When I was in college, I had blogs, first on LiveJournal and then on Xanga. I suspect that some of you also have blogs on these sites, or use the bloggin functions on Facebook or MySpace. I even know some people who start blogs on Blogger or WordPress. These are blogs about your life, mainly shared with friends, and at one time, this was what a blog was. Period.

But there’s a very distinct difference between what a used to be and what a blog can be today.

Here’s the thing: Unless you are a celebrity, perhaps, you aren’t a professional blogger no matter how well you write about what you’re having for lunch or how often you post your favorite song lyrics. “Professional” implies that you make money with your blog or running someone else’s blog. There’s nothing wrong with starting a blog so you can talk about your kids or upload pictures of you cat, but you aren’t going to make money that way. Professional blogging doesn’t mean that you write a journal.

You might be surprised at just how many of the sites you visit are actually blogs. A lot of people still think of blogs as personal journals, but Gizmodo, Treehugger, TMZ, Lifehacker, and even The Huffington Post - they are all blogs. Most major companies have blogs (Apple, Google, etc). Many political figures have blogs. They’ve become so much more than personal journals.

Being a professional blogger means that you have a niche. Instead of just randomly talking about your life, you have a topic of choice, be it a broad topic like technology or celebrities or a more specialized topic like comic books or shoe fashion. You can certainly be opinionated in your posts, or you can write objective pieces instead. But in both cases, being a professional blogger means that you’re creating a cohesive website to entertain readers or help them sovle a problem - and the goal is to make money.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about making money online…and in future posts, I’ll be discussing techniques that do and do not work. For now though, you simply need to start rethinking the way you think about “blogs.” This is a legitimate source of income for freelance writers, and it isn’t the same as keeping a personal journal online. The most people who realize that, the better.