These days everyone is jumping onto Blogger.com or WordPress.com, all with the ambition to make money online by being a blogger. What started this modern day gold rush?

As blogging gains popularity and notice in conventional media, everyday people jump into their DSL or Cable Modems to see what is this blogging thing about. They find great sites like Problogger, Desi Notes, and Kumiko’s Cash Quest. After some digging through those blogs, they find posts about making money with blogs and tips on how to do it. People read these blogs and think, “That’s easy, I can do this!” They hurry to the free blog creation sites and in a few minutes a new blogger is born! Generally there are four types of beginning bloggers:

• Dollhouse Bloggers — They spend more time worrying over how their blog looks. They want the colors to be just right and matching. These are the same people who create mySpace pages that slows the average computer down with animation graphics, audio files, and have a ‘cute’ background that makes actually reading their page impossible.
• Scrooge Bloggers — Ever been to a blog and they either have more ads than blog posts or no blog posts at all? These people are in it totally for the fast buck. They create the blog with a very spartan format, with just the minimum amount of information required to start the blog, and then start plastering on the ads.
• “Look At Me!” Bloggers — There are people out there that are just crying out for attention, for whatever reason, and will throw away any and every shred of dignity they have if people will pay attention to them. They’ll post about how horrible their life is, what was done to them as a child, and anything else that gets them sympathy. Any ads are just an afterthought.
• Firefly Bloggers — Fireflies are scrooge bloggers in mentality towards getting at that money, but they also actually have something to say. They’ll pour their heart and soul into the blog, posting, reading other blogs, and searching how to get traffic. After three to six months of running at a sprint to make some money, they’ll look at what good all this work has done, and unless they’ve been talented or lucky, the lack income will have them determine that blogging isn’t for them. Or that they were misled. Or you have to pay for traffic. Or yada yada yada…

I’ll be honest, I’m a firefly blogger. I read some great blogs and thought I could do the same. You know what? I can’t. I used to be able to program in BASIC, PASCAL, and knew alot about computers back in the late 80’s to early 90’s, but now I’m good to be able to read the HTML templates and kinda see what’s going on. Programming my own HTML? Forget about it! Over the weekend while tinkering with the templates to try and make my blog look how I wanted it to, I came to a realization. Beyond what I read in other blogs, I don’t have the faintest clue on how to make money online by blogging.

While I subconsciously knew that I didn’t know how to blog for money, I joined websites to generate some money by pay per click or pay for reading email. I would spend a good 30 minutes to an hour making the rounds on my sites, collecting pennies to a dollar or two for my efforts. I came to this conclusion last night when typing up two reviews on affiliates. They were a huge waste of time, time I could better use to learn how to be a better blogger.

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