The short answer is, yes, a good movie blog can make a lot of money. But, the bad ones end up costing you money.
What makes a good blog? That’s an incredibly complex answer. The quality of the writing and the depth of your insights into cinema are actually only small parts of what makes a blog good enough to monetize.
There are about 3-million things that go into a good blog that creates income. But today, we will focus on 3 of them.
A Strong Back End
Before we deal with the other factors, we need to deal with one issue that sinks thousands of blogs in every sector, every single day. Nobody is going to follow your blog if your speeds are slow, your site is frequently down, or your site isn’t secure. Period.
It’s simple. Before you start earning money from your blog, you need to invest in it. That means you need to invest in high-quality and secure web hosting and skip all of those $5.00 a year hosting companies.
If you don’t go with a quality host right away, you will be twice as frustrated when you try to move your site after the cheap one lets you down.
A Hook or Niche
A lot of very smart, funny, and insightful movie bloggers (and podcasters too, for that matter) can’t find a following because they’re too broad. They’re trying to appeal to anyone and everyone. Their content is great, but nobody can find it because they’re competing directly against the big hitters in the industry.
You will likely have more success if you focus on a smaller niche or submarket to start; one you know you can really crush. Instead of trying to gain traction reviewing every movie that comes out, lock onto a smaller, but passionate, group of fans for a sub-genre. Maybe start out by reviewing the rom-coms of the early 2000s.
You might have something to say about every movie that comes out. But, you should likely start smaller with your blog.
Strong Traffic and a Good Following
The first and most obvious question is what is a good following? What is enough traffic to monetize?
The real question people are asking is, “At what point can I make enough money from my blog to quit my job and blog fulltime?” That is the goal in most cases.
Well, IMDb has more than 250 million unique monthly visitors. You don’t need anywhere near that much. But, it’s hard to say how many you will need. There are bloggers who say they quit their day jobs when their traffic reached about 100,000 visitors per month. Others had to triple that to 300,000 to make full-time-level income.
There are too many variables to set any real expectations. It all depends on your industry, and how you’re earning your money. Are you running ads? Are you doing affiliate marketing?
There are far too many things to list them all here. And when you’re actually going through it all and blogging every day, you will learn a few thousand more things.
However, if you even read this blog today, odds are good you’re ready to take it seriously.