From our side, it hasn’t made any change at all; Indie Travel Podcast has always been clear with naming our sponsors and being transparent with our audience. That’s the core of a trusting environment: talking clearly.

What are your personal ideas about how this could hurt
the blogging world?

@Stuart: I never see you around my blog! On a note related to your comment, I actually net more than 3k lately. However, expenses for this are actually very low. I could get by on about $200 a month in expenses. However, I’m a lazy guy who doesn’t like to write so I outsource much of my SEO writing to a friend. Overall, I spend about $600 a month.

We have got away with only 30 hours by ignoring “vital” tasks like external SEO for more social-media efforts. If we spent time doing “marketing for machines” we could probably draw a lot more search engine traffic. We are spending more time on site-related work at the moment, because we’re trying to grow things a bit.

I do agree though with some of the comments above that not emphasising the amount of work required to “make a site successful” is a bit of an omission.

Also, I’d say claiming to “earn $3,000″ a month when that is just the gross figure, brings others like John Chow to mind — and not in a positive way! NM would have been better served (IMO) to have gone with a lower figure and added the word “profit” into his marketing of the ebook.

Sidenote to C&L: You get away with just 30 hours a week on this site? Nice work — I look forward to buying your book on “100 ways to improve productivity”!

Thinking back to 2007, my lifestyle was akin to that of a cloistered monk as I built my first blog in advance of my trip around the world.

Selling a “how to” book at $27 could be an good revenue generation tool.