You've probably heard how some people got rich by setting up a blog for a particular niche, built a large fanbase, and then made a ton of money off of the advertising. And now they blog from their laptop while sitting in their beach chair on their private island in the Bahamas (or something like that).

Alex Iskold writes for Read/Write Web that such opportunities have long since passed; the market has been saturated with miners prospecting for blogging gold. The advertising revenue model depends on a huge volume of traffic visiting your website, for two reasons. One, the Google AdSense ads on your blog generally only earn a few coins per clickthrough. And second, only a small fraction of your traffic will click on one of your ads. That means that you need lots of people visiting your blog on a daily basis if you want to quit your day job, but it's very difficult for a new blog to even get noticed these days. You'll put in a lot of effort, and see very little advertising reward.

However, that doesn't mean that there's no money left to be made from blogging. Quite the contrary; blogging as a supplement to your business and your web site has a lot of value. As I've talked about before, blogging helps your search engine position by growing the size of your website with pages rich in keywords. Second, it's a great way to communicate with your existing clients. And third, it can be an effective way to prospect for new customers.