The title is misleading. Although I know a small number of people are making enough money from their blogs to generate a living income, the truth is the majority of people who try to blog for profit will fail to produce substantial revenue. That doesn’t mean the blog won’t be a critical part of their money-making strategy, it just means that a bigger strategy is needed; one in which blogging is just part of the equation.

Direct Income It is possible to make direct income from your blog, of course. The two most common models of this are ad-supported (Google Adsense is common, but higher-quality and paying ad partners are available to larger blogs), and pay-for-use where your reader pays to access premium content you produce.

The problem with direct income schemes is they take enormous amounts of traffic to work. The average user will not pay or click on ads so in order to get your 1/1000 conversion to pay off you need to have tens of thousands of visitors to your blog. That would have to be a really interesting blog.

Affiliate Income A more common way for bloggers to make money is by hawking other people’s wares on their site for commission. Depending on the affiliate, the income from this can blow ad-supported revenue out of the water.

Marketing for Other Income Other writers choose to use their blog as a medium to advertise some other product they have created, or as a vehicle for increasing their professional profile. In these cases the blog may or may not additionally use another model to generate income, but the focus is not on making money.