“Make money in your spare time with blogging!”

Jetpacks brought up an issue I’ve been reading about more and more lately: making money off blogs. JP has it right: content, content, content. If you got into blogging to make money, cool, have at it. But like Guy Kawasaki said, there are two types of bloggers: the famous who blog–and people famous for blogging. (And unless your name ends in Hilton, good luck with the former, you’ll need it.)

Famous people who start blogs can hit the ground running day one and have mad traffic. Basically, people want to be part of the life of someone famous, so they comment on their blog hoping to be noticed, much like a fan in the crowd seeking that elusive autograph. This is why people flock to Mark Cuban’s blog.

This is why 600 people tell Alec Baldwin every post what an asshole he is over on Huffington. Take anyone you despise in life, on TV, in sports. Give them a blog and I guarantee they have a page rank of 9 their first week and almost as many hits as Drudge gets in an hour.

This is also why the people who become famous for blogging take way longer to do it, and have to incorporate more tricks in their arsenal to get good traffic. But you can do it. Be original. Have your own voice.

Don’t start off your blog day one reviewing products or other stuff unless you’re Gene Shalit and it’s your job. Nobody cares what you think of the new slippers you just got. P&G already pays an army of mommy bloggers to do this shit anyway. Please. Try the University of Phoenix instead. I hear they’re looking for students for their law program.

Build traffic through unique content.

Eventually, you’ll have enough readers to make it worth it to potential sponsors–if that’s the way you want to go. It’s the recipe social media sites like Facebook and the rest use. Give away something cool and people will reward you with loyalty and traffic.

Hit me up with 1,000 ads day from one though and you just undermine all your effortsAdiós.

Besides, that whole pay-per-post market will likely become flooded as everyone doing it will end up only being read by other PPP bloggers. In that case, I can only hope that some crazy readership cannibalism thing takes over and Darwin is proven correct once again.