Lately, I’ve been taking a look at blogging as an opportunity to make money. It started with my brother’s interest in all things financial. He stumbled across John Chow, a self-styled Internet entrepreneur,a savvy dot com mogul by his own measure. I downloaded his eBook so that I could “Learn How I Went From Zero To $40,000 a Month By Blogging”. I watched his video on how he treats his blog as a business. After all of that, after educating myself on how people apparently make money by blogging, I started brainstorming on how to monetize my own blog. I began thinking about whether or not this blog could work, and whether or not I should try to start a new blog and treat it, as John Chow teaches, a real business.

I learned that blogging for money depends very much on networking. You have to build your site up so that it becomes prominent. You’ve got to up your PageRank (Google’s rating) and your Alexa rating (which is entirely flawed). You’ve got to make it so that advertisers would pay to advertise on your site. But John Chow says that’s only a third of how he makes his money. He makes heavy use of affiliate links, earning money from commissions on the products he suggests to his readers.The problem is, I haven’t got a proper topic that can be monetized. If I were to focus on a particular niche, it would have to be one of my passions: romance, writing, technology, gaming, maybe food. The problem is that these niches are filled. The only arena in which I would stand a chance would be romance. But what can I sell? Where can I earn money? Where would the revenue be coming from? I’ve already lambasted Internet dating sites and proclaimed my disdain for speed dating.The only thing I can market is my lifestyle. The only thing I can pass on to others is my philosophy of free independent thinking and old school values. I can only teach people to become more unique, to become more like themselves by finding their nature and finding their voice. I have no books to hawk, I have no services to sell. What I have to offer are intangibles. Information can be sold, but realistically, there are already tons of self-help books out there, making my own personal brand of happiness and success an extremely tiny niche. Unless I somehow gain a massive following of people who subscribe to the values that I put forth and the philosophy that guides my actions, I don’t think I’d have much to sell.

Honestly, even if I did have a following, I wouldn’t want to sell them anything. I’d just be satisfied that I have people who agree with me, people who share a common base of values, that I’ve changed someone’s life, even if it’s just a little bit. I suppose this is why I’m not some Internet dot com mogul.