When weblogs first started peppering the face of the internet, I thought they were just a fad. But they have caught on in a big way.
The internet hosts about 70 million blogs. According to Web- analysis service Techno-rati, about 120,000 blogs are created worldwide every day.
What most of these blogs have in common is their lame content. The lack of quality partly explains why most bloggers fail to earn anything and just write for the love of it.
Marketing consultant Kevin Stirtz, author of Marketing for Smart People, who writes his own and several commercial blogs (notably AllBusiness.com), offers simple advice to anyone hungry to make big blogging bucks: find a paymaster.
Some bloggers just 'sell' their posts - accept fees to blog about something. 'It's like an ad. I don't consider it true blogging,' says Stirtz. Most bloggers who make money do so by building traffic (readership) then selling advertisements on their blog. 'This is commonly accepted and perfectly legitimate,' says Stirtz.
The best platform on which to build traffic is the free blog-pub-lishing system WordPress (wordpress.org), which Stirtz describes as simple yet powerful and flexible. One can install it on a website or use a hosted free version at WordPress.com.