Savvy Affiliate

It Applies To Blogs …. Just As It Does To Everything Else

The 80-20, also known as the law of the vital few and the Pareto Principle ( Wikipedia Article ) is a rule which states that 80 percent of the consequences derive from 20% of the causes.   That is, in other words, that a minority of people exert a majority of influence on any given thing.

The 80-20 rule can be applied to many things.  You spend 80 percent of you time with 20 percent of your friends.  You get 80 percent of your recognition at work from 20 percent of your activities.

So Who Cares?  Or more precisely, what does an abstract thought such as the pareto principle have to do with you as a blogger?  Well one could apply it in this manner You will get 80% of your traffic from 20% of your posts.  And that would certainly be true.  Any given blog will derive much of its traffic from the minority of posts that get widely linked to.  Likewise you will probably get 80% of your income from 20% of your pages. 

However that isn’t the most interesting application!  It is much more interesting if you apply that law to the blogosphere as a whole.  If you do that you can say that 20% of the Blogs make 80% of the money!   Don’t believe me?  Check out Paula’s List of Blogger Salaries

You can see that there are very few bloggers who are pulling down significant amounts of money.  But those that are are dominating the field.   It is interesting to note the scarcity of middle income bloggers on her list.  She has very few people on it who are pulling down $20K - $50K a year.  There are far more people pulling down $120K + a year.  And far far far more people who are making less than $5K a year.

Although Paula clearly has some bias in that she is more likely to index popular sites than less popular ones, it is clear that the top names in the industry pull down the lion’s share to the money, while the others get the leftovers.

So what does this mean to you?   Basically, what the 80-20 rule means to you is that you have to differentiate yourself from the crowd. You need to develop your writing, pick your persona, and improve your SEO skills. Because If you are only better than 50% of the other blogs you are out of luck!  You have to be one of the best blogs around to start making serious money.  But once you rise to those hallowed ranks, the rewards can be great.