Quiz: Can blogging make you rich?

Programmer Peter Merholz is widely credited with shortening the phrase "web log" to "blog" in 1999.

The majority of bloggers do not earn any income from their blogging activity.

The blog, PerezHilton.com, reportedly drew 4 million hits per day in 2007 and made $111,000 in advertising revenue per month.

Fourteen percent of bloggers earned a salary -- an average of $24,086 per year.

For the 10 percent of bloggers who were paid by the post, half reported earning less then $25 per post, and half made less than $1,000 in annual income.

Technorati uses these categories in their annual "State of the Blogosphere" survey: hobbyists, professionals, corporate bloggers and entrepreneurs.

Hobbyists account for some 60 percent of all bloggers, and tend to write about their lives and interests without any real expectation of income.

Of the 18 percent of bloggers who consider themselves professionals, 72 percent use their blog for part-time supplemental income.

Corporate bloggers make up just 8 percent of the blogosphere, and they use their blogs to share expertise, promote their brand and try to attract new clients.

Entrepreneur bloggers are similar to corporate bloggers in that they both maintain blogs to share expertise, promote their brand and attract new clients.

To maximize the number of people reading your blog, you need to pick a topic that you love and that other people are interested in as well.

In the blog world, visitors are referred to as "traffic." The more traffic a blog has, the more potential it has to be successful.

A popular way to begin publishing advertisements on your blog is through Google's AdSense, a free service that matches ads with content on your Web page, then pays you based on how many people click the ads for further information.

When bloggers place an affiliate link on their pages or in posts, they get paid when a visitor clicks through to the affiliate Web site. In addition, they earn a cut of any sale the Web site makes as a result of a blogger's link.

Companies like AdSense pay a fraction of a penny per ad click. Therefore, don't expect too much revenue from advertisements if you don't have much traffic to your blog.

The term is "pay-per-post." There are several Web sites where you can find pay-per-post jobs, including PayPerPost, Review Me, SponsoredReviews and Blogsvertise.

The answer is 176 million. That same day, the Huffington Post was the most popular blog, according to Technorati.

Many of the most popular bloggers worked for months -- or even years -- before their Web sites began to earn much attention and revenue. Jim Wang's popular Bargaineering blog didn't get more than 100 visitors a day for the first six months.

The pay for pay-per-post blog entries is usually very low (just $10 to $20), but can be as high as $1,000 for very popular bloggers.

Many companies and organizations require you to have a certain amount of blogging experience and expertise before they'll hire you to write for them.