I am among the bloggers who make some money for their efforts. For fifteen months I have been writing Crystal Coast Living for Bluewater GMAC Real Estate where I also work as a RealtorĀ®.
I receive a modest sum which certainly is not enough to let me support my family on writing alone. I also do a lot of photography. At one time I sold my prints and made a few dollars. I could not get to the scale that I needed to in order to really make money so now I give away my images. Most people think my photos are very good. They might be better than my writing for all that I know.
The only thing that I do different for the blogs where I am paid for the content is I have my wife proof read them. She catches a few errors that I miss.
She long ago gave up reading my free blogs. I actually have a lot of readers across all my blogs. I suspect that I easily ring up 25,000 blog visits over the course of a month. If I got ten cents for each visit, I could come close to supporting myself with writing if I add that to what I am already receiving.
And if I could get something for hundreds of thousands of monthly hits on my main websites, I could retire, but that is not going to happen either.
I have learned how to build traffic, but I have yet to figure out how to really get paid for those efforts or found anyone who really understands how strategic these skills are.
Fortunately all those web efforts have brought me some real estate clients who have bought property in a really tough market so not all the efforts are for nothing.
I have tried Kindle Publishing, but my material does not really fit well there at this point. So I either need to create some material that does work well on Kindle, find someone else that would like to pay me for a blog, or go back to working on my book.
It is really a tough choice because I love writing, but I also need to support my family since the economy has not been particularly nice to real estate agents.
Blogging has been very good to me. I have learned a tremendous amount. The Crystal Coast Living blog that I started last year has become a real success, but anything supporting real estate sales these days might be on life support at any moment.
My own website, the Southern Outer Banks, has also benefited greatly from my blogging efforts. The Crystal Coast social networking site that I have been helping to build has seen tremendous growth and much of it comes from the content that I post on my blog at the site.
I think we certainly are at a point where sites that depend on free content are going to find some challenges. There are fewer writers out there than one might imagine. I have tried to train some more, and I have found it hard to motivate people to write.
I plan to keep churning out posts on View from the Mountain, Applepeels, and my other sites as long as I have the energy and creative spark to provide good content for free.
We will see how things evolve over the next few months. Maybe the real estate market will recover, and we all will be surprised.






