Patrick Hind

My American friends have been telling me all about how to make money simply by blogging on the internet. Could this be true I thought? Would anyone be willing to pay me simply for versing my views on any range of opinions ranging from the merits of the Maastricht Treaty to what are the merits of Hegel's dialectics in post-Enlightenment Europe?

Well, it's not quite that simple. Blogging can be a great way of promoting a product that you're trying to sell if you build up communities of interested parties and generate invigorating discussion that will hopefully boost your web traffic.

But what if you have nothing to sell and everything to say? Apparently it's still possible. There's a new marketing technique sweeping the web called 'moguling'. Trademarked by Arizona-based technology firm Phoenix, the process involves adept purchasing of domain names and quality writing.

So I'm going to give it ago. Here's the theory: I'll buy a domain name for a small price of about £6 for two years from one of the many UK-based providers and then I'll start my blogging. But you can't just write about anything – you must tap into a niche market that you can write well about and other people will be happy to read.

The idea is that by your stunning linguistic dexterity you will generate a great deal of traffic to your site and people will keep coming back because they can post comments, respond to your opinions and build up relationships with other users.

Another feature of blogging is its search engine optimisation – affectionately dubbed 'SEO' in the industry. Apparently Google likes blogs and so ranks them highly on its search results. This is thought to be primarily because they are very well linked to other quality content on the internet and also if they provide niche information, similar search 'keywords' will keep coming up again and again.

So when you've got your highly ranked blog, thriving online community and wide range of informative opinions where does the money come from?

Easy: you sell the domain. There are many companies out there who wish to push themselves up the rankings so that they can generate more traffic to their site and sell more products. However, search engine optimisation is a tricky business – so you do it for them. They buy your site, keep the blog as a feature section and then use the rest of the bandwidth to promote themselves, their products or both.

The Blogmaster of DomainNews360, a blog devoted to the art, claims that a lot of money can be made this way.

He (or she) says: "Blogging is the quickest way to generate traffic and ranking to a domain. What this says to me is 'business opportunity'. For those with the blogging know-how huge profits can potentially be made.

"Domains can be bought for a song and a dance and then monetised via blogging to then go for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars."

I'm not certain but it seems it's worth a shot – we'll have to wait and see.