For the past 5 years, I have seen thousands of blogs come up while others experience a natural death. It’s sad that even the most resilient bloggers don’t earn above Ksh50, 000.In fact, after tracking the income generated by majority of Kenyan bloggers, I have discovered that only less than 15% pull in more than Ksh50,000
I know some bloggers may question the criteria I used to come up with this percentage. It’s this simple: to calculate the amount of money a blogger earns, you simply calculate the total number of visitors their blogs attract in a month, then use the obvious formula bloggers use to determine the income. It’s known that for every 1,000 visitors, almost all blogs in Kenya generate $0.80.If a blog generates 10,000 visitors per day, the blogger will earn $8 in that day ,and in a month he will generate $240.Out of the current 5,000 bloggers in Kenya, only 300 are able to earn more than Ksh25,000 per month, the rest earn as little as Ksh3,000.
A blog that generates 10,000 visitors per day must rank above position 500 in Kenya. You can count how many Kenyan blogs are in top 500!!!
One reason why a number of bloggers in Kenya have never made it in blogging is that they like shortcuts. From my own experience, if there is business that needs patience,strategy and time, then it’s blogging. This business is not a gold mine,but if one is patient enough…if he manages to create interesting content and target humans who can consume his content, succeeding is not a difficult task. In most occasions I refer to Pat Flynn,one of the most successful bloggers in the world.This guy started blogging in 2008.During that time, he could barely make $10 per month. But due to his consistency, resilience and patience, he managed to upscale his income to the current $200,000 per month. This explains why resilience and patience are two key ingredients of successful blogging.
What is happening in Kenya is that one creates a blog today,copy paste all the content from popular sites and then starts sharing on Kilimain mums and Dads,Group Kenya and other popular Facebook Groups in the country. This will help you for two or three days but when fans of those blogs realize you’re fake,they will start ignoring your content.
In blogging, there are numerous things most bloggers are not aware of. The first thing they should know is that the most important source of traffic comes from Google while social media traffic becomes useless over time. Focusing more on Facebook traffic is one sure way of killing your blog. This is actually the reason most blogs that rely heavily on social media end up quitting the ecosystem due to traffic decay. It’s a norm that the more you share your content on social media,the more your fans get bored and eventual ignore all the nonsense you share on the platforms, unless your blogs is extremely interesting to read. It’s for this reason some bloggers wonder why they aren’t pulling in even 1,000 views per blog post yet they have 1 million likes on Facebook!
Another reason why most Kenyan bloggers are stuck down there in terms of income is over reliance on AdSense. When you solely depend on Adsense,no matter how hard you work,you can’t break the earning ceiling. In Kenya,the earning ceiling for blogs monetizing with AdSense is Ksh300,000….unless they are at the same level with Nation and standardmedia that earn above Ksh500,000 per month.
When your only monetization strategy is AdSense, you find that month in month out, your income is uniform…even if the amount increases, it won’t go beyond a certain level.
I am one of many bloggers who were monetizing with AdSense and I realized I was killing my career. One day I decided enough is enough and I removed AdSense from all my blogs. Since then I have seen my blogs breaking the earning ceiling—it now earns unbelievable amounts, more than double the amount I used to earn from AdSense. What is more shocking is that the moment I removed AdSense banners from my site, several advertisers came knocking.
I have also noted in the past that blogging in Kenya has become extremely complicated.Competiton is now stiffer than before and advertisers have reduced the amount of money they spend with AdSense. The CPC now averages 0.03 in Kenya. Due to competition for major keywords and the low advertising budget by advertisers, it’s now almost impossible to succeed as a blogger in Kenya. The only way to succeed is to drop AdSense and embrace other means of generating income.