I’ve been writing for over half a decade and been involved with online income in some form or another for over a decade.
Back in the day, there used to be bloggers and people the bloggers used to call “internet marketers”.
The bloggers were people who would write articles for free and didn’t make a real effort to monetize it. At most, they would sell a few $10-$20 ebooks.
The term “internet marketers” was for people who would write but also actively try to make money from their writing.
Mind you, this was back in the late 2000 – early 2010s where the internet was not nearly as monetized as it is today. People would complain about affiliate links for amazon books (which only paid a few cents in commission).
The bloggers hated internet marketers.
They would constantly write about how they are better than internet marketers and how internet marketers were “not producing value”.
Makes sense right? The guy who’s writing solely for his audience will outlast and produce better content than the guy who also wants to make some money?
NOPE. That’s not how it went and not how it goes.
Today, almost none of those “bloggers” are still around. Their blogs are either dead or abandoned. They stopped writing and they disappeared.
On the other hand, the guys they called “internet marketers” are still around and making more money than ever before.
(To those new to the game, the terms have changed with time. What you now know as the “creator economy” was previously just “internet marketers”.)
The Importance of Making Money
(Why the bloggers disappeared)
The old school bloggers were not making any money from their blogs. This is the primary reason behind them disappearing.
Money changes the equation in many ways:
1) Money makes you stay in the game.
The “true bloggers” were so puritan about not making money from their work that they eventually could not sustain the effort.
When you get busy or push comes to shove, the things that go in the back burner are the things that don’t make money.
You become busier and the first thing a no-money-making writer does is stop writing and focus on other things.
It’s just how priorities work. If you don’t make money from something, then you will not prioritize it as high as things that do make you money (unless you are extremely rich, which most writers are not).
This applies to me too.
I’ve been writing for over 6 years. I’ve made millions of dollars from LMM despite it only being a hobby. I don’t go out of my way to go make money (you will notice that I don’t bombard you with affiliate links or force you to pay for articles.).
BUT I do want to make money. I would be lying if I said otherwise.
I have many products you can buy and I want you to buy them for yourself and for your friends and family. Unlike most people who act like they are above making money, I am 100% transparent.
99% of what I produce is free (hundreds of articles, videos, podcasts) but for the remaining 1% you have to pay for.
If I made no money at all from LMM, there would be far fewer articles on the site simply because I’d invest less time into it. However, I promise to always stay true to the LMM promise.
The LMM promise: I only make money by honorable means.
This means: I sell products I am proud of, I don’t promote shit I don’t personally like just to get a commission, I don’t skip payments to our affiliates, I will not charge you for something after you cancel, etc.
2) Wanting to make money forces you to upskill and improve.
Note: In this point I’m not talking about spammy content writers who we all hate. I mean genuine writers who you want to read.
When you are trying to generate some money from your work, you are forced to improve simply because of market pressures.
What were all the puritan old school bloggers who were anti-monetization doing in the last 10 years?
- They were using shitty blogspot and wordpress subdomains instead of a real domain for their blogs.
- They were running websites with terrible design that wasn’t pleasant to open or read.
- They were not building any SEO juice simply because they didn’t care enough.
On the other hand, the internet marketers (what is now called “content creators”) figured out the game very soon.
Why? Because they were tracking sales.
- They saw that they get more traffic if they use a real domain and more sales with better website design.
- They learned that writing personal updates was not enough and if they wanted a growing audience, they also needed to write about topics people were searching for.
- They learned SEO because they needed more traffic to make more money from their work.
- They learned that they should leverage social media and email lists (while most pure bloggers hated social media).
Over time, the marketers got a bigger and bigger share of the traffic while the bloggers got fewer readers.
Wanting to make money forced internet marketers to adapt to the changing internet and the bloggers who didn’t adapt perished. Just like animals in the wild – only the most adaptable survive.
3) Money lets you invest in the tools to help you grow.
As the landscape changes, you need money to adapt to changes.
People now expect much better website designs than they used to. They expect more functionality and better images and editing.
How do you get all that? Money.
If you’re not making money, you cannot invest in things like design, SEO, professional images, good hardware (like a great microphone for podcasts), etc. In other words, your business suffers.
Not making money forces you to be behind in terms of quality. All of this gives you even fewer readers and makes you more likely to quit.
It’s that simple.
What about social media killing blogs?
Some people say social media killed blogs and to an extent they are correct. Social media did kill those “life update” blogs where people wrote about their day.
All that stuff got absorbed by Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites.
However, sites that were producing actual content that people want to read – that was not killed by social media. Those were killed by their owners not monetizing their sites properly.
I know this is 100% true because the guys who were monetizing their websites are still around, and still alive and kicking (and in fact doing better than ever).
It’s only the guys who weren’t making much money from their sites who disappeared.
The money making writers just adopted social media as another traffic source and it actually helped them make even more money and get even more readers.
The primary reason behind all the bloggers disappearing in the last 10 years was not social media, it was money.
And that prompts me to leave you with the important meta lesson of this article:
Always try to monetize your art.
Average people think “making money is bad”. That’s why they are average.
They don’t understand that making money actually makes the art and artist better.
You are forced to produce the best work you can and learn new skills and tools to stay competitive.
You can’t delude yourself into thinking you’re an “underappreciated and undiscovered gem” when you really just aren’t as good as you think.
When you try to make money from your work, you find out just how good it is and are forced to learn how you can improve it.
And most importantly, when you make lots of money from your art, it becomes a priority even when life is keeping you busy. Unlike all the bloggers who used to complain about marketers, you don’t disappear into oblivion.
– Harsh Strongman
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