I have spent the last few days contemplating this exact same question. Is it worth the time and effort to promote your blog in an effort to make money. I have seen this question posed many times, and I thought I would put my two cents in.

I want to be a writer. That is what I want to do.

I also want to pay my bills being a writer. I am pretty sick of working at a help desk.

I spent 10 years in bands attempting to do the same thing. But people didn’t put the evil to the ethics like they do when talking about putting a simple ad on a blog. We would go around the country, handing out free Cd’s, begging people to take a listen hoping someday we will see nice royalty checks from doing something we love. And likes 99 percent of musicians, I never saw a cent. But bands don’t really have the chance to put click-through ads at their merch tables.

So I made the decision that I am going to take as much time and effort to market my talents. Using this blog as an attempt to earn a living is one of those.

I think the key is, if you are a good writer, you deserve to make money while you provide your readership with content they enjoy. It takes a while to come up with something to write about, articulate it so people understand and enjoy it, and then refine and edit. It’s not like writers just show up, start typing away and in 20 minutes they are finished with their daily activities. My blogs (I have several) take about 4-6 hours to complete. That is a lot of work for free, obviously.

Ethically, if you are profiting off your opinion I think that is acceptable.

I recently ran across a website that I think is outstanding. It is called bloggingexperiment.com. Here is a gifted writer using his talents to make money. He is not short-changing his readership, and he is working his tail off to have a well thought out website and concept. And while I do not have the expertise yet, I intend on following a similar path to build this website, over time, in to a similar money making venture.

Cheers!