Truth About Anime Blogging: Expectation Vs Reality

Growing a blog is not as simple as it sounds. And, making money out of it is even more difficult. This post is going to breakdown what blogging about anime is actually like.

Firstly, I have to mention that I’ve only been blogging for 2 years. I clearly don’t have much experience, nor have I had the chance to try every blogging, money making tips and tricks known to mankind to give you guys a summary of the important things you should know about anime blogging.

However, I’ve definitely learned a few things in these past couple of years. I’ve come to understand how some of my “assumptions” were absolutely wrong. I’ve also come to know that I have to change my entire mindset about blogging.

Here are some of the common (mistaken) assumptions/expectations about anime blogs.

“Blogging means easy money”

Many people think internet as the magical be-all and end-all solution to making money easily. While it is undeniably true that almost all the billion dollar businesses to ever exist toady have something to with the internet, the sad truth is that the competition has grew several times stronger. Long story short, you are a tad bit too late to the game to have an easy win.

Even if you’ve somehow managed to get a 100,000 visitors a month, you’re going to be hugely disappointed by how much money it earns you (because, I sure was.)

Here’s my income report for the last month where this blog got 60,000 unique visitors + 20,000 returning visitors:

PropellerAds

Infolinks

I use two ad providers: PropellerAds (the one with the annoying pop-under ad that gets triggered whenever you click something on the blog for the first time)and Infolinks (the one with the regular banner ads).

I don’t use Google adsense as I got banned for something I did unintentionally (ಥ﹏ಥ)

As you can see, I’ve only earned around $40 (combined) for 60,000 unique visitors. Now, there are a lot of factors that decides the revenue, like the blog topic, countries of the visitors, whether they clicked the ad or not, the placement of the ad, etc.

But most of my readers are from the USA which is supposed to be a tire one country, and this is how much it converts to. This might be because Anime is not the best niche to earn through ads as it has a very little demand in the ad industry.

So ads alone aren’t enough to make anime blogging your fulltime job. You’ll have to try affiliate marketing, direct ads, selling courses, and any other possible revenue stream to make a decent income out of your blog.

Don’t get me wrong though. I’m not saying you’ll fail for sure. I’m just saying that it is not going to be a walk in the park to make money blogging about anime.

“Blogging requires less effort”

There are thousands of anime blogs out there and you’re going to be just another one of them. Reviews, recommendations, life lessons, polls, quizzes, and everything one could possibly think of is already there. So getting ahead of all the other fellow bloggers and creating attractive content is going to cost a lot of time and effort.

In the beginning, I thought all I ever had to do was write whatever I liked and everything else will work itself out. But turns out, I’m not Kirito and I can’t get the best results just doing things on a whim.

I learned that doing keyword research is important. You can’t just write about anything and expect good results. You have to put some effort into finding what people want to read about, and then write about it.

You’ll also have to grow your own social media page from scratch as it is crucial for promoting your content. Which means, you’ll have to spend years growing on your preferred social media platform, posting content daily.

“I can hire writers”

This is actually not a really bad idea if you have a well structured plan, money making model for your blog. If not, you’re only gonna end up losing more money. Right now I’ve hired a freelance writer who writes most articles for me, but I’m paying almost half of what I earn from my blog right now for their service. I’m not a full time blogger and I’ve got a day job so I can afford it. If you’re somebody like me you can also hire freelance writers to delegate some work.

But if you don’t have any other income stream, unless you have friends who’ll work with you for free (at least until your blog grows big) it’s not wise to start off hiring writers without an income model.

And yes, there might be people who’ll write for a cheap price. However, the truth is, their devotion to your blog and its quality is definitely going to be less than yours. After all, they’re just helping you out and you can’t demand quality.

“I don’t have to learn anything new”

This is probably the biggest thing people are wrong about. Writing about the anime you love is not all you do. You have to learn Search Engine Optimization, Email marketing, digital promotion strategies, affiliate marketing, keyword research, learn to use analytical tools, etc.

If you’re expecting to only write and not care about anything else, you’re better off writing for somebody else. This is a much better option as you are sure to get paid a definite amount.

Once I get popular, it’ll all be smooth

Funny thing. I was thinking that if I got a lot of traffic, everything would be perfect. But I forgot about my “competitors”, aka other anime bloggers, especially the big ones, who want to maximise their traffic even more.

I’ve had two viral articles that ranked #1 in Google and drew thousands of daily visitors. I was lucky to be number one because no other blogs had written about it. It was essentially hidden treasure that I happened to stumble upon by chance.

I was happy, I thought I finally made it! A little more effort and I could become a fulltime blogger! But guess what happened? In a few months another popular anime blog wrote about the same topics and stole all the traffic! Google prioritises them because they have high domain authority unlike my site, so I got kicked out of the first place in Google.

I said “stole” the traffic, but it isn’t stealing if the content is unique. I can’t really complain because they just took the topic and wrote their own version of it.  Though I was the first to find the topic, other blogs could also write about it, so it is legal.

But what I learned was there are eyes on you. If you become a moderately successful blogger, your competitors will start stalking. They will write their own version of a topic that brings you traffic and beat you out of the race because they have high authority.

So should you start an Anime blog?

Ask yourself if you’re truly passionate about anime, writing or growing a blog. Ask yourself if you’re dedicated enough to work even when you don’t get any immediate results. It will take years to make a living out of anime blogging. Are you patient enough for that? Are you ready to learn new things and adopt them into your practice?