It’s all over the web: Make money blogging. No initial investment. It’s easy! It’s fun! You’ll be getting laid in no time!

Nonsense. Blogging is a job, and it’s important to remember what the function of that job is: Deliver content to your audience. It’s easy to lose sight of that. What with all the talk about how easy it is to start a blog using tools like Blogger, WordPress or Joomla!, people can forget that all they are doing is dropping their words in the digital ocean and hope, usually in vain, that someone will find it and reward them for it.

That said, blogging has created a new business model for rewarding content producers. With the advent of online systems that can process advertiser-to-publisher micro-payements, such as Google’s AdSense Network, people are able to get paid for their words in ways that simply wasn’t possible 10 years ago.

10 years ago, blogging was mainly in the form of public diaries. We didn’t call it blogging back then because it was, and is, an incredibly silly sounding word. And no one took it seriously because it was patently un-serious. Anyone remember OpenDiary.Com? It was ugly as all hell, and you had very little control over how your content looked and how it could be shared. That has changed.

Technology we can all lose

The effortlessness with which someone can now create and distribute content could easily be seen as a bad thing. The amount of poor writing/design that winds up in my Stumbled browser window is quite disturbing, and I think it’s due to everyone saying how easy blogging is.

Content, I keep telling myself, is king. What that means is that no matter how good your SEO, no matter how perfectly you’ve placed your ads, no matter how flawless your design, if you can’t deliver the goods then people aren’t going to be your regulars. Sheer strength of will isn’t going to get the job of blogging done. You have to actually have something to offer.

Except in cases where you don’t. I’m not going to list any of the blogs that I’m discontent with, mostly because that’s just plain rude, but also because you never know what I’m going to need from any of these people. But I will say that there are blogs out there, popular blogs, that don’t seem to offer anything special that couldn’t be found with a simple Google search. Of course, the reason that said Google search is effective is because the information on those blogs is so prolific, but that’s an Escher drawing I don’t want to get stuck in.

Resources

In the process of trying to learn everything we can about being successful in the Blog-O-Sphere™, we’ve picked up some interesting resources. And in the spirit of spreading the word about how to blog well, we’re sharing them with you.

Create your Blog

Blogger – Use this only if you have no idea what you’re doing and no desire to spend any money whatsoever. The most basic of basics, doing for blogging what Hotmail did for email 12 years ago.

WordPress – Very simple and easy to use. Using this, you can quickly setup your blog, and you won’t need a great deal of web experience. But don’t count on being able to get it working, or looking, exactly the way you want it to.

Joomla! – Very powerful, but not recommended unless you have a great deal of experience with web development and programming. Sure, you can use a canned template and a basic installation, but odds are you’re going to encounter a problem or you’ll need it to do something that isn’t in the manual and you’ll have invested all of your time in creating a site that you need to scrap and swap in WordPress.

With all of that in mind, it’s worth pointing out that our site is Joomla powered with a custom designed template and an amalgam of plugins and modules that I couldn’t even begin to list. I’ve spent two months fine-tuning this site’s template, so I hope you enjoy it.

*** A quick word about comments: Comments and TrackBacks are a huge part of the blogging experience. They are what separate the bloggers from the more traditional columnists of yore. By allowing authors to easily engage with their readers, a whole new form of dialogue was created. If you’re going to have comments and trackbacks on your site, then you better make them easy to use. If anything on your website requires too much effort from your readers, they will likely lose interest in a hurry.

Content Ideas

Ideas are the oxygen of any blog. Unless you want it to whither and die, you better be having ideas on a regular basis. When you get a little constipation of the brain, here are some useful mental laxatives:

Blogging Tips – If blogging is indeed the lifestyle that I tell everyone it is, then this is a good hub of resources for staying on top of events and techniques. A must for the bookmarks bar.

Blogging Ideas from Your Daily Life – Some ideas for how to come up with articles based on the desires of your readers. Comments and reader mail can be invaluable, and this post helps you to sort through them and come up with good ideas.

Make Your Blog Sizzle -Typically, I don’t care for this many ideas in one place. I find them very difficult to navigate and extract anything useful from. But the author of this list managed to do the unthinkable: hold my attention for 101 consecutive but unrelated sentences.

Steve Palina’s How To Monetize Your Blog – This is a must for anyone that wans to blog. I put this in the ideas section because he provides pointers on how to write content that will appeal to monetizers.

Monetize

These are the monetizing options available to everyone, immediately. Obviously, there are more specialized ways of selling ad space on your site, but once you’re at that level those people tend to get in touch with you.

Google AdSense – The big fish. Almost every blog out there has at least one flavor of AdSense links or ads on them.

Project Wonderful – Very popular among webcomics and gamers. Clearly, right up our alley.

Donations – Paypal works well, or at least it does in theory. It’s very straightforward, so don’t expect it to do backflips.

Text Link Ads

Amazon’s Affiliate Program

Popularize

This is the most controversial part of the blogging discussion. The fact that most traffic from these sites is usually of a questionable quality, coupled with rumors that the “democratic” nature of these communities might be anything but, it’s hard to know what social bookmarker to go with.

That said, we use all of them.

Digg

StumbleUpon

Reddit

Technorati

Del.icio.us

MySpace

Facebook

It’s a really good idea to add a bookmarking button at the bottom of each post (most blogging platforms use templates, so insert it there). We like the one we use, from AddThis.com. This way, your people can spread the word effortlessly. As previously mentioned, if it’s not easy, your readers probably aren’t going to do it.

We welcome your comments, and please don’t forget to Stumble us, Digg us and read our comic.