Last Blogger

This statistic is tossed around a lot. Even more so over the last year and a half since making money online has become chic again. You can find discussions regarding the fact that 99% of bloggers who try to make money online won’t over at Steve Pavlina’s and the most direct one, 45n5.

While there’s not likely to be any particular research behind this statistic, it draws from the age old wisdom from bricks and mortar businesses. Starting something is easy, succeeding at it is not. So that 1% isn’t a fixed number. It may swing +/- 0.5%, but all in all general knowledge suggests that it’s pretty spot on.

So where do I fit in? Well it depends on one of the variables in the original statement. What is “making money”? Lots of people can put together a few dollars by tossing Adsense on their site, but the real definition of “making money” varies depending on who you speak to. For example 45n5 suggests that you need to be earning at least enough to pay your mortgage in order to call it “making money”. While I’m not quite at that point yet, I’m not exactly pulling in peanuts either. I’d guess that I could pull in roughly 66% of my monthly mortgage payment on a regular monthly basis. So wherever you set the bar is going to have a huge impact on that 99%.

So what’s the point of all of this? It’s hard. Like every other money making opportunity that exists, there’s no easy money online. You may hear of someone earning money that sounds easy to you, but in almost every case they’ve invested enough time and knowledge to make their earnings seem almost paltry by comparison. Much the same way as I’d be crazy to think I could open a restaurant tomorrow and have it succeed and turn profit in no time, it’s just as crazy for people with no web experience to expect to start a blog and within a couple of months start making a lot of money.

All that said, there are people earning money. They make anywhere from a few dollars a month to several thousand, to several tens of thousands. If you want to earn enough money to keep your robot hobby going strong, then it’s well within reach for most intelligent people who have drive and want to make it happen. If you’re setting out to earn tens of thousands of dollars a month and have never done anything like this before, I’m not going to say you absolutely can’t do it, but you have about the same odds of becoming a multi-million dollar professional athlete without having trained at all for the last ten years.

If you’re going to do it though, go all in.