I can't believe it has been four years since I first blogged about Northern Voice. Sadly, I wasn't able to save those posts from the big database meltdown of 2006 but I do remember them fondly. Northern Voice is a conference about blogging, how to write, and how people may use the power of blogging software to improve their web sites.

At the moment, I am sitting in a session where five authors are talking about how they started blogging. This is one of the more fascinating talks because the discussions are about content. Why is this exciting?

More on this later...

Hanging around Northern Voice for the last four years I have been to a few different sessions on how to put advertising on your blog in order to make some money.

One of my pet peeves about advertising on the web is most people I talk to obsess about the advertising an appear to forget the content they are attempting to create. If you have read this web site before, you will know that I love good content and things like advertising are secondary. When you find a voice for your blog the advertising revenue will come. (Sure, there are many things that you can do to improve how advertising works on your blog but those are the final touches and not our primary focus.)

James Sherrett of Adhack fame is doing what I would do - he is facilitating rather than professing any expertise (of which he has a whole lot!) in the session topic. There is no true final answer for how to make money with advertising as it is different for each individual blog and he acknowledges this at the very beginning by asking the audience what the answers are.

I will write more about this later but, right now, I am going to follow a bit more about what is being discussed.