Why Blog? (Have a Smorty Day...)

I talked last month about reasons to blog. I enjoy writing, but (as I said in that blog) three different companies in the last 10 years have paid me to blog. Kind of. Two of the actually paid me to create content - articles like I would have written for a newspaper or magazine - and blog about my content. One, China Venture News at Creative Weblogging, pays me to maintain a blog on a particular topic.

In recent years it has become possible to generate income from your personal blog. Having Google ads in your blog will get you a few pennies if you manage to attract significant traffic to your site. But a more realistic option is a service like Smorty, where you can get paid for blogging...

Smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers can then pay bloggers to write opinion posts that include links back to that advertiser's site. (Haven't you always dreamed about getting paid for saying what you think about people and products?)

There are a few basic requirements, but they're not hard at all to meet if you're a serious blogger. You're blog has to be at least three months old, for example. You also have to have a history of publishing something at least twice a week. And, of course, there are a few very reasonable content requirements; if your blog is about how much you hate people who are a different color than you are(for example), or about some topic that involves violence or pornography, chances are good that no advertiser cares what you think about their product or service and your log won't get accepted.

So if part of your reason for blogging is to make a little money, get connected with the advertisers who want to pay you to do it by. Smorty seems like a good place to start, in my opinion...