What bloggers can make from their blogs

Blogging not only helps one to express themselves but one can also earn money through blogging. Recently people making lot of money from blogging than working in day jobs. I have a friend who is a blogger and does not want to join any company as he is getting enough money from Google Adsense for his blogs. Few people are using blogs for their earnings and few for just to experience the power of blogging.

In India recent developements suggest that Actors and Politicians are also using blogs to connect to their fans across the globe. There were lot of contraversies sorrounding celebrity blogs (One with Big B's and Ameer Khan's blog about Sharukh Khan). In politics, recently Omar Abdullah stopped blogging because of unwanted and lot of hate comments.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article that looks at what bloggers can make from their blogs.

Through systems like Google's AdSense, advertising now can be added with the click of a mouse to the smallest of websites. The model will soon be expanded to online videos with the announcement last month that YouTube will share ad revenue with content creators.

The rise of what's known as contextual advertising has created a 21st-century version of royalties that's reaching deep into the ranks of amateurs and hobbyists. It points to a future where many people will moonlight online as small-time creators for a little extra income, with a few finding fame and fortune along the way.

"A lot of people say it's sort of like a little investment. They write something every night before they go to bed, and another page on their website gets added. And the more pages they've got, the more chance they've got of earning a little bit of money," says Darren Rowse, the webmaster of problogger.net, a site that helps bloggers improve their income.

He says he makes six figures a year blogging, when factoring in all his sites and the consulting gigs they generate. "You put something out there," he adds, "and it has the potential to earn money forever. And in that way it sort of is like a royalty."

A little more than $1 billion, or one-fourth of all advertising online, went to Google's AdSense program in the third quarter of 2006. Of that, Google shared $780 million with those running AdSense. Approximately 3 million blogs now use AdSense, according to the blog-tracking site Technorati.

What isn't known is how that $780 million was distributed over those roughly 3 million blogs. But anecdotal evidence suggests that there's a majority making nothing, a sizable minority bringing in at least $100 a month, and a few making serious money.

This past November, a survey by problogger.net of 732 self-selected respondents found that of the 625 bloggers using AdSense, 45 percent were making at least $100 a month. Another survey of 104 bloggers at a blogger summit last week in New York found roughly a third making that money, not necessarily with AdSense.

Nearly one-sixth in both surveys made at least $1,000 a month. These samples, of course, skew heavily toward the more committed and successful bloggers.