Blogging sounds like a hobby for people with too much time on their hands and too many opinions. Can you really earn an income from blogging?

The fact is that a lot of people are getting extra cash from writing blog posts. How do they do it? Blogs can easily be monetized using advertising or including hoplinks to ClickBank information products, but if you set out with the sole intention of making money from your blog, you won't get far. Your readers will sense you're not really committed to the topic, and without the trust of your blogging audience you won't make any money.

So how can you build up a solid foundation on which to monetize your blog?

Here are 10 tips for creating a quality blog that can be turned into a money-earner.

• Posting comments on other blogs can help encourage more visitors to your own. Just make sure you don't have a spammy signature. A link to your own blog is fine and if people want to know more they'll visit your blog. But, if people sense you are trying to be too salesy this will be a major turn-off and undermine your credibility.

• Be selective about which of your reader’s comments you publish and decide how you will approve them. Will you allow affiliate links? And when would you delete a comment? It is a good idea to decide on these things at the outset so you are consistent.

• Spend half an hour every day on your blog, with your time split between writing new posts and commenting on other blogs, particularly those in a related niche.

• Seek out the popular blogs in your niche and try to make friends with them, posting comments regularly on their blog posts – you'll seen get noticed and may even end up being part of the circle.

• Write your blogs posts in advance and then schedule them to publish at regular intervals. Posting frequently and regularly gives your blog more credibility.

• Keep up with your niche and keep your posts relevant. With so much information available to people out there you need to provide quality articles that are at the forefront of what is happening in your niche. Subscribe to quality blogs in your niche to get a feel for what others are doing.

• Write about things that your audience is interested in, avoiding a constant sales pitch, which quickly gets tuned out by readers and eventually ignored..

• Make it easy for readers to get your content either by offering them the option of subscribing by email or RSS or both. Emails can include an excerpt from your post that then links them back to your website

• Don't be obsessed with making money from your blog. Your readers will soon pick up on this. Instead, focus on becoming an authority in your niche and the money will follow almost naturally .

• Give it time. A blog is a long term thing and if you have the endurance you will be successful. Too many bloggers lose interest after making a few posts and it comes to nothing. Stick at it for at least 6 months and you'll start seeing the fruits of your labor.