Good news for those of you who want to blog but don’t want the hassle of setting one up with your own hosting account. Now you can host your blog on WordPress.com. You can customize the templates and posting is as easy as typing into a form and clicking on a button. Just head over there and grab a subdomain.

Your blog will be named [something].wordpress.com. “Something” is whatever name you choose.

The thing I like about WordPress vs. Blogger is that with WordPress you can set up categories to sort your posts and that makes your blog more organized. It also helps your readers find stuff on your blog.

At this time, you can’t manually tweak the template yet but I expect that will be a feature added in the future. If you would like to earn affiliate income, here’s one suggestion.

Get an account at Commission Junction or LinkShare if you don’t already have one. You can then set up a product blog and post product items to your blog. Make it more interesting. Write your own reviews. If you own the product yourself, tell people how you’re using it. Then encourage them to buy.

There is a tradeoff between promoting high-priced and low-priced item. The tradeoff is between volume and the amount of commission that you’ll make. Let’s say you’re promoting a book off Amazon. You may make a few more sales than promoting a massage chair. But one sale of the massage chair makes you a much bigger commission. You’ll have to test out what works best for you.

Popularity: 19% [?]

If you’re looking for a good web host and have a small budget, one company I highly recommend is Host Gator. You can get shared hosting for as little as $6.95 a month, reseller hosting from $24.95 a month. If you have a bigger budget, dedicated hosting starts from $174.95 a month.

They use cPanel which is the most widely used for site administration. This includes real-time Awstats so that you can track all your website visitors.

Reliability is another key issue when you’re looking for a webhosting company. In the past year that I’ve used Host Gator, I have been very pleased with the uptime. Support is also fantastic. There is an online chat option that connects you to a live tech support staff 24 x 7.

So if you’re in the market for a good hosting company, be sure to take a look at Host Gator.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Here’s another blog network to watch - Shiny Media. Among the blogs maintained by this network are Mobile Digest, a mobile phone blog, and The Bag Lady, a shopping blog. These blogs make money mainly from Google AdSense and affiliate marketing. As you look at some of the blogs, take note of how they integrate pictures and ads to make the presentation aesthetically pleasing.

Popularity: 12% [?]

I read this article in Fortune about Jon Gales whose blog MobileTracker.net earns more than $5,000 per month from Google AdSense. This from a kid who is 19 and still in college. The site has been in existence for about a year and a half and gets over 200,000 visitors per month. That’s pretty good stats.

I checked the blog just now and noticed that Adsense ads has been replaced with Chitika mini malls. However, if you look at the archives, you’ll still see the AdSense ads. Take note of the color scheme for the ads. The title and text match the color of the post title and body and the URL is just a lighter shade of blue. The layout integrates the ads to make them look like part of the posts. This is a common strategy for AdSense publishers, i.e. making ads blend into the rest of the page content.

Check out his other blogs: Carbwire, GoogleRumors.

Carbwire is PR6 and has 1,210 backlinks in Google. Mobiletracker is also PR6 and has 1,790 backlinks in Google.

Also, the list of media mentions for MobileTracker and Carbwire is impressive.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Jason Calacanis has sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL according to this news report published by Reuters. Jason reported not long ago that the blog network was earning over $1 million in AdSense revenue per year. That’s not counting other advertising deals he has with companies wanting to advertise on their highly trafficked blogs.

The reported sale was for a cool $25 million. Now, that’s a money making blog! Or I should rather say money making blog network.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Blog networks are becoming a popular business model. The idea is to have a network of several blogs on niche topics and generate income through advertising. The key to having a successful blog network is traffic and branding. Other than that, the barriers to entry are quite low. Some people start off by managing the blogs themselves but that quickly gets out of hand as the network grows and the need to write for the blogs increases. Many blog owners then resort to hiring contract bloggers and pay them either a percentage of the revenues or some fixed amount per post. Of course, there are other creative arrangements as well.

There’s even a blog now on blog networks. Check out BlogNetworkWatch. It’s owned by Martin Neumann. By the way, he also owns HomeOfficeVoice.

So back to the topic of blog networks. The early players in this arena are Weblogs, Inc. owned by Jason Calacanis, b5media owned by Jeremy Wright, and 9rules owned by Paul Scrivens. Scrivens also owns FineFools.

Here are some of the blogs in the b5media network:

* CellPhone9
* Cooking Gadgets
* Microsoft Weblog
* New Linux User
* Play Girlz
* The Search Engine Herald
* The Windows Vista Weblog
* Lifestyle Literally Blogging
* She Knows Best
* The Movie Weblog
* The Sports Weblog
* Unplugged Living

Here are some of the blogs in the FineFools network:

* Gardgy - gadget blog
* I Like Cameras - photography
* Movable Phone - mobile phones
* Damn I’m Cute - celebrities?
* It’s Useless

Then there are the casualties. WebbyMedia just started its short life (less than 2 weeks ago) and and was canned today. The owner Omar Al-Hajjar reasoned correctly that there are no barriers to entry for blog networks and the only differentiating factor lies in the brand power.

Overall, as you can see, the blog network owners target high-paying niches like gadgets (cell phones, digital cameras and other electronic toys are popular ones), tech and also potentially high traffic topics like celebrity gossip.

One of the signatures of blog networks is the that they often interlink all their blogs in order to cross-promote. This reveals all their blogs and open themselves to the scrutiny of competitors and possible competitors. As I said earlier, the barriers to entry in this business is virtually none. Therefore, in my opinion, it’s better to keep your blog inventory under wraps.

Popularity: 11% [?]

If you’re looking for ways to further monetize your blog, take a look at Kontera. It’s a unique contextual advertising system that scans your website for keywords that match their ad inventory. The keywords on your page will appear as active links but these links look slightly different from regular links (they have a dotted line below the regular underline). When the mouse cursor is hovering over the Kontera links, the ad will show up on the page. It’s sorta like the Yahoo! Search box that pops up on the page when you view Yahoo News.

Popularity: 13% [?]

You can get this blogging guide at Michael Bergman’s AI3 blog. Looks interesting but I don’t have time to read it in detail yet. For those of you who want to do more with WordPress blogs, this should be useful.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I noticed on Darren Rowse’s BreakingNewsBlog that some of the content is taken verbatim off news sites. For instance, the posts at the credit cards section and this one in the personal finance section. And it’s not just one or two sentences. It’s a wholesale lifting of entire paragraphs. I’m quite sure this is a violation of copyright terms. Now, I’m not sure if Darren himself is posting these entries or one of his hired-hands. I’m suspecting it’s the latter case. Take note - if you’re hiring bloggers, be sure to do quality control checks. You don’t want to be caught in a copyright infringement suit.

Be sure to check copyright terms before you use any content from other websites.

Popularity: 7% [?]

It looks like Problogger, Darren Rowse, is diversifying from purely earning from Google AdSense and selling ads across his network of sites. He is teaming up with Andy Wibbels in offering a course on how you can duplicate his success. He even got a mention on CBS Marketwatch and a live interview on CBS. That’s gotta do wonders for selling more of his course. According to the report, there are already 800 people signed up for the preview course call. With the price tag of the course at $270, that amounts to $216,000 if all 800 people end up buying the course. That’s a nice chunk of change!

The strategy to offer a course is a good one after riding on his success breaking the $10,000 per month barrier with Google Adsense. The only thing with blogging full time is that it’s not passive, i.e. hands-off, income. You’ll have to work day in and day out updating your blog or blogs. That amounts to a full-time job. So if you’re looking for something that you can set up and then let run on autopilot, you should take this into consideration.

Unless you can afford to hire a bunch of bloggers to maintain your blogs, that means that you have to do all the hard work. Having said that, if your archived blog posts are indexed in the search engines, you’ll still be getting traffic to those pages and probably generating income from them. So in that sense, it’s sort of on autopilot.

Popularity: 6% [?]