by C.V.Rajan

Created on: November 11, 2008   Last Updated: December 30, 2010

Whether you can really make money blogging is a tough question to answer. But the honest answer is: "Yes, but not much". There may be exceptional bloggers who make real money through blogging and you may call them experts; they are masters in the techniques and tricks of the trade; they have the niche that has the edge.

But for the vast majority of commoners, blogging is at the best a good time pass, which may also happen to get a few dollars a month as pocket money.

From the point of earning from blogging, the scope of blogging itself has to be split in to a couple of categories and analyzed.

(1) Blogging in a typical blogging site where so many others blog:

Such sites may not offer you any day-to-day compensation even in pennies for your blogs. You may write there for the pleasure of writing, to vent your creative writing skills, your thoughts, opinions and rants. (Examples: Sulekha.com, Gather.com, Livejournal.com etc). You will be able to get new friends, create a readership circle, go and read others blogs and comment "excellent blog" and they will be obliged to read yours and reciprocate! At times, the site may offer you some competitions, some publishing opportunities and if your blog is selected, you may get some gift coupons, cash awards etc.

(2) Writing in web-content sites that acquire and distribute knowledge, opinions, experience and information:

These sites can be considered as more evolved and refined blogging sites, who have taken blogging to a higher level of knowledge sharing.

Typical sites in this category are Helium, Associatedcontent, Howtodothings, Ehow, Suite101, Constantcontent, Hubpages and so on. They are all revenue sharing sites who share their income from advertisement revenues (predominantly from Google adsense) with the writers in some way.

Each site has unique ways of sharing the income. Some pass on a percentage of revenue from ad-clicks to the author. That is, if a reader of your article happens to click a "context sensitive" ad appearing adjacent to your article, it generates some revenue and a portion of that revenue is shared with you). A typical sharing percentage is 50%

In Hubpages.com, you can post ads of Ebay.com and Amazon.com by becoming their respective affiliate. If anyone makes a purchase at Ebay or Amazon by getting routed through their ads in your articles at Hubpages, you will get a commission.

Some sites give you "some dollars per 1000 page views". That is, for every 1000 page views that your article gets (consolidated

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