What are the steps to getting advertiser money for blogging?

[xerxes]

I read the Yahoo article on how a few bloggers are making a lot of money. But there are 30 million of us who mostly do it for free. To get advertising, do you contact companies to solicit ads directly and, if so, what kind of statistics do you need to give them (topic of blog, real traffic, likely target audience, etc?) It would be good to know the steps to attract advertising directly rather than relying on middlemen (although a list of those would be good to have, too). Thanks for any help..