Blogging for money

As a business student, I tend to look at things from business perspective. So as a new blogger, I began wondering whether it was possible to make money by blogging. I warn you I am not an expert on this. Let's say I am just brainstorming about blogging business.

Blogging is a type of journalism, specifically freelance journalism. You don't write for news media company but you post your uncensored writings to your blog site on the Internet.

Traditional journalism businesses like newspapers, radio and TV have most of their revenue generated from advertisement. To demand higher price for advertisement, they need to have bigger readership, audience or viewership. In order to have larger audience, they need good contents to attract more people. So, logically good contents is critical in generating more revenue for journalism business through advertising.

Now we live in Internet era. Internet is changing our daily life and also the business world. Internet had serious impact on traditional journalism business, especially newspapers. Nearly every newspaper company across America has lost more than half its revenue recently. Guess where people get their news from instead of reading newspapers. Of course, on the Internet.

People read news from major online News sites like Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal online. But besides major News sites, people also get news and latest buzz from blogs. Since Blog is a new type of journalism on the Internet, it also make sense to apply revenue generating mechanism of traditional journalism to Blog. That is to make money from blogs through advertising. In case you didn't know, online advertising is the most profitable business on the Internet. The richest Internet company Google makes most of its money from online advertising. Google does it by placing a little banner or column of text ads across all over the Internet. This ad system by Google is called AdSense.

So if you want to make some money off your blog, you would probably want to place some ads on your blog, such as AdSense. Every time people click on the ad, you make a few cents - I don't know how much exactly. You can click on the ads on your blog, but that's illegal and called click fraud.

However, if you want to make good money through ads on your blog, you need to draw a considerable number of people to your site. To make that happen, you should have good contents for your blog just like traditional journalism. Sure, you don't have to write trustworthy news like those on the newspaper. It can be celebrity gossip, political rants or anything interesting.

Even if you have good contents, you won't make money if nobody knows about your blog. You have to make your blog known. One way to do it is through Search Engine Optimization. What SEO means essentially is to make your site appear among the top search results from Google or Yahoo! Another way to make your blog known is to have your blog article voted in social news sites such as Digg or Yahoo! Buzz. I won't go deep into SEO or Yahoo! Buzz since I am not an expert on this.

So to make it short, I think it's possible to make money from blogging if you keep publishing good contents on your blog to keep your readers interested. Also you should know how to make your blog popular and draw traffic to your blog.