Making money by blogging

I keep hearing all these stories about people making mega-bucks with adsense on their blogs. The idea of making money on the internet is interesting to me (after all I have ads on this page) but it seems strange to me that people could be making 6 figures just by blogging.

What’s even more puzzling is the high priced keywords that apparently a lot of people make money off of. Googling for phrases like “top keyword” will get you all kinds of sites that tell you words like “casino”, “gambling”, “debt”, “mortgage”, “loan”, anything or anyone having to do with sex or porn, and really odd ones like “Donate Car” and “Answering Service”. Basically anything that would appear in your normal spam message. (With the exception of “Rolex” I get a lot of spam about watches, yet I saw nothing to indicate its a new keyword…)

I guess that sites that focus on these keywords get a good ranking on Google and therefore get a lot of traffic which in turn brings in a lot of money. But it seems weird to me, like if Google wanted to they could probably stop this.

I think the reason some people are getting so rich with so little content is because the system isn’t in equilibrium: The results of the search are skewed in favor of the keyword laden blogs. Since Google is all about delivering good results, it would seem they would want to focus on “legitimate” sites (i.e. give the search a link to a casino instead of a link to a page advertising casinos), and that would balance the system by sending the traffic to useful sites.

It would seem that simply monitoring spam traffic (to see what topics are most popular) would be a good way to see which way the scales are tipping. Then they could adjust their ranking system to ensure that sites that would be a probable target for those keywords would rise to the top, as opposed to the sites that are playing the odds by making themselves statistically more appealing (i.e. keyword stuffing, etc.).

But then again there’s a reason why those keywords are the “top keywords”, its because someone out there is willing to pay that much to get the traffic of people interested in that topic. So maybe the system is ok, and I’m just looking at it funny. That could be the reason why I’m a better coder than a business man…