How much do professional bloggers earn?

Great question. In this post from ProBlogger.net, Darren Rowse sheds some light on how he's doing; and though he never provides any specifics, you get the sense that he's doing rather well.

After reading Darren's blog for a few months, it's become clear to me that he takes a proactive approach to earning money and being straightforward with everyone about his methods. Through doing this on his ProBlogger blog, managing one of his 20 other blogs, and working on a consulting basis he claims to make at least $100,000 a year.

A philosophy of mine, however, is that you cannot focus on the money when it comes to a creative medium. Darren doesn't do this, but those thinking about blogging are met with the temptation to think "how can I make money being creative?" This should be replaced with the more appropriate "I'm creative, weird somebody just gave me money for it!?" It's not the businessman CEO mentality, but it aligns with the Google business model that if it does the best to serve the user (in this case, the reader), the rest of your project will fall into place.

In connection with this I have been talking with someone in the last few weeks regarding the Writer Shore community generated online literary magazine project. As a prospective writer for the site, this person expressed concerns about executing their "first publishing rights" on an online literary magazine that's freely searchable and available to the public. I understood this concern and we left it at that. However, I think that sooner or later the attitude of those responsible for giving us really great content (good writers) will shift toward accepting publicly searchable mediums as a positive audience rather than a trash can for our marketable publishing rights.

The Internet as a publishing medium doesn't get much respect from those who consider themselves professional writers. With the proper visibility, the size of an audience a writer can get from the 'net is mind boggling. By default we have access to readers in any part of the world where somebody has Internet access. Just this week the Writer Shore blog has received visitors from Hawaii, Seattle, Florida, New Jersey, Chicago, China, Wisconsin, Australia, Detroit, and Italy. My intuition tells me the potential is there for serious writers. It's just up to the writers to take a bold step and deliver that content.

For more content related tips on Internet blog writing, Darren Rowse has been steadfast in his solid preaching.