In the last post, I built a hypothesis on some posts that Brian Clark of Copyblogger wrote. The hypothesis is that you can in fact make a living from online writing. It’s how you go about it that I think makes the difference, and I’m out to actively prove it in my current projects.

Let’s face it. Contextual advertising is generally tough to earn – or not, depending on who you ask. For me, it’s tough. I make more money writing for other people’s blogs. At least for now. But my website statistics suggest that I might someday make good money from my sites. If I can keep up the pace I’ve set for myself.

The keyword, though, is “someday”. There’s an exponential growth curve in blogging revenue, and some weblogs experience a shallower initial curve than others. Sure, there are people who experience faster growth and earn a living from contextual ad programs for AdSense – often spending less time than I. But I haven’t discovered the magic yet.

I have, however, discovered some other honest writing opportunities, courtesy of a website owner I’m collaborating with. He’s already started a successful online publishing business writing and selling targeted niche e-books and e-reports.

He wisely set up an affiliate program, whereby the affiliate takes 25%, he takes 25%, and the author takes 50%. He’s written two e-books himself, and my guess is that he has done quite well.

I am currently working with him on a series of e-reports, which require less of a commitment than a full book. I figure, one e-report should take me an elapsed time of about 20-40 hours, start to finish – including research, writing, editing and producing a reasonable layout before creating the PDF file. Let’s do some approximate calculations.

The e-books will sell for between US$17-47, depending on the content and the length. Even at $17, and because of the actual umbrella topic and its rising popularity, indications are that the e-publisher can sell up to 1000 copies in a year’s time. My 50% would then give me about $8500 for just one project. At 20-40 hours of work, that’s about $212-425/hr. Not bad. To achieve the same kind of earnings writing for a few dollars per post for some of the weblog networks, you’d have to write, well, a lot.

But of course, that’s a lie. To make an e-book/ e-report publishing venture work, you need a high-traffic site with a good conversion rate. To get that, you need to build trust and prove that your writing is worth buying. In my estimation, that means writing a weblog, with regular fresh entries containing valuable information. And that, of course, takes time for research, writing, and building up a regular readership.

Furthermore, I think the reason why this e-publisher’s site works is that the only advertising on his blog is an advert for his book. There are no other ads to distract the potential customer’s eye. This is the same technique that Seth Godin uses, and, I believe, the same one that Brian Clark of Copyblogger will use. All three of them are marketing geniuses, in that they realize that in addition to blogging, they need to give something of value away for free.

In fact, Seth Godin gives away many of his e-books for free, and makes his living from sales of print books and speaking engagements. Brian Clark hasn’t shown his pimp hand yet, but no doubt will do so soon. They are not the only two doing this, but if you want a career from writing online, you’d do well to read both their weblogs.

So, yeah, I think that you CAN make a profitable living from online writing, but not necessarily from contextual advertising. It’s a question of finding some popular topics and writing freshly about them in a weblog, and supplementing them with free e-books/ e-reports. When you’ve built up a sizeable readership, then consider offering an e-report for sale, to test the waters. You need to give the project enough time, to make sure that a sizable number of people (maybe 1,000?) have been exposed to it.

Unfortunately, this method means that you need to pay your bills by some other means, until your e-books (and others, if you’re planning to go that route) start selling. In other words, you might still have to write pay-per-posts for a while.