Lorena and I do make a respectable living blogging. We belong to that small group of bloggers that have made it so big that we can type away from the comfort of our home and see the payments roll in each month.

Blogging for dollars, or as we like to call it, nanopublishing, is like any other business. It requires a business model and all the business processes that one would need to run a hot dog stand or semiconductor company or bank.

Unless you really do something outrageous or crazy or are a celebrity or have something very unique to share, blogging is a difficult niche to break into. Lorena and I started publishing on the web in 1999. First movers have a huge advantage and newcomers are struggling simply because they started so late.

There are very poor statistics out there on blogging and both Technorati and all the other sources that Penn cited are so wrong (though, they give you a flavor). To give you an idea about the traffic needed by us and the revenue potential (including ups and downs since 1999), for every $50,000 in revenue we need at least one million monthly visitors. After trying many advertising models, we work almost exclusively now with Google Adsense.

For obvious reasons, I am not going to disclose how to succeed like us at blogging, but unless you are very talented at something, I wouldn’t suggest that you even try your hand at making a living from blogging. It is a very competitive market and only getting tougher as more and more content goes online.

Organize a meeting with people in your company that often meet with the customers the most, for example, sales, marketing, and support.

Develop a summary of what they think their key customers need the most.

Now take this information to the key accounts and refine the list (add or delete based on what they want).

Develop an organization chart that will include a few people that will interact regularly and then have a supervisor to manage these individuals.

Go back to the key accounts 6 months later to see if it is helping them. If not, make improvements.

Now why do I want to give some help to the carmakers?

Merely as an act of charity to millions of fellow Americans who would otherwise lose their jobs right away. Sad as it is, but like steel or apparel or software development, it makes no sense for us to make cars and it is in our best interest that our car companies eventually shut down. They make lousy cars, they do not want to change their business models, and they have too many other structural problems.

By giving them some money right now, however, we will just postpone the pain for workers, maybe by a few months to an year or two. To lose a job right now means that these workers will be unemployed for a very long time putting a big strain on our economy. However, I am expecting that in 6-9 months, we should see an economic recovery, and if these companies go out of business around that time, the laid off workers can find alternative employment rather quickly.

A clown by the name of Daniel Henninger says that the crisis is due to secularization of America. Hmmm…That means all the other secular countries of the world should be in perpetual financial crisis. “It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions,” he writes.

I hope anyone responsible for fixing the current mess is not listening to him; otherwise, we will be in this mess forever. It is so amusing that shenanigans of crooks in corporate America are being blamed on the religious beliefs of Americans.

Nick, I understand how you want to turn your business around and have the data to support your decisions about Consumerist and Valleywab.

Unfortunately, you are stretching numbers for your business to the universe of other online advertising supported businesses. Please understand that despite some commonalities, there are so many other features that differentiate one business from others. And that is why while some businesses are doomed, there are others that are either holding steady or even thriving. Ours is one of them. The lesson is that if you build an empire on one vertical, say auto, finance, politics, or travel, you have a rough patch ahead, but if you build something that is more focused on lifestyle issues no matter how the economy does, you can ride out any recession without going out of business.