Blogging and vlogging (or being a “YouTuber”) have never been an easy way to earn extra income. The rare influencers with millions of followers do make small fortunes — but it is constant work, too often leading to burnout and exhaustion. Blogging for dollars isn’t easy.
What makes blogging and vlogging for income so challenging? Even a basic website or online store can overwhelm a creator.
The challenges include:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) and user retention.
- Creating new content on a regular schedule, based on the media type.
- Updating content to work well with social media services.
- Maintaining affiliate links to retailers such as Amazon.
- Complying with regulations from the United States, European Union, and some individual states (notably California and New York).
- Dealing with income taxes, sales taxes, employment laws, and other legal mandates.
We are migrating more than 4000 blog posts from Blogger to our hosted WordPress server. As I migrate the content, I’m attempting to improve how each post meets the challenges of earning a tiny amount of revenue. Even after pages are migrated, the work to keep old posts earning will never end.
A serious digital content creator has to create new content and maintain the old content or the blog, vlog, YouTube channel, or podcast might fade away from search results. If it isn’t new and fresh, you also lose followers.
Challenge 1: Being Found
Most new readers, listeners, and viewers of online content come from search engine results. Others find content via social media. Mastering search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing require that you never stop following the latest information from Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and other gatekeepers. What you learn today likely won’t be true in six months to a year, and certainly won’t be true within two years.
Search engines and social media platforms use metadata, tagged information that resides hidden from readers. I focus on Google’s suggestions for meta tags and metadata, but Bing and Facebook also have suggestions. It takes a lot of time to optimize the data referenced by search engines, time I don’t invest.
For my blogs, I use SEO plug-ins that automatically create and maintain minimal metadata. That’s better than not having the metadata at all, but far from hand-tuning the data to be the top search result. There are SEO experts for a reason: it takes a lot of work to keep track of Google’s search rules. I don’t do a good job of keeping my content search optimized. I should spend more time on metadata, page links, and so on, but I struggle enough with creating content on a schedule.
Challenge 2: Creating Constantly
Search engines check the “freshness” of content channels. Blogs need new posts. Websites need new and revised pages. Podcasts need new episodes. The amount of new content required depends on the medium, too.
YouTube wants new content daily. Creating video or streaming video takes a lot of time and energy. To earn $50,000 or more annually, a YouTube creator might be recording and uploading 20 to 60 minutes five days a week. The millionaires on YouTube have small studio setups, with two or more cameras. They spend a couple of hours on each project. It is a full-time job and the returns are often temporary. What is popular today might be a mere fad.
Podcasting success really needs to episodes per week, a pace I cannot maintain. Producing 30-minutes to an hour of audio content is as demanding as creating video content. Plus, audio should be transcribed for compliance reasons. Single-host shows without guests struggle, so you end up needing guests and a way to record those guests. Again, podcasting can end up a full-time effort. Media companies employ audio and video teams today because that’s where the traffic is.
I have a niche podcast, and I rarely manage an episode every two weeks. It’s just hard to do around other responsibilities. I admire the dedication others have to multimedia content.
Audio and video allow for ads that cannot be blocked or easily avoided. Podcasts often open and close with ads, with one or two sponsorships mentioned during an episode. Basically, podcasters are the new talk radio hosts. Videos attract sponsors, too, and features opening and closing ads on YouTube. But, those advertisers leave if you don’t have a lot of new content.
Bloggers rarely have the followers of video and podcast creators. They also don’t have the same earning potential. It’s been made a lot harder because advertising on blogs has changed.
Challenge 3: Promoting on Social Media
As important as SEO, social media marketing drives traffic to content. New content must be promoted on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and anywhere else audiences might be found. Some of this can be automated, but the social media platforms keep making this difficult. About the time you manage to link social media accounts to content channels, one of the platforms will change the rules.
I used to be able to post once to Twitter to promote a new blog entry. The Twitter post was shared to Facebook and LinkedIn. Everything was connected nicely. Now, you have to pay for services and plug-ins that get around various restrictions and changes to access policies. The ever-changing rules mean that sometimes things just break.
Engagement with audiences on social media is necessary if you want to earn a living as a content creator. However, I don’t read Twitter or LinkedIn content. When the automated “shares” of my blog or podcast fail, it takes me a day or two to notice.
After spending hours writing or recording and editing content, I’m not ready to spend more time engaging with social media followers. The creators who do master social media marketing drive traffic to their channels. Again, this would be a full-time effort and people rarely appreciate that time commitment.
Challenge 4: Maintaining Affiliate Links
Bloggers make money through affiliate links. Some video creators also rely on embedded links to generate revenue. For a time, it looked as if enhanced podcast formats would also make extensive use of links, but simple MP3 audio files continue to be the standard for podcasting. (You can include links in podcast descriptions, but most people listen to podcasts without reading or viewing bonus content.)
Amazon is the source of revenue for many bloggers. Maintaining Amazon affiliate links requires keeping up with Amazon’s constantly changing tools. When Amazon discontinued its convenient JavaScript-based link tools, hundreds of links I had on web pages stopped working. Direct links are faster and more permanent, but the JavaScript methods were easy to automate. Of course, after I change my links to the current Amazon format, they will somehow change the affiliate link syntax again.
A direct product link currently is:
<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN/ref=nosim?tag=ASSOCIATE-ID” rel=“nofollow sponsored”>text to link</a>
The old JavaScript format allowed the following:
<a type=”amzn” search=”NTC dictionary literary terms”>NTC’s
Dictionary of Literary Terms</a>
The JavaScript links didn’t require that a content creator locate the Amazon Standard Identification Number. All I had to do was place the anchor around the title of a book, movie, or other product and Amazon did the rest. This came with a performance penalty and slowed page loading, too.
I understand the direct product link benefits and hope once I convert all the links on 4000 pages of content that the links continue to work for many years. Amazon ad code changes too often. It’s as if Amazon wants to break links from affiliates.
When your income depends on Amazon, or any other commerce site, you need to keep track of their rules for participating as an affiliate. Maintaining proper links also affects search engine results. Google doesn’t like it if you don’t include “sponsored” in the links to items for sale.
Challenge 5: Complying with Regulations
There are a lot of rules and regulations for content creators. Governments eager to protect consumers from scams and basic visitors from being tracked without consent have passed a lot of well-intentioned but complicated mandates.
The United States’ Federal Trade Commission ensures that influencers disclose any product placements, review copies, and other promotional compensation made to a content creator. The FTC rules are available online. You have to disclose you earn money; you have to disclose Google and Yahoo collect data; and you have to permit opt-out or opt-in for cookies and tracking.
Legal changes that don’t hurt large companies are a pain for small shops and individuals. Recent California and EU regulatory changes meant changing WordPress settings. There are so many rules that it’s a constant race to stay compliant and remain eligible for ad revenues.
Compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union is possible with a few plug-ins for most content management system (CMS) platforms, for a price. The “freemium” plug-ins don’t quite meet the needs of many creators. If a site allows comments, you have to explain how user accounts work. Are you sharing data with Facebook, Twitter, or Google? (If people use another service to leave comments, you’re sharing data.)
Laws change and so do the resulting regulations agencies create under those laws. Often, regulations change without the authorizing law changing in any way because regulators have a lot of authority.
Is your site ADA compliant? Is it accessible to the disabled? You might believe it is, but most pages aren’t. That means yet more tools and testing time, too. I use WAVE to test sites and make revisions. Lawyers are looking for sites to sue, sadly.
Challenge 6: Making it a Job
California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) went into effect in 2020. The law limits how many columns a freelance writer can contribute to a publisher. Friends are losing gigs freelancing thanks to AB5 because publishers don’t want to risk facing fines or other penalties. Reading the law it is easy to understand why large corporations fear that compliance is nearly impossible with any contract workers.
Blogging or creating content as an individual, you still need to worry about various tax laws. Any self-employed person can attest to the challenges. Do you work from home? If so, you can only deduct space that’s never used for a non-business purpose. Do you drive for work? Keep those logs and receipts. Office supplies? More receipts. If you spend more than a certain amount with any vendor, special forms to file.
Oh, you didn’t get a business license? Be afraid in some states, because they require licensing. Working from home is also frowned upon in some cities and some homeowners’ associations prohibit working from home. It sounds silly — and it is — but you might discover a lot of reasons not to be self-employed.
Other Challenges
For individual media creators, there’s a lot to do. Complex rules are easy for the Big Tech firms. Not so much for freelancers with a few blogs, podcasts, and videos.
If you have a good idea, someone will try to copy it. You have to keep innovating and offering new ideas.
The biggest challenge to me isn’t technical or legal. When you are online, you become a target for trolls. There are people who lash out at whatever you post. There are insults and even threats. You need a thick skin to be an online content creator.