A blog is an expression of yourself in written form. Basically, it is your thoughts, your ideas, your stories, your opinions, and your information displayed through your written voice. Blogs can be written on just about anything. Although making your blog pay you may not have been the original goal, it is certainly something that most blog owners wouldn’t say no to, if they could make it happen. Earning revenue via your blog can be a very satisfying experience.

The blog originates back to the beginnings of the internet. Blogging started out as a diary or journal that captured the daily lives of people. The word blog actually came from the word weblog. Weblog was the term developed by Jorn Barger and later shorten to blog by Peter Merholz. During the 1999s, the popularity of the blog exploded with blog hosting sites such as „Open Diary“ and „LiveJournal“.

It was in the political realm and news reporting that made blogging famous. The fall of the U.S. Senator Majority Leader Trent Lott in 2002 was widely attributed to bloggers. The bloggers brought to light some comments not made public by the media. Senator Lott was forced to step down from the controversy.

It wasn’t just politics that bloggers were interested in. Dan Rather, the news anchor of CBS, reported about President Bush’s military record. The validity of the documents presented was called into question by bloggers. In depth research revealed the documents to be forged and the „rather popular“ Dan Rather was fired over the incident. CBS was forced to issue an apology.

Some bloggers have a hard time keeping fresh content in their blogs or other activities come up that steal away their time. When this happens, they often put their blogs along with the domain name up for sale. This is where you can make money without actually having to write a blog. You can buy these lower priced blogs, fix them up a little just like you would for a renovation on an inexpensive house and then resell them for a profit.

Other bloggers are attempting to grab a piece of the millions of available advertising dollars by putting ads on their blog. Visitors leaving those blogs often click on the ads and for each click, the owner gets some small revenue. Google Adsense, and Adbright are just two of the many online entities that allow you to customize ads for your blog.

The great thing about ad revenues is that you can be collecting revenue, even if you have ignored your blog for quite some time. If however, visitors have been commenting on your blog and keeping it alive or constantly changing for the search engines, then you traffic will be increasing along with your residual income. There are tricks and tips to the size of the ad format relative to its surroundings and the placement of the ad that can make up to 400% more money for you, so before you run out and just put Google’s adsense on your blog, read up on this a little more.

Selling products from your blog is a good way to make the traffic on your blog work for you. Your blog can help you promote items that you wish to sell. A percentage of each item sold goes to you. Note that this is percentage of the sale which is different from google ads where you get a percentage of the Click earnings. When starting out, you might want to pick products that you use and are familiar with. It is easier to connect with the customer when you know what you are talking about.

Clickbank is the king of info products and can pay commissions as high as 75%. But Commission Junction, and LinkShare are also great sites that engage in drop shipping and lead generation for commission. Literally, thousands of products are available for you to market. Putting a related product image with an affiliate tag from CJ into a related article on your blog can only help not hurt your chances.

Just remember, too many ads are a turn-off to potential customers. Messy looking blogs with too much advertising turns away customers and everyone runs from over-commercialization. So keep your blogs looking like they are offering more information than advertising and you should be doing just great.

Getting more people to visit your blog is important to generating sales or getting more ad revenue. The more people who visit your site, the more potential for income that you have. Traffic can be directed toward your blog by commenting in other topic related blogs and leaving your own blog address in those. Consider putting your blog address in your signature as your comment in forums and don’t be shy to put your blog url/address in your Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Linkln or Myspace accounts for more curiousity seeking traffic.

Yahoo and MSN search engines prioritize blogs. To keep your blog on top, keep adding new content. Alert your readers to new content by submitting your blog to many of the ping services available. New content will automatically send a ping/alert to the 100-200 search engines particularly if you have added more ping services than the default rpc.pingomatic.com that is set up in your blog writing options area. This will re-prioritize your blog to higher levels in the search engines.

Making money from your blog is a realistic and achievable goal. It does take some work and elbow grease type investment to figure out the combination that works best for you. When it does succeed, its often a pleasant surprise to see small checks coming in continuously.Many of the ideas mentioned above are general commonsense ideas. Some of you may have known about them, and for some there may be just a little new information here. Understand however, that while these are all great ideas, implementing them in exactly the right way to make a ton of money is typically a trial and error process that many of you can relate to. Suppose however that there was a way to cut through the wasted trials and use an existing formula that simply works? Read a review of 5 of the web’s best known blog authors, whom all make 7 to 8 figure salaries from their blogs.