"Get paid to blog!" Every article or advertisement should have some fine print after those words, to the effect that if you already have a blog which enjoys a wide readership, then you can make serious money for blogging. When a person with a common, little-read blog considers making money with a blog, they are apt to end up feeling cheated.
The bloggers with real income potential didn't start their blog to make money, but because they were passionate about the subject of their blog. Yes, their blogs have a subject, and a fairly narrowly defined one. A blog that posts about cat care one day, Pres. Obama's Third World abortion policy the next day, and the New York Yankees on the third won't have a chance to develop a readership. Further, a blogger who picks a topic- say Britney Spears- based on a high search engine ranking for those words is competing with thousands of other would-be money bloggers as well as legit Britney fans or critics.
The blogger that wants to have a popular blog must also be a good marketer. He must know which blog promotion efforts pay off, and which just offend readers and make the blog less popular. He must also be very persistent with his blog, posting every day. Bloggers who take a couple of months off don't have a chance to become popular bloggers.
How do you tell when your blog has become popular? Check out the top blogs on similar topics. Do they ever mention you or link to your articles, not because you've asked them to, but because what you wrote was too good not to share? Look at your visitor stats. Have you ever had 1000 visitors to your blog in one day? Look at the comments on your blog. Have you ever had 50 comments on a single blog post? This is how you can tell if your blog is popular enough to make good money.
I must confess that my own many blogs are not that popular. Not just the one written in Volapk, an obscure artificial language with about 15 speakers, but my other blogs such as my politics blog and my science fiction blog rarely generate much notice. I do work on improving my blog, but the money- maybe 12 cents in a year- I generate from Google ads doesn't compare with the money to be generated writing articles for Helium..com or Associated Content.
One 'get paid to blog' opportunity that I would urge you to pass up is blogging at Today.com. I started a blog there because they promised you a dollar for each post on your Today.com blog. But you had to wait until you reached $50 to get paid. In addition, they do review your blog posts there. One quite innocent blog post which touched on the topic of Today.com itself got deleted for no real reason. I was in the process of changing my main blog over from Blogger to Today.com. I had changed the name of my Today.com blog to that of my old Blogger blog. Losing the blog post made me decide not to give up my Blogger blog after all. When I changed the name of my Today.com blog back to its original title and blogged about how I was going to continue my Blogger blog and continue the Today.com one under a different title, the blog reviewers at Today.com deleted my account.
While I have no hard feelings for Today.com, I believe the drawbacks of using their blogs- you cannot edit your posts after they have been reviewed, for example- outweigh the advantages for most bloggers. The time you put in writing one post for your Today.com blog could more profitably be spent writing an article for Helium.com or Associated Content.
The promise of getting paid to blog lures many people- including me- into doing things that in retrospect turn out to be poor ideas. Bloggers, the best thing you can do for your blog is improve your writing skills, pour your passion into your blog, and visit a good web site such as ProBlogger to learn how to improve the way you market your blog. Over the short term, your blog will not cure your money problems. But in time, if you grow enough as a blogger, perhaps the money will come.