Blog development costs 163,000 rubles, maintenance costs 84,000 rubles, and blog promotion (per month) costs 199,900 rubles. Promotion, for example, includes “buying ‘thousanders’” (bloggers with 1,000+ followers; 3 posts per month) — 30,600 rubles, “development and deployment of 4 unique virtual accounts” — 24,000 rubles, and “cross-posting (50 posts)” — 1,240 rubles. I can tell you about my own experience. Over all my time as a “thousander,” I got about fifteen idiotic emails along the lines of, “Please tell us your rates for posts on your blog.” None of the emails even had a greeting, so they were obviously just blasted out to everyone in Yandex’s top 50. I regularly get free invitations to the movies — “special screenings for bloggers.” Twice, acquaintances approached me asking for outright paid placements. I was terribly curious to find out the going rate, but it never got that far. It felt awkward to ask — like you were haggling. But it was clear, by the way, that we were talking about fairly small amounts of money. A hundred thousand billion times people have asked me to simply plug links — and in many cases I do. I’m always asking people to plug mine too. Once I was offered a mobile phone to test on the condition that I simply describe my impressions. I would have gladly taken it, but it just didn’t work out. I had to go pick it up, and I wasn’t in Moscow, etc. And only once in all that time did I get a genuinely personal email from some guys who were running a PR campaign for an event. The guys politely but directly offered money. The email was proper: full name, phone number, and so on. I refused and once again never found out the rates. But the funniest part was that I was going to write about the event anyway. It turned into an absurdly stupid situation, and I ended up writing nothing. From regularly talking to other “thousanders,” I can say that when it seems like “the post was paid for,” in 99% of cases it wasn’t. And in general, this whole “blog promotion” scene has been inflated into a basic scam. By the way, one reason for that is those stupid tests like “find out how much your blog is worth.” People get all excited when they see “your blog can earn up to $8,000 a month.” You can’t make a living from a blog. Well, you can make a little money, but not enough to live on. Yes, of course, there are exceptions in the form of a few professional blogs with audiences in the tens of thousands. But that, excuse me, is no longer just a blog — it’s a full-fledged media outlet. After all, nobody is bothered by ads in newspapers and glossy magazines. And despite how simple it may seem, creating a blog like that is unrealistic. You’re welcome to try. So, two pieces of advice from where I stand. For those who want to make money from a blog: stop wasting your time and find a real job. For those desperate for “promotion through blogs”: the recipe is simple — write something interesting and add a polite note at the end saying, “please give this a plug.” It works.