Post 1 - What I am trying to do

Everyone and his dog now has a blog. I have had one for a couple of years devoted to one of my interests. It has been a pretty low key labour of love. I have been paying a modest sum for hosting but apart from that it has been all my own work. I was quite pleased with it and I have enjoyed tinkering with it. One of the things I did with it was try out Wordpress, and as part of that I started using a theme that I had downloaded from an Internet Marketing website. This was a theme designed for use with Adsense and as soon as I set it up the adverts started appearing. My initial reaction was to take them off but they made the blog appear a bit more professional so I left them where they were. Months rolled by and my traffic started to nudge up. I became curious as to whether the benificiary of the adverts (presumably the person whose website I got it from) was making any money out of my website. With a bit of fiddling around I set up my own Adsense account and started redirecting the revenue to me. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was getting a few clicks a day and now had a new income stream. It has built up a little since I started and I find that I have now added an extra 0.25% to what I earn as a full time employee. Well it is unlikely to change my life, but I couldn't help thinking: what if I could create another similar blogs? That might make a big difference. I did a few back of the envelope calculations and quickly came to the conclusion that it was very unlikely that simply doing the same again would even generate the same level of income as a paper round. But the thought wouldn't go away that there might be a way of making some money from blogging. I haven't fully formulated my ideas yet, but I thought the best way to start was to blog about it. So here I am. If you are interested in my journey, this is the day it all started. (I have started writing this on the 9th of June 2008. As I type it I haven't yet actually set up the blog, so the post date might be a bit later.)