Show Me the Money!
Before starting this blog, I gave serious consideration to whether an audience of writers would hold it against me if I accepted advertising. I came to the following conclusions: If I’m going to take the time to write this blog, I owe it to myself and my family to earn money at it. And if anyone should support getting paid for writing, it’s other writers.
I once heard Michael Perry, author of Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, field questions after a keynote address at a writers conference. Predictably, someone in the audience asked him what inspires him to write. Perry said something to this effect: “There’s a guy named Bob at my bank. Bob holds my mortgage. Bob inspires me to write every day.”
That’s a down-to-earth, non-greedy way of saying, “I write for money.” It makes perfect sense, really. Writing is my work, and I like to get paid for it. Because I’ve got bills to pay.
Accepting ads on my blog allows me to earn money exactly the same way as I do when I have a piece published in a magazine. Subscriptions and newsstand sales do not pay for the writing in magazines: ad sales do. In most magazines, one page of ads pays for one page of editorial content.
Do you blog? If so, do you accept ads? What kind of writing are you willing to do for free?