Something has been bothering me lately. It's blogs that are about blogging for money. A new one seems to pop up every day. I realize this has been a hot topic of debate, and I don't mean to dig up the dead horse so that we can beat it some more, but blogs that blog for money are beginning to smell more and more like scams. I usually don't voice my opinion about these kinds of things, but I stumbled upon this post today (Things I Hate On The Internet), and I felt inspired to let my bitching be heard!

So maybe "scam" is a strong word, but to me blogging for money is the new "get rich quick" scheme in my book. Most of these websites claim to be doing you a favor by giving people advice on how to effectively blog to increase traffic, site popularity, page rank, etc. However, do not be fooled. Every post on these kinds of blogs are designed for one specific purpose - to make money.

Let's look at an example: This is a post from problogger. Look at the title alone "Using your blog as a resume to land your dream job". The title of this post is designed to be search engine friendly. How many people do you think are searching for terms like blog, resume, job, or dream job? I'll give you a hint, it's a lot. This is just one tactic that these types of blogs use to draw traffic. Another is link bait. If you will notice above I have linked to problogger.net and bloggingexperiment.com. Both of these sites won't be mad that I linked to their site in a post that is somewhat criticizing what these people do. I'm willing to bet that they will like the fact that I linked to them. Why? Because it's more traffic, and more traffic means more revenue.

Now having said all of that, you will notice that there are ads that run on this page. I don't see anything wrong with running a few ads as long as the overall goal of the site is not to make millions by blogging. Why? Because I honestly believe that if the goal of your site is to make lots of money then it's going to have an influence on your content.