I was watching the news on TV last night and there was a warning about buying puppies as Christmas presents. There's nothing worse than visiting the kennels in the new year and seeing all those unwanted dogs that were chosen as presents because they were so cute at the time. It reminded me of people who start a blog in the hope of making some money online only to give up after a few days or weeks when things don't work out.

The average blogger makes around $20 to $50 per month. So, if that is the average, it stands to reason that some people make less than that and some people make more. The amount of potential income that can be generated by blogging depends entirely upon your ability to build a loyal audience of people who have money to spend.

There is no point in creating a blog and then looking for an audience. Your first task is to identify a hungry market and provide it with high quality information. Once you have established your blog and created some interesting content, your next task is to attract your hungry audience to your blog. There are many ways of attracting traffic to a blog site including banner adverts, ezine advertising, pay per click traffic, links fro other web sites and submitting your site to the specialist blog search engines.

There are literally hundreds of blog sites that lay desolate and abandoned like an old frontier town with tumbleweeds blowing through on the breeze. Their owners failed to identify a hungry market, they failed to attract visitors or they simply gave up posting fresh new content to their blogs.

Blogs are dynamic web sites, they require time and attention. Search engines love them because they are frequently updated with fresh new content. People love them because they regularly provide new and interesting information. But you have to persist, just like any other business, online or offline, you have to work at building up your content, building up an audience of loyal readers and creating a portfolio of products and services that will appeal to your readers and generate some income.

There are many ways of generating income from your blog. Several people have created successful niche sites that offer product reviews including books, software, videos, DVDs and other popular products. Other bloggers earn their income from the sale of advertising space and yet others generate income through pay per click systems such as Google's Adsense programme.

There is now another way of building a profitable blog. A brand new hosted blog service -

John Taylor - November 2004.

John is a prolific writer and is the author of several books including "Testing & Tracking" (