What is a blog anyway? To me, blogs are an expression of one’s inner feelings, an online journal, a place to air your dirty laundry, a place to talk about your passions in life, a place to be known. A blog is also a great place to make money on the Internet.

A blog can be created on a free service such as Blogger or Wordpress or as your own, hosted site. Either way, it’s so easy to pick up the habit now a days. If you know how to use a Microsoft Word document, you have almost all the skills necessarily to start a blog.

Everything in life is WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get), ok not everything, but that’s how you input text, pictures and videos into your blog. Point and click, how hard is that?

I’m no Internet marketing expert (yet) but to me there are only a few types of blogging styles out there, yet each of them has the potential to make money.

Personal Blogs

Personal blogs come in many shapes and forms. From political satire, daily life and even anonymous ranting about how much they hate life, or hate this person, or hate school etc. This type of blog far outnumbers almost every other style of blog, with people super eager to start telling the world what they had for breakfast, what movies they watched recently and how much they hate work.

I myself have been guilty of the above, but if you are interesting enough, beautiful enough or maybe you’re already a celebrity; a personal blog can bring in quite a comfortable side income via things such as sponsored posts and onsite advertising.

The downside? You need to be interesting, beautiful or a celebrity and it takes time to post regularly and in an interesting manner. But hey, as an online outlet for your thoughts, feelings and emotions, a blog is a good way to go.

Hobby Blogs

Hobby blogs are completely focused on a single hobby that the blog creator loves. I’ll give you an example from one of my ex-colleagues. He loves making models (the ones made out of plastic) from WW2 era soldiers, to anime robots. He documents some of the steps he takes and even sells his completed works. That’s a nice side income for him already, although it takes him a lot of time to do.

Have a look at his blog http://blog.castlebrimstone.com/ (the power of Greyskull! Get it?)

Business Blogs

A business blog is just another avenue of marketing a product or a company. The benefit of a blog is the personal interaction that users feel they have when reading a blog rather than a business’s corporate website. Some examples of business blogs include:

Nike http://insidenikerunning.nike.com/

Google http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Yahoo http://www.ysearchblog.com/

Barack Obama has a blog http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog/

And even John McCain has a blog http://www.johnmccain.com/Blog/

OK those last two weren’t really business blogs, but what could be a bigger business than the US economy?

Niche Blogs

The term niche marketing is used a lot by internet marketers. This is the action of finding a niche segment in any market, finding a product to sell and creating good content around that niche topic to try and entice people to buy the product.

You can also make money from niche blogs through things such as Google Adsense paying words and other similar forms of income generators.

I myself am trying to set up a few niche blogs and target keywords and traffic to them, but it’s been tough going. The first one I tried was The Dell XPS M1530 blog, you can’t get any more targeted can that can you? But after some advice from an Internet marketing coach that I went for a seminar at, he told me that I had just missed the up trend and it was falling now.

I’m going to keep trying to create these niche blogs/ websites and hopefully get myself a good keyword and get ranked highly in Google. If anybody has anything more to add to my article, please add on in the comments, I’d really appreciate it.

-William