Ask HN: Do you earn income from your developer blog?

Many of us probably have fairly similar blogs - code snippets, conference notes, our thoughts on programming, etc.

Are any of you earning income through your developer blog? Not just by finding contract work, or by writing an ebook, but some other method. Maybe selling your libraries, doing training, paid access to "the good stuff".

If you are, can you share what you're doing, how you decided what to do, and how successful it's been?

5 comments

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PaulHoule 12y ago ↗

Developer blogs are second only to anime sites for poor monetization.

wmil 12y ago ↗

Political blogs also have terrible monetization even with high view counts. Developer blogs generally get the odd pity click on an ad.

Really the only way to be a "professional blogger" is to be an otherwise famous writer or to convince a business that they need a professional blog post writer.

joshstrange 12y ago ↗

I am not monetizing my blog but the eBook/ad routes seems to be the most successful way to do it. For example Dayle Rees writes blog posts on the PHP framework Laravel [1] and then compiles them into eBooks [2][3] that he sells.

[0] http://daylerees.com/

[1] http://laravel.com/

[2] https://leanpub.com/codehappy

[3] https://leanpub.com/codebright

scottlilly 12y ago ↗

Niche ebooks seems the most common way I've seen to generates a little extra beer money (or more) from a development blog.

swanson 12y ago ↗

In addition to blog posts, I write short reviews [1] for technical books that I've read and use Amazon Affiliate links (a single link to the book).

It works out to between $20-$50 a year for my blog [2]. Nothing major but it covers a couple "free" Kindle books or a nice steak dinner :)

[1]: http://www.mdswanson.com/writeup/2013/11/13/how-to-fail-at-a...

[2]: https://gist.github.com/swanson/4711006