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 across the numerous articles that you may have posted) you will get, say, about 1.5 dollars. This rate may vary from site to site and also based on the popularity of the topic from the point of advertisers. Writers may earn anywhere from a penny to a couple of dollars per day in this mode depending on multitude of factors like the number of visitors, ad clicks, popularity of subject etc.
Some sites, at some time or for specific topics may pay you upfront per article from one to a few dollars per article. Some sites will accept the articles only after an editorial review.
(3) Creating your own blog:
Instead of writing at others' web-sites, you can have your own blog site (you can get one for you free from Google's "blogger" or "Wordpress" or you can spend money to own your own web-site) and keep writing on a variety of subjects periodically there. You can register with Google and place Google Adsense ads there.If any visitor clicks the ads, the revenue generated will be yours.
If your blog is in existence for some period of time, it is attracting sizable number of visitors and you are systematically and regularly updating its contents, then you can earn good money be getting more advertisements for display through affliiate membership in payperpost.com etc. The more visitors and page views you manage to get, the better you earn.
Writers are at prowl dime a dozen in the web-world. Blogging seems to be the past-time of every alternate person in the street. So, making any big money through blogging is not easy, unless you master all the tricks of the trade and work really hard with a goal to achieve in this arena.
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