I recently received an email from someone who would like to make some money on the Internet. She asked about the relative merits of blogging versus YouTube videos. Here’s what I said:

As to YouTube video versus blogging, here are my thoughts:

Everything starts with writing. With writing, you can extend the boundaries of our world by inventing places and people, or you can teach. Now or later, your writing can become anything from courseware to movie scripts.

Blogging itself is easy, but not as popular these days as videos. Videos require not only filming, or creating with animation tools such as Doodley, something you can download and play with, but also typically a lot of editing, so they take considerably more time. Or, if you have something interesting enough to say, you can do vlogging – video blogging, which can be as simple as a talking head video, just you sitting in front of a camera and telling a story. Even your phone is a good enough tool for YouTube vlogging.

As to revenue, with YouTube, it is possible to participate in their AdSense program. You get some money if people click on ads associated with your videos. It typically works out to one dollar for every 200 viewers, so you have to have a whole lot of viewers before it amounts to anything significant. However, you have to jump through some hoops before YouTube will let you participate in AdSense. Because there’s so much competition, that’s nearly impossible. Besides AdSense, you can advertise your own products in your videos. For instance you could have a free beginner’s video on cat training, then sell advanced videos on cat training.

Blogging is still done these days and besides being more pure, simple, and quicker to produce than video, can be quite effective, The actual term blogging is less common. People just refer to blogs more generically as ‘websites’ these days. That’s what I’m doing with 500ways.com – it’s basically a blog. I should point out that 500Ways does not make a full living for me – yet.

Yet another approach is ebooks or audio books, such as Amazon Kindle, and Audible.com. However, these too have a lot of competition, and can be difficult to start successfully. In the early days of Kindle, I was making $1,800/month with a few books I submitted, but the competition has all but buried my books in recent years.

If you want to start a YouTube channel, I’m only marginally familiar with that, but can probably help you if you get stuck or would like advice. I charge $2/minute. Sometimes I can answer questions in 3 minutes ($6). Sometimes, people want an hour of coaching ($120).

If you want to start a blog, I’m exactly the guy you want to talk with. I can build a foundation and show you through illustrated email or screen sharing how to manage your blog. BTW, there’s no reason you couldn’t illustrate some of your blog posts or pages with embedded videos, so in the end, you can have the best of all worlds.