There is currently a lot of interest in making money through blogging. The notion, after all, sounds extremely attractive. You get to work from home, write about things that you like and are passionate about, and make gobs of money at the same time!

So what is the catch?

Well, not surprisingly, it turns out that making money through blogging is hard to do. There are two primary ways to blog your way to wealth:

1. Write commissioned articles for others;
2. Write popular articles and earn money through advertisement placements (e.g. Google AdSense).

According to this artcle, commissioned blog articles will get you about "$7-$12 a post". It takes me about 2-3 hours to write an article so you can probably get in 2 posts ($24) per day, which comes to about $720 per month.

The second alternative, which also tends to be the more popular one, can presumably get you more money, but you must not only be a good writer, you must also be good at picking popular topics and web marketing.

This article shows some interesting numbers for what people are earning through Google AdSense. Forty-six percent of poll participants earn under $30 a month; with most of them earning less than $10. Five percent earn (or say they earn) over $10k a month, which to me, is very shocking.

What this shows us is that making money through ad-revenue blogging is extremely difficult.

Only seventeen percent of the respondants make over $1000 per month.

Note that this poll is from November of 2005, and more recent numbers show that AdSense earnings have been decreasing. This is not surprising because competition is increasing, as more and more people rush to spin blogs into gold.

This poll taken in August 2007, shows even more dismal results; with 58% of the respondents not even getting their Google AdSense check yet. Consider that the sample population of both polls are very different, so one cannot read too much into their numbers; but one thing is clear: most people make very little money through Google AdSense.

Now the picture is probably not as bleak as it looks, because good money can be made through affiliate programs such as Amazon, eBay, or ClickBank. Some bloggers may even get job offers, or book publications through their online writing efforts. However, this does not happen often.

In this article, Darren Rowse, a popular and well-respected professional blogger describes how his own blogs can vary from earning anywhere from over $100 per month to over $3000, when linked to high-paying affiliate programs. These figures give us a high-end range of what one might earn through ad-blogging.

Now that we have established what kind of money we can expect to make with blogging, let us turn to online gaming. A popular online game that you can make good money from is World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft (or WoW) is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing-game. Gamers pay $20 per month to play and adventure together with friends.

Real money can also be made through WoW by selling WoW gold online, or through power-levelling characters for others. As of August, 2008; 1k gold pieces is selling for about $43 US.

So how much gold can a player make per hour?

Many posts have been made about this, and the consensus seems to be about 200 gold per hour, using a level 70 character. That means you would be making about $8.60 US per hour, which is pretty decent. If you spend 8 hours per day doing this, you could earn about $2,000 US per month.

But the good news does not end there.

There are game bots available that let players automatically farm for gold. These game bots would essentially take control of a player's character and automatically kill and loot monsters continuously.

The bots are sophisticated enough to heal themselves, heal their pets, and take rests between kills so that they may recover health and magic.

In this way, you could be earning money by doing nothing at all. There are some risks involved. If you get caught, your account may be deleted and you may be banned; but it is not too difficult to come back on a different account under a different profile.

Which makes more money?

There is certainly greater potential in blogging. As we saw, if you are at the top 5%, you could possibly make over $10,000 per month. On the other hand, 85% of people make under $1,000 per month.

With the World of Warcraft online game, regular players can make about $2,000 per month. Through bots, you may not even have to lift a finger.

Of course if the WoW gold trade gets as saturated as blogging does, prices will likely get extremely depressed, and the online gaming experience will most likely be spoiled by the large numbers of bots and gold farmers. In the meantime, it seems to be a viable way of making money online.

So by all means blog, but blog because it is fun and because it is healthy. Do not blog just for making money or you will most likely be very disappointed.