How you can make serious money as a blogger

The typical way to make money is to sell advertising. But here's another, more interesting way.

Three days ago I wrote a piece entitled "How the Cash4Gold ripoff works." The article I cited at Cockeyed.com was also picked up at The Consumerist; both the Consumerist article and the original one have now been linked to by so many sites that they have risen in the Google ranks; as of tonight, if you Google Cash4Gold, those are the #2 and #3 links, after the Cash4Gold one itself.

So... the guy who wrote the article critical of Cash4Gold received an email from the Cash4Gold people:

I work on the Cash4Gold site. We are trying to clean up their first page of results in Google. Your article... is ranking very well for term “Cash4Gold”. The site looks like you may do well from Adsense.

Is there a financial arrangement we can come to that will offset your Adsense income and make it worth your while to take down or at least “de-optimize” it for that phrase? I would be happy to speak more about this on the phone…

When he didn't respond to their offer, they emailed him back offering "a few thousand" dollars if he would delete his article from the internet. To his credit, he has refused (so far...)