I don’t know how people come up with this myth. As far as I know, it may have to do with how a blog was originally used. Back then, a blog is nothing more than a personal diary or journal.

Blog readers used to be close friends or family members. But those days have been long gone.

This is also the reason why some people still insist that a blog should not be commercialized. If you have read blogs long enough, you will surely find people who yell, “How dare you, making money from this. It’s a blog. It should be independent.”

In my opinion, there is nothing wrong in making money from a blog. Some of us do it for a living. Others do it as part of their job. They get paid from their effort, either through their paycheck or if they are self-publishers, from advertising, affiliate programs, product or service promotion or from the sales of premium content.

The occurence of blog networks are great examples for us to witness the new model of making money from publishing.

Take an example, Jason Calacanis sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL for $25 million. They have strong amount of quality content added by bloggers. Those who work for the company get paid per post.

If you want to be more independent, you can choose to publish and promote your blog by yourself and take all the money you can.

Actually, there are two school of thoughts about making money from a blog. The first one is to use a blog to publish information and earn from the publishing effort. The second thought is about how to get a positive return on investment or ROI from business blogging — or in other words, blogging about your existing business.

All the income streams available for a website are also available for a blog. Right now, you can grab an affiliate program link and place it anywhere on your blog. Contextual advertising — Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network and others — is another alternative.

The fact has instead turn to the favor of blogs. We read blog sponsorship making the news every day. There are advertising network dedicated to serve bloggers, just because there are demands from advertisers who want to target blog readers specifically.

The second school of though is about getting a positive return on invesment from a blog.

While a blog can be used to increase sales, oftentimes much of the benefits could not be quantified.

For instance, a hundred blog posts got over 2,000 of links from other bloggers who are influencers themselves. How can you measure the effect it has given to your company in this case?

How many customers have the links refer as the results of referring your product? How about the increase in search engine ranking and traffic?

The new stream of traffic and other benefits, for marketers, translates directly into increase in bottom line, especially if you consider that you can start a blog for free or next to nothing.

Of course, there are human resources involved, but the benefits of blogging could easily cover those. Blogging is a long term business and marketing strategy, plan it upfront and you will most likely gain the benefits years in the future.