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Don’t Quit Your Day Job to Start a CAD Blog
If you listen to the buzz about blogs and bloggers you may get the wrong impression and you may assume you can quit your day job and start blogging, with Google AdSense as the new reliable source of income. If you take a closer look at the key numbers you may find out that a blogger's life is not so easy.
you may get the wrong impression you can quit your day job and start blogging
Bloggers' income from ads is now a hot topic after the recent post by Guy Kawasaki, the charismatic Silicon Valley evangelist and venture capitalist. Guy's post was quickly picked up by many bloggers. Particularly interesting is Chris Anderson's post. (Chris is the author of the Long Tail business-model and book.)
In 2006 Guy Kawasaki's blog served an average of 203,000 pages per month generating about $280/month from ads. This equals about $1.4 every 1K page views. Not really a big source of income, considering that according to Technorati Guy's blog in the same period was ranked among the top 35-45 blogs. (Technorati ranking explained here.)
Going through the comments on Guy's post I read that Ralph Grabowski, the most popular blogger in the CAD industry, makes about $150/month from his blog. On his blog, Ralph tells us that during 2006 he had an average of 203,000 page views per month. About $5.4 every 1K pages. Better than Guy Kawasaki. Good job Ralph!
Why are these people investing their time in blogging? Surely not for AdSense revenues, more likely for marketing, visibility, and networking reasons.
Here is the Technorati ranking for the most popular CAD blogs (the smaller the ranking, the more popular the blog.) I'll leave it to you to figure out how much these blogs make or could make selling ads.
| #3 | Ranking | Blog | Author |
| 1 | 53,094 | Between the Lines | Shaan Hurley |
| 2 | 82,598 | RobiNZ CAD blog | Robin Capper |
| 3 | 98,003 | Beyond the Paper | Scott Sheppard |
| 4 | 130,510 | WorldCAD Access | Ralph Grabowski |
| 5 | 135,990 | CAD Insider | Roopinder Tara |
| 6 | 191,548 | JTB World blog | Jimmy Bergmark |
| 7 | 246,415 | Beside the Cursor | Richard Binning |
| 8 | 340,275 | SolidWorks blog | Fielder Hiss |
| 9 | 340,275 | Lynn Allen's blog1 | Lynn Allen |
| 10 | 374,181 | CAD Manager blog | Mark W. Kiker |
| 11 | 466,290 | PR, Marketing & CAD | Rachael Dalton |
| 12 | 530,888 | ChrisKelley.org | Chris Kelley |
| 13 | 614,545 | CAD Panacea | R.K. McSwain |
| 14 | 726,715 | NOVEDGE blog2 | Franco Folini |
| 15 | 726,715 | Alibre CEO blog | Greg Milliken |
| 16 | 893,486 | Deelip Menezes | Deelip Menezes |
| 17 | 893,486 | Outside the Box | Owen Vengerd |
| 18 | 893,486 | TL Consulting1 | Tracy Lincoln |
| 19 | 1,150,259 | 3D Mojo | Alex Neihaus |
| 20 | n/a | The CAD industry | Evan Yares |
I'm sure I may have missed more some important CAD blogs. Just leave a comment and I will update the list. Thank you.
Franco Folini
UPDATE: See my answer to the comments on this post.
Notes:
(1) Technically speaking Lynn Allen's blog and TL Consulting are not true blogs. They don't accept comments and trackbacks. Without comments a blog is more a monologue than a dialog. (See TechCrunch post for a discussion on what constitutes a blog.)
(2) NOVEDGE blog is the youngest of the group. The Technorati ranking therefore is not yet meaningful.
(3) In the case of two blogs with the same Technorati rank, the blog with more incoming links comes first.
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