Blogging for cash

[Karikaru]

So Mushy, Atom, and I (possible Eci, and of course, whoever else wants in) started to discuss tonight the possibility of setting up blogs to make money with SEO and adsense or what have you. Basically, the premise we landed on was making blogs about our individual cities - things to do, night life, cuisine, coming events, etc. Something that would spread easily via word-of-mouth and be pretty easy to maintain (like an hour a week of generating content). We'd probably use something like WordPress or Joomla to do our publishing with.

Things we're investigating:
what's the best technology to use
how exactly do you get moneys from making a site
suggestions on site design/content
suggestions on how we can network our sites for cross-traffic, etc.
wisdom in general/meaning of life, etc.
is this a good idea?

I've heard from a guy on a forum I post on that it's really not that hard to once you figure it all out - a few hours a week of work is all he puts in to collect $400+ a month. This is anecdotal information, but seems legit - you get a bunch of hits = you get a bunch of money. Might be unrealistic to get thousands of hits a day on a site that is narrowed down to one city, but who knows /shrug. Once we get the basics down, presumably it would be pretty easy to expand and make more and more sites - for instance, I had another idea to start a fitness blog on common misconceptions in fitness. Content would be super easy to copy/paste or get for free from forum posts and free article sites. You get a bunch of these sites going with little time spent on content - you make a little cash from each and it all adds up

[eci]

I'm ready to provide some content assuming we get this thing moving.
I think it'd be a great motivation to make videos/music/art/etc.. if there was a purpose for it and a place to publish.

Atomizer has been experimenting with the site design (around the city/events idea) and server setup and his stuff should be checked out.
As discussed before, ubuntu or ubuntu server edition are looking pretty sweet for the server OS(Atomizer ran his on a virtual machine on top of windows 7).
I think Mushy had a possible server machine lined up.

I still think b2evolution http://b2evolution.net/ is worth checking out for the design tools part atleast for blogging needs since it's free.
Also I think we should figure out who are getting involved and start assigning tasks regarding the "things we're investigating" and more as we go along.
Lastly in order to get stuff organized we need to appoint a project leader/manager.
I think Karikaru would be the obvious choice here.

[Mortis]

WordPress.org (or .com) is my personal favourite, I use it for all my blogging. Movable Type recently copied the entire WordPress admin UI, so that's worth a shot, and some people like ExpressionEngine for its fluidity. Find it hard not to recommend WordPress though