Top Blogger Rundown

[jetpacklife]

Here is a create piece from BusinessWeek about top blogers.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/07/0714_bloggers/index.htm

Gives details on how they got started, how much traffic they get, how they make their money (mostly advertising) and how much they make ( one guy is showing off a 6 figure check from Google )

One of the sites is just silly pictures of cats! It just goes to show that if you can bring in the traffic, you can be making some serious cash.

[onemoretry]

I wouldn't count on traffic, I'd count on content. Many of these top bloggers started earlier and were willing to contribute meaningful content quite nearly daily for at least three years before they saw epic returns. The key phrase in the lolcats interview is "on a lark"---no one knows what stupid idea is going to turn into a cash cow. The other blogs in that report are your better bet for inspiration.

[jetpacklife]

I said, "if you can bring in the traffic, you can be making some serious cash."

I stand by that. I'll add the that traffic has to be virtually free for you to make money, but, if you're getting lots of traffic, you should be able to make some money. The more traffic, the more money.

IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU HAVE REAL HARD HITTING CONTENT OR JUST SILLY STUFF!

For my one venture I was doing the most stupid myspace codes. My friends would go to the site and say "You make money off of THIS?" They had no idea how many thousands of dollars I was making on it. They didn't even believe I could make anything!

[MuseMojo]

I was considering some original silly stuff to build traffic. A certain niche market might find it amusing. I wrote about 25 pages of original material about 5 years ago, but never did anything with it. I could post it on a website, but I don't know how to test to see whether it's worth my time (& maybe professional reputation) develop it.

Digression: I really don't know how Scott Adams got the cajones to create Dilbert while working under a pointy-haired boss. He really has a lot of guts.

When I ran a Google search on the closest keywords that I could think of
literally thousands of responses came back, but absolutely NO Google ads. Not a very good sign, right??

The top results don't really have enough traffic to show up on Alexa.com, but they do have some Google Adsense spots on their sites.

[onemoretry]

I said, "if you can bring in the traffic, you can be making some serious cash."

I stand by that. I'll add the that traffic has to be virtually free for you to make money, but, if you're getting lots of traffic, you should be able to make some money. The more traffic, the more money.

IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU HAVE REAL HARD HITTING CONTENT OR JUST SILLY STUFF!

For my one venture I was doing the most stupid myspace codes. My friends would go to the site and say "You make money off of THIS?" They had no idea how many thousands of dollars I was making on it. They didn't even believe I could make anything!

I can definitely agree with you that mountains of traffic will always convert to some amount of cash (and one of my muses relies on exactly this), but the onus is still all on you to come up with something silly (or hard hitting) that generates gobs of traffic. It's the age old "insert magic here" problem. How did you arrive at your MySpace codes venture? Was it on a lark, like lolcats?

So while you're right on the mark with what you said, I still don't see how it's valuable to say "traffic == revenue" without some way of quantifying what makes or breaks traffic.

[coollikeme]

its that simple. Hope to find that out soon.

[chigurh coin flip]

overheard in new york and perezhilton are extremely popular sites. these are not just average blogger sites. while they may have started as such, this is like saying "just write a book and get to be a popular author."

and those are only two that i'm immediately familiar with offhand.

by the way, its still a very interesting article, so thank you for posting it. and perhaps there is inspiration, even in the unattainable.

[jetpacklife]

Like I said before, when looking for google search terms, you have to research what people are search for, not what you think to search for for you own site. It can be good that your competitors are not monitized. They might not be competative.

For my MySpace veture site, I went into it very calculated. I had another site that was falling out of favor and I needed something new. I had a couple of my users asking myspace questions, so I researched it. I found out the SPECIFIC myspace things that people were looking for online. I found that "myspace layouts" was something that was searched for something like 20,000 times a day. I made some USEFUL pages relating to layouts and worked hard on SEO for them. (linking from all my other sites and finding other links online, etc)

Within a month, I started showing up on the first page google for that search term. I got about 10k users a day from that seach term, and about 100k page views from those users. That translated to me making about $100/day just on those page views. I added some othes pages for other terms, and started making even more.

I of course do NOT recommend myspace related sites now. I would try to find the next up and coming thing that doesn't have a lot of targeted sites. (maybe facebook, bebo or iphone related sites?)

I would not count on ALEXA for measuring traffic. I've found a much better way to quantify the traffic. Google Adwords will give you a traffic range for sites that have their ads on them. Sometimes even broken down by section.
You just have to create a site targeted ad and search for that site's url.