My friends of the non-geek type often ask me how companies like Facebook can make so much money and provide their service for free at the same time. Here is a quick example of how you can make money online.

Warning: this is a not a get rich quick scheme. I’m not going teach you how to make millions working for Google from home.

I recently started following John Gruber’s blog Darring Fireball. This gentleman seems to be rather influential in the hacker community. On the website, he says that there are more than 400,000 subscribers that frequently read his blog. In the world of Internet publishing, this is a great deal of exposure. Not very many people get this much attention.

If you browse through the site, you will soon notice that you can sponsor John to write more articles. You can pay him $5,000/month - in return, a small banner with your company’s advertising graphics will be displayed in a prominent place on John’s blog for that month. You will get millions of people every month looking at your ad for just $5,000/month.

Writing interesting articles about the web is a full-time job for John.