Political blogs get most of the press these days and for good reason. Many political bloggers have managed to uncover government fraud, mismanagement and other scandals. They have also been known to rabidly attack people who may or may not deserve it. These blogs have a very public face and there is some potential for profit in political blogging, but it can be a real challenge.

There are so many political blogs out there already that it can be difficult to get your voice heard. If you have the ability to dig up secrets about the lives/lies of political figures, then you have a chance at generating traffic. Otherwise, you are entering a very crowded battle with very little weaponry. If you do succeed you have the possibility of generating a lot of hits and hits translate into profit.

Unfortunately, a secondary problem with the profitability of political blogs is the lack of revenue generating products associated with politics. Beyond some books and bumper stickers, there is very little to buy.

Here are some political blogs to look at:
Wonkette
Talkleft
Freerepublic

The personal blog or web diary is a staple of the blogging community. These blogs contain the thoughts, opinions and experiences of the blog author. The person writing the blog wants to share their life with the world and perhaps get a little recognition from their readers. They may also have motives such as finding romance or publishing their stories and poetry. This is by far the most popular (from the standpoint of number of people running their own blog) form of blogging today.

The concept of blogging grew from these personal diaries. While these blogs are at the heart of what was originally considered blogging, they are rarely the type of blog that will make a profit. That isn1t usually a problem because most of the people who create these types of blogs aren1t in it for the money. If you want to make a profit blogging about your life, you1d better have a very interesting life.

A good place to get a look at a lot of personal blogs is at myspace.com.

There are thousands of services worldwide that will be happy to host your web site. Before youchoose a provider, check to see if they are compatible with your blogging software. Wordpress, for example, currently requires PHP version 4.1 or greater and MySQL version 3.23.23 or greater. They also recommend Apache servers but do not require them. Movable Type requires Perl version 5.004_05 and recommends 5.6.1 or above. It also requires one of several database programs. Whatever blogging software you need, but sure your web provider can handle it. Some other considerations are:

Storage Space
Does the service provider give you enough space to comfortably host your blog? If you plan, for the most part, to stick to text entries then this will rarely be a problem for you. Almost any package will provide you with enough space for a large number of text entries. If, however, you intend to constantly be assign photos and other graphics to your site, the amount of space provided will eventually become an issue.

Bandwidth / Traffic
Bandwidth controls how much information your site will be able to download to users every month. This is another issue that probably won’t affect you unless you intend to use a lot of graphics on your site. Text downloads simply aren’t too demanding.Statistical Tracking
Most providers offer some sort of statistical tracking for your site. At minimum, their tracking should give you the following information:

Unique visitors
Number of visits
Pages
Hits
Bandwidth
Hit totals for individual pages
Incoming Links
Search Engine hits and search terms

There are plenty of other statistics, and the more you can get, the better your analysis of how your site is doing and how it can be improved will be.

Included Blogging Software

Many providers now include “one-click” installation packages for your blogging software. They make it simple to get a blog up and running using a package such as WordPress. If they do provide this, make sure they use the most up-to-date version. Some service providers never bother to update their software (iPowerWeb comes to mind).
Recommended Providers

Some quality, affordable providers that have a good reputation and simple blogging software installation include Blue Host, Midphase, DreamHost, and Laughing Squid.

I’m not going to tell you that blogging will make you rich. As I’ve already said, blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Your goals need to be realistic and you must be willing to put effort into your site. I understand that people want to see dollar signs when somebody discusses making a living, so I will share mine.

In the past year, my blogs have earned about $17,000 from various advertising sources. Before you get turned off by that number, however, understand that this has been a part-time income for me. For most of the past year I have both worked a full time job and been a full-time graduate student. I generally spend about two-to three hours a day on my blogs. I estimate that I dedicated 700 hours to my blogs in the past year. That means my hourly income was about $25.

This is my second full year of blogging (although some of my sites are older than that). While I would love to have made more money, I believe my profits were very realistic considering the hours spent. Now that the sites are up and running, I am moving towards full-time blogging and I hope that next year’s income will continue to reflect that hourly rate.

My advertising revenue comes from several sources. These include direct payments from individuals as well as affiliate advertising though Amazon, Google, Commission Junction and Yahoo. There are several other services and I will discuss affiliates at length in a future post. Some people may also look to sell items or services directly through their sites.

Because of confidentiality agreements with the various advertisers, I cannot give you exact numbers about how much money one service pays versus another. I can give you this general number for my site however. I have found that between all of the advertisers I average about $9 per every thousand page view on my sites. My blogs are about a variety of subjects, so they probably earn about an average amount. Some topics (such as medicine and finance) will earn more than others, but this is a good yard stick. By this measurement, you can see that the more visitors you can appeal to, the more money you can make. A site with 30,000 visitors a day will probably make a substantial amount of money while one with 300 visitors a day won’t even buy your lunch.

One of the facts that needs to be clear from the beginning is that you won’t be making money the first day. Your blog will require time to build an audience and for a long time you will need to write with the knowledge that not too many people will be reading your original posts. You will still need to write them as if you are writing for a large audience though, because quality and continuity is what will bring people back and get them to recommend the site to their friends.

People choose to blog for all sorts of reasons. Many of those reasons have nothing to do with money. Often, people just wish to share a piece of themselves with the world. For most people, blogging is much more enjoyable when money is not part of the equation. People who blog for the love of it should be careful when considering making a business out of blogging.

If you blog because you care about something or because you enjoy expressing yourself, you should realize that turning what you enjoy into a business will change the thing you love. It isn’t that you cannot still be happy blogging. Finding a way to make money doing something they love is one of the best things that can happen to a person. You need to know, however, that once the thing you love becomes a business you have to treat it like a business. That will take some of the fun out of it.

Before you decide to blog for profit, you need to evaluate what you wish to accomplish and why. The decision to treat blogging as a for-profit-business is one that you need to consider carefully. You are not going to start making loads of money the first week or the first month. It may take a year or longer to build up your audience to the point of profitability. During that time you need to be posting information daily, or even several times a day depending on the material you are covering. To do this requires a commitment, and that commitment shouldn’t be made lightly. Blogging for profit is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Blogging is a grounds-up publishing business that requires more dedication than capital.

The point of making a career out of blogging should be to find something you can happily do, without supervision, for years to come. You need to either love the concept of blogging or to love the topic you are blogging about. Preferably you should love both. At points, especially in the first year, you will question whether or not to continue. There are plenty of bumps along the road. Your advertising revenue and/or your readership can suddenly drop off. Your site can get taken down by hackers or bugs. Your readers can send you nasty letters for over the smallest of mistakes. Things can and will go wrong as you build your blogging business. Moving past these problems requires a degree of dedication and hardheadedness that many people lack.

I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture for people who want to turn blogging into a business. I love what I am doing. I love having the ability to write about the things I love without anyone telling me what I can and cannot say. I love that I can make a living doing it. For me, that is worth the struggles I have been through. What I want people to understand is that blogging for profit is like starting any other business. It requires hard work, dedication and intelligent planning. I can’t provide the first two items, but I hope I can help with the third.

The term blog is short for web log. The original meaning of the term was any diary or journal kept online. The goal of blogging was to create a site in which one person or group wrote about their lives and invited other people to comment on what they wrote. The concept began to grow, however, and now encompasses a far wider variety of subjects and providers. There are now corporate blogs, professional blogs, job blogs, political blogs and many other types of blogs. Just about any topic can be turned into a blog, so the concept of it as a diary is a little outdated.
For our purposes, a blog is more about the technology and the presentation than the subject discussed. Blogs use server-side software to present their information. In other words, the person writing the blog typically does little more than type and format the article.

The programming and presentation are automated using software that originates on the web site, not on the person�s computer. Blog scripting allows a publisher to automatically post information. This greatly increases the speed in which a site can be developed and updated.
One of the most important features/limitations of blogs is that blogs are chronological.

The most recent entry appears at the top of the page and subsequent entries appear below the first entry or on separate pages. The relevance and positioning of an article is determined by time. The timeliness of the information presented is vital. People are most likely to read the most recent blog entry and less likely to read older entries. This is what differentiates a blog from a standard web site. On a standard web site, the designer decides what information goes where and determines the relative importance of the articles/links that appear.