Making money from blogs?

[Wehaha]

I know you can make some form of income from blogs sometimes..

I want to know how the money gets to you and how it works. What makes the blog generate money?
Is blogger.com a good one to use? A free one

[Jake]

Blogger.com (owned by google) is one of the rare cases of a 'free' host with no paid upgrades, google provides these blogs in hopes that you will run their Adsense advertisements, the most common revenue source for blogs, you just have to go through the application process, insert a few lines of code on your pages indicating where ads should go and Google matches ads to the page contents automatically. Average revenue might work out to perhaps 1 cent per visitor, to hit their min $100 min payout you might need 10,000 visitors.
Typically you want to have a blog setup with some significant amount of quality content like 10 articles, preferably near 500 words each, the Adsense ad system feeds off text content, as do the search engines which are typically the main source of traffic. You might focus on building up the publication and getting traffic to it before worrying about adding advertising, which is no help in search ranking.
Getting a significant number of viewers, ideally many thousands a month may take real dedication, motivated writing and some luck.

Some free hosts will take a percentage of advertising revenue, or prohibit it unless you pay an upgrade fee, the simpler hubpages.com article site pays 60% of ad revenue from ads you setup (actually thy give you 60% of the user clicks)

Blogger allows you to add a custom domain name obtained elsewhere, like at Godaddy or Namecheap, using a domain name instead of the free subdomain frees you to relocate the site while retaining the same name and address. (though I need to review Google's terms about who owns the blogger content)

To review the style of blogger blogs, you might do a web search for:
site:blogspot.com intitle:"your interest"

[Dustin Custer]

The truth is that setting up a self-hosted blog that is optimized for marketing is an extremely difficult task. Knowing where to place ads, placing ad copy in those ads that converts to leads, understanding the proper text to use (plus more), AND putting it all together, is a highly advanced skill. There is a Good solution that works but does have a small startup cost. For full details check out my blog: http://www.badasscontent.com/VBS-Blog2