Yes. Yes you can.
WARNING: there isn't a recipe here. I'm sorry. I've been getting lots of questions about making money through blogging, and figure the easiest way to get the info out there is to write a post. We'll be back to your regularly scheduled (well, sporadically scheduled--it's summer, after all--who are we kidding?!) slow cooker recipe in a day or two.
I do make money from my blogs, and I started making this money without spending *any* of my own money. Except for buying the food. I had to buy the food.
In 2007, I wasn't working. I quit my (super low-paying and ridiculously mind-numbing) job because the kids needed me home. I don't regret that decision at all, but there were a few very panic-stricken moments when I didn't know how we were going to make ends meet.
My friend Jenny offered me a job working from home for BlogHerads.com. I knew that in order to understand my job better, I should start a blog of my own. I wasn't interested in spilling too much of our family info out into the Internet, and only wanted to do this thing if it was going to make money for the family (this may be offensive to some, but it was honestly how I viewed it at the time).
{PS: I no longer work for BlogHerads. I worked for them for a little over a year, and quit when I began working on the first cookbook}
I chose to not buy a domain name. The crockpot365.blospot url still has the "oh no, you're using a BLOGGER blog?!?" stamp of disapproval. I also didn't buy a fancy camera or lighting--- at first.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't buy these things. I just didn't. Because I wanted to prove to myself (and my husband) that I could do this blogging thing without spending any of the family's money.
It did not take long to make money from this blog. I was PROMing the files this weekend and found a pay stub from April of 2008. That was only 4 months into the year, and the stub was for $211. I know that there are bloggers out there who have blogged for years who haven't seen that kind of money.
Was I/am I lucky? Yes. Absolutely. I have been tremendously lucky and I am so very grateful for the opportunity to make money at home in my pajamas while caring for my children.
But I also view this site as a job, and as a source of information and inspiration to those who 1) like crockpotting, 2) eat gluten free, 3) need help planning meals for their families.
I like helping people. I truly believe if you find a tightly-focused niche where you are providing quality content that people search for (through google) that is both helpful and interesting, you will do well.
I also have an entrepreneurial side to my personality. I like to create things, and I like thinking of ways to build content/businesses. If you question any of my friends, they'll tell you that I am the happiest when in the midst of a huge project. If I'm not busy, I get frustrated and start making up stuff to do. That's just who I am.
I'm going to link to some posts I wrote on my other blog last year that might be of some help.
The Business of Blogging (part 1)
Figuring Out Your Internet Voice
Writing for Search Engines Doesn't Mean Selling Your Soul
Is Self-Esteem Tied Into Site-Meter?
Social Media and Time-Management (an oxymoron?)
Full listing of my "can you make money blogging?" series (the above links are linked again with others)
I don't know it all. I am not going to even remotely pretend I know it all. This site has led to three book deals in two years, and through the ad revenue and affiliate links (Amazon is the only one I use thus far) I'm pretty confident that I'll no longer need to look for a "real" job once the kids are fully in school.
That said, there's a lot more that I could be doing with my sites to make them more profitable. I need to better organize the food categories, I know. I need to add a gluten free/casein free tag. I need to get the archives on TotallyTogetherJournal.com updated. I need to work on stephanieodea.com and find a way to wade through the mountainous piles of email I get so my buddy Bob doesn't send me icky emails (Hi, Bob! Sorry for the delay in getting back to you!). I'm not a good facebook or twitter person, and am looking into launching a messageboard so you can write back and forth to each other with recipe questions since I'm not able to be on the computer 24/7.
But these things take time, and the kids are only kids once. There is plenty of time to have a career, but there is only a limited amount of time when the kids are still drooly and goofy and like having me around.
Postingan
