Ask HN: I recently lost my job, I want to pursue blogging as a career. Thoughts?
The truth is, it's hard to find a good loyal audience to monetize. My main blogging revenue is Medium Partner Program. Since beginning of 2020 I made around $500 from something like 5 articles. I don't blog a lot but I have access to pretty popular programming publications on there, allowing me to reach a wider audience. I also made some money from people reaching out to write posts for them. It's not a lot, but considering I only have 1.4k followers and treat my blog as more of a reminder/documentation for myself in the future, it's also not bad.
Medium can suck though, as their algorithm decides whether your posts will be shown on the homepage. Personal self hosted blogs on the other hand can be hard to optimise for search engines, which is something medium is great at.
Don't try to make blogging your main thing. You will either fail or it will take along time for you to see any decent sums in the first place. Do it on the side, and if it takes off then you can consider doing it full time.
What will you blog about? Make sure the audience is big enough that you can make money from it. Too big though and you might get lost in a sea of voices. Quality content and marketing is key. It’s been awhile since I blogged though so someone else might have better advice regarding marketing / social media platforms / SEO rankings.
Do you have a following or technical writing / journalist skills? I hear you'll make peanuts, so do you have writing skills useful to startups / biz that you can freelance with while you build the blogging side up?
It's hard to make money blogging. I suggest becoming a YouTuber instead, consuming YouTube content is lot easier.
And if you want to make money, I suggest you try e-commerce.
Well you won't exactly become Kottke overnight. Blogging requires that you build the habit of blogging. I like to write on an airgapped machine to trial out some posts before they go live to the masses.
If my post looks good, then I move it off the airgapped machine to my main device where I upload it to my Ghost instance and then seen by thousands, or even millions if it gets picked up by other bloggers/news outlets who would amplify your message and spread it far and wide.
Providing you have monetized it, you can generate revenue, although to really earn properly from it you would need a small staff of writers and master Commission Junction / Amazon Associates and you would need to consistently churn out well written high quality posts and also build your audience organically over time.