# Posted 9:25 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

BLOGGER-CON II, CONT'D: (Click here for Part I) Before letting you in on the secrets of how to blog for profit, I thought I'd let you know that Tara from Liloia.com has put up a comprehensive set of links to posts about Blogger-Con II. As you might guess, it's hard to think of an event that could possibly get more blog-love than a convention of bloggers. Anyhow...

There are a lot of different ways to blog for profit, and Jeff Jarvis has put up a rough list of them here. Even though I've never had much interest in figuring out ways to make money off of blogging, I've noticed that more and more of my favorite blogs have started to put up ads.

Sometimes, you just don't have a choice. As Kevin Drum mentioned when we met up last December, the cost of bandwidth for a popular site can add up to thousands of dollars per year. In other words, Kevin basically had the choice of paying out of his own pocket to give readers access to his site or, instead, selling ads to cover the cost. As Kevin found out, a site as popular as his can easily earn back five or six times in ad revenues what it lays out for bandwidth.

One of things I'm curious about is how many hits per day a site has to have before BlogAds will take it on as a client. I'm also sort of curious about the maximum amount someone can make off selling-ads. The BlogAds site says it has clients making up to $1500 a month. Is that a reference to Glenn Reynolds? Or will he break that ceiling wide open?

Anyhow, I don't think I'm doing a very good job of conveying the substance of Jeff's session. Frankly, a lot of the business talk passed me by because I don't have any sort of framework to plug it into. What definitely was both interesting and relevant was when Jeff polled the audience to find out what are the most important challenges facing the blogging industry.

The top two answers, far and away, were: 1) A blogging industry trade association and 2) Reliable demographic information about blog readers. A trade association is necessary to set standards as well as deal with collective welfare issues such as legal concerns, lobbying and insurance. Reliable stats are critical to turning profits because it is very hard to sell ads or product without a reliable way to quantify the target audience.

While blog audiences are small compared to big media, my suspicion is that our demographics are extremely impressive in terms of education, income and geographical distribution. But you can't sell a suspicion. The challenge then becomes how you get a representative sample of readers to provide information about themselves.

The technical folks at Jeff's session seemed to be in agreement that measuring internet traffic is a very, very hard thing to do. Why is that so? You probably know more about it than I do. But I wonder if there are solutions to this problem already out there. After all, the NYT and WaPo have a strong incentive to get demographic information about their readers. Whatever methods they use should have some applicability on a smaller scale as well. Or not. After all, what do I know?

In closing, I think that Jeff's standing-room only audience felt that his session was a big, big success. The participants were very excited about sharing their ideas and actually seemed very excited just about being together and sharing the hope of turning blogging into a major industry. I hope they're right about that. I could use the cash!

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