I'd like to give a brief response to a couple of the questions every new blogger is likely to be asking:

How Much Money Can You Make Blogging?

While there is no hard and fast rule to this, Larakulpa from Ginko Consulting recently suggested a good rule of thumb during a conversation we had in the ProBlogger 31 Days Forum. She suggested that for every thousand page views your site gets in a month, you can expect to make $2-$4 on each advertisement lasting for that month. You would normally have more than one advertisement, and an article on Nifty Prediction gave a similar rule of thumb, suggesting that for each thousand visitors you make, you should expect to receive between $10-$25 from advertising.

That rule of thumb in mind, it shouldn't be too difficult to make a lot of money blogging, if you can just get a lot of visitors to your site. While that's true, you should bear in mind that to actually get that money, you'll need to find advertisers. You might decide to go with some of the existing programs out there, such as affiliate marketing, referral programs, or an ever expanding parade of other advertising programs looking for sites to advertise on.

You'll make more though if you cut out the middle man by finding your own advertisers. This will take work, luck, and a professional countenance.

While the above rule of thumb is not a hard and fast rule by any stretch of the imagination, it's probably left you feeling both optimistic and a little intimidated. You have, I'm sure, looked at the numbers and realized that if you can just get enough visitors to come to your site, you could make all the money you need. However, I'm sure the other side of your mind is cringing at the logistics of getting that many visitors to visit your site. The scale of the work ahead of you may cause making money blogging to seem very far away.

How Much Are You Likely To Make Blogging?

A survey ProBlogger had his readers take, showed that 29% of all his reader's blogs made less than $10 a month. The reality of it is that most blogs don't go anywhere, and for that reason you should definitely not quit your current job, or rely on your blog for money too soon. You should try not to rely on the money your blog will make you until you've already been making the amount you need for a solid 3 months in a row.

Don't lose hope though, because a quick study of the other side of the chart shows that 20% of his readers made more than $500 a month, and 37% made more than $100 each month. There may be a fair sized portion who fail, and you should be ready for that to happen. However, there is a larger sized portion who make decent spare money, and a workable portion who could live on their blogging income. It should be taken into account though that people who read Problogger are more likely than others to be successful in blogging, so the survey results may be slightly askew. However, if you read ProBlogger too, then the statistics will be accurate for you.

How Long Will It Take For Your Blog To Turn a Profit?

Nifty Prediction suggested a sustained 3-8 hours every week spent working on your blog, and more when you're early in your blog's life span. Some estimates vary, but the generally popular view is that you must put in at least one hour a day on your blog. While you may take days off sometimes, you must put in some time working on it almost every day.

As far as the time span you should expect to work in, you're not likely to profit much from your blog within the first three months. Depending upon how you've gone about setting up your blog, it may actually cost you money during this time period, in hosting, domain registration, advertising, or some combination of those and other costs. You should be ready to absorb all of the costs for your blog during this time period, and perhaps longer.

Depending on the speed of the blog's growth, you should soon find the blog paying for itself, and probably producing a fair level of profit as well. If the blog isn't producing at least some money within the first year you might want to consider whether or not you're willing to blog on the subject simply for your enjoyment without thinking about the prospect of profiting from it. If you don't think you could handle blogging about the subject without the hope of being paid, you might want to consider scrapping it and starting over. I'd like to mention though that the best way to profit from your blog is to love writing about your topic with or without pay.

Bottom Line of Making Money Blogging

The bottom line here is that you can make a living blogging if you get the correct numbers of visitors to your site. To do so, you will need to have some way of attracting that many visitors to your site, and the time and energy to create, maintain, and promote it on a regular basis. Even if you do everything right, your site may not make it, and you need to be ready for that. Do not depend upon your blog until it's already been successful for a while.

Long Story Short: You can succeed in making all the money you need if you work hard, get lucky, and keep at it. But there is no guarantee, and you need to be ready if things don't work out the way you had hoped.