The following is a guest post that I lined up to coincide with me going on Holiday! I’ve split the post into 2 sections for easier digesting. Anita Campbell is the Editor of the award-winning Small Business Trends blog. Her blog is central to her business.

People often seem surprised when I say matter-of-factly: yes, you can turn a blog into a business and make money from it.

Truth is, you can make money with just about any kind of website, and a blog is nothing more than a type of website. Of course, you have to make the right moves with your blog if you expect to make money from it. Here is my advice for any entrepreneur who wants to earn money from his or her blog:

(1) Update frequently — Update your blog several times a week, or even better, twice a day. Posting frequently gets traffic to your site, builds your audience, and gives you more pages to get indexed in the search engines. But don’t just take my word for it. According to the latest numbers from Dave Sifry at Technorati, there is a direct correlation between frequency of posting and Technorati rank. The highest ranked blogs average 53 posts a month, or nearly two a day.

(2) Be accessible - Make your email address very prominent. I’ve never understood Internet entrepreneurs who don’t want to be contacted. You are closing yourself out of potential opportunities. For instance, someone may want to hire you for a project. Or a journalist may want to interview you for a media story. They need to be able to contact you easily. Sure, you may have to deal with spam, but I figure that is part of doing business.

Put in place a good email spam filter and smile every time you see a spam message, because one day instead of spam you will see a promising opportunity arrive in your inbox.

(3) Be original – Regularly create original content, rather than always linking to news stories or other bloggers’ posts. When you create original content you give people more reason to visit your blog and link to it and talk about what you wrote. “Best of” lists, “top ten” lists, any compilation of hard-to-find resources, a tutorial or “how to” on a timely topic, product reviews – these are all good forms of original content.

For example, I regularly link to a post at Master New Media because it contains an exhaustive list of the top blog and RSS search engines, all in one place. If you have any data to share, that’s even better, because people love to get specific information they can cite.

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Check it out: You can accept credit cards on your website or blog!