Hmmm. should you? I wouldn’t and I tell you, you shouldn’t too. It is a risky deal to hang on to your blog for an income. Let us explore this in detail.

First, what are the ways one can earn with a blog? Link Sales, Paid reviews and Banner Ads are some of the most popular ways of pocketing good cash, enough to make a living.

Link Sales: Much of Link Sales is dependent on Google’s invincible potion called PageRank. It indeed is powerful. Your income has a direct relation with your PageRank number. If you have a PageRank of 6 or 7 or above, you can consider yourself a rich man, while a lower PageRank will get you income in lower figures. So, say you have a PageRank of 7 and you have a popular blog and are selling each link at $200/month. 10 links fetch you a good $2000.

Then comes Google and slaps you with a PageRank 5. Aww, you have been hit. You have no choice but to reduce your cost from $200 to $100. True there will be customers who will have bought the link in your blog for exposure, but most of them will have bought it for the so-called PR juice. Your juice doesn’t taste good anymore and so, you have to sell it at a reduced price so you can finish it before it stinks.

Paid reviews: Ok, this is another of the hot trends going on in the Make Money Online Industry. You have a popular blog, you signup for a service like ReviewMe.com or Smorty.com, get paid review requests/orders, fulfill and submit them. 95% of the time your reviews are approved and you are paid 7-15 days after approval.

Why do people buy paid reviews? They do for 2 reasons. Firstly, if your blog has a good readership, it will get their service or product very good exposure because your readers will read your review just like another post. Secondly, it gives the buyer’s site backlinks. Backlinks are required to improve a sites authority in Search Engines and also to build PageRank.

Here is a tip: Google doesn’t like these Review Sites, because it knows it is a disguise for link buying and sales. How long this trend will run smoothly, we don’t know. What happens if Google penalizes? We know.

Banner Ads: This is a fairly safe but limited method of revenue. How many banners can you run on your blog? 4, 6,8,10? Ok 10. Say you charge $100 per banner and make $1000 a month selling 10 banners on your site. Very nice. Ok, what happens when one or few of your banner clients drop? You of course get new clients. What if you don’t get? Say, you have 2 or 3 spots empty? How much did that hurt you? $200-$300? Mighty sum.

Why the heck am I blogging then? The million dollar question.

You are blogging because you want to build an income. How do you do it? By making your blog a medium for selling your mainstream idea, service or product, you leverage on the visitors you receive daily, you benefit from the RSS reader database you have built over time. True, link sales and banner ads are good cash, but do not solely depend on them. Not the best idea.

You are good at writing reviews for your paid customers. Why not implement the same idea to review the hundreds of products that are related to your niche, give your visitors good and unbiased information about them and bank some very good commission as an affiliate. You don’t have to be like the GURUS out there, who are simply thieves when unmasked. Read about the product, research and find out if people have really benefited from the product. If yes, go ahead write a good review based on your research and if the product is of a really high standard, give a personal recommendation. People will appreciate it and will not mind if you leave an affiliate link at the end. They will gladly help you receive the checks.

If you are blogging about a niche that is hardly covered by others, provide a membership site with fresh, unique and usable content. People will come. The days of paid content are not over. Anything that costs holds value. This is a well known belief. Build a monthly membership. Market it the right way. Blog about it. Let your readers know about it. Show them the benefits.

One last benefit I want to tell you is, doing the above will make you truly independent. You don’t have to depend on a PageRank or a Google. It won’t bother you what they do anymore and you are outside the comfort zone already.

Say yes today!