints from your browsing history – to show you ads that they feel are most relevant to you). We have little say in what is shown here, except for blocking inappropriate ads. But we enjoy that they are fairly self-sufficient, which means more time for projects and writing posts.
• Ad Networks: Plenty of blogs substitute or supplement Google with ads from a network, which allow for more home improvement specific ads that can also pay more (since they do not typically have sufficient “inventory” to fill all slots, we typically use a back-up method that shows Google-Ads when they are not running). Our ad network is Haven Home Media for anyone wondering, now owned by Reader’s Digest. And they came to us, so we are not sure how you sleuth an ad network out (in general we believe in focusing on keeping projects/posts strong and sponsors/networks will hopefully come to you).
• Sponsors: These are the ads that you see on our sidebar marked as such (as well as folks who get shouted out in a thank you post once a month). These are people/companies that we work with directly, who come to us because they think we’d be a good fit. If we agree (and have room for them, since sometimes we are “full”) they come on as YHL sponsors and we send them plenty of virtual wet kisses. We have a lot of enjoy for them because unlike the random ads that come through an ad network and Google, these folks choose to work with us directly, which is fairly cool of them.
• Amazon Affiliate: There are plenty of affiliate programs out there where in short bloggers earn a quite small cut (typically around 4-7%) when someone purchases a product that they recommend. The most common affiliate links you will find are in our “We are Digging” sidebar column with a label under them that says “links contain affiliates”(we are sticklers for labeling ads, sponsors, and affiliates to try to keep things 100% transparent). They are all items on amazon.com that we enjoy (some of which are things that we have in fact picked up ourselves – like a specific book, camera accessory, decor item, or toy for Clara). Occasionally they pop up in posts about things we have picked up and enjoyed, where they are also consistently clearly marked.
• Writing Gigs: These are the aforementioned BabyCenter and Do It Yourself columns that we write, as well as random things that come our way once in a blue moon (like an opportunity to write an article for another publication).
• Book: Yup, they are in fact paying us to write a book. We cannot believe it either.

But of course, no business is without expenses. And it straightforward to assume that blogging is a free endeavor (after all, it was when we began in ’07, we even had one of those free urls with wordpress.com at the end of it). But as our traffic and business grew, so did our costs – such as:

• Hosting: Between paying for our site (on LiquidWeb <–affiliate link, fyi) and our images (on Amazon S3) we are headed towards a five figure year when it comes to hosting expenses alone. Yes, that is tens of thousands of dollars simply to host our site so you folks can read posts and see pics. Totally worth it though. Blank journal page = no readers. And we like having you folks around.
• Taxes: Not that anyone is immune to these, but since no employer is taking out taxes for us upfront, it takes some extra planning on our part (i.e. remembering that about a third of every paycheck needs to be squirreled away because it is going right back to the government in the form of quarterly tax payments).
• Insurance: When I left my advertising job last May we were suddenly on our own when it came to securing and paying for our own health insurance. And it is not exactly low-cost, but with a little one, good coverage is certainly worth the peace of mind.
• Retirement: Without an employer automatically socking away bits of a paycheck into a 401k (or doing any sort of matching for us), Sherry and I each opened a SEP on our own, which we are responsible for contributing to regularly.
• Business License/ LLC Fees: Since we are a legit LLC in Virginia, we pay annual license fees and taxes.
• Professional Assist: I know that sounds like a therapist, but what we mainly mean is that we pay our accountant (who does our taxes) and the occasional programmer to assist us navigate technical issues (ex: we crash four times in a week and feel like throwing our computers out the window). Though perhaps we should consider the therapist sometimes…
• Equipment: If it were not for blogging, we likely would not own a second laptop, a DSLR camera, an HD Flip video camera, an external hard drive, or an iPhone (among other items that I am likely forgetting right now). But it certainly helps to have some decent “tools” for blogging as efficiently as possible, so we are glad to invest in them (and yes they are write offs, which does not make them free, but it takes away a bit of the sting).
• Project Costs: Arguably a lot of these costs would likely have been incurred eventually since we were Hands-on junkies even before we began our journal (so we would do most of this stuff anyway). But as I mentioned earlier – some of our projects happen (or at least happen at the pace and scale that they do) because of this journal. So we might have done all the things that we did to our current house in two years instead of in nine months if we were not home bloggers. Oh and since we get asked this a lot: none of our projects are write-offs since we are doing them to our primary residence (our house is not zoned as an office building, which is a good thing because if it was – and we wrote projects off – we’d owe a big chunk of money to the government if we ever sold it).

If you want more info on the expense side of blogging, we in fact wrote about it in more detail last year. But that is sufficient out of me for now. Hopefully “peeling back the curtain” helped – whether it is to use this info as you plan your own blogging business (or other somehow-related venture), or to simply assist you better understand what goes on behind the scenes around here. It is certainly a lot more than simply doing projects and writing about them, but there is nothing else we’d rather be doing. Seriously, we are fully amazed that we ended up “here” and our cup runneth over with gratitude. In fact a pie chart of our gratitude would be 101% full. And now as anything with charts should end – who else is hungry for pie?

Update – Some of the most frequent requests that we get are for info about professionally blogging (how we made our site, how we grew our following, how we make money, etc) so we shared all of the details about how we began a journal, grew our traffic, and turned it into a full time job.