There's money to be made from blogging - uh, right?

Late last month Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's notoriously inept campaign pollster, published an article in the Wall Street Journal asserting, "There are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters."

Penn's lunacy, buttressed by the claim that almost half a million Americans used blogging as their primary source of income, prompted howls of derision from bloggers.

"Fantastically bogus and clueless," Mickey Kaus wrote on the Slate website.

But as the ranks of print journalists dwindle, and the army of Lilliputian opinioneers swells, wouldn't it be nice to know if there is money to be made blogging?

I have been monitoring the career of ace Washington Post reporter Rick Redfern, a cast member of Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strip, whose transition to Internet journalism has been rocky at best. Are there gold nuggets buried in the digital dross?

There is a small aristocracy of early-adopting bloggers who have become successful online publishers, such as Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos or Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. If you can get a media giant such as New York Times Digital or the Atlantic magazine to pay you to blog, good on you. There are well-read academic bloggers such as Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, who blogs for free. He writes textbooks, he has a nice day job -- it's all good, as the kids say.

Then there is everyone else. Millions of them.

The website Technorati pegged bloggers' median annual costs at $80 and the median average revenue at $200. Bloggers with advertising spent a mean of $1,800 on their sites and harvested bigger bucks, about $6,000 a year. Enough to feed a family of four. Mice.

How do you make money? By driving traffic to your website.