Is the blogosphere a long tail ghetto? Can you make a career out of it? Can you make a living?

Today has been quite the day on Techmeme…

First, we had a post from Robert Scoble wondering whether he should run ads on his blog which I provided an answer for here.

Then we had Fast Company telling us how we could make a career for ourselves through our blog.

Then to wrap it all up with a shiny bow, we had Mark Cuban asking whether the Internet was a long tail ghetto.

The answer is, if you happen to reside in the long neck of the curve (like Robert Scoble), we can make an excellent career for ourselves, we can make a great income and we can escape the “ghetto” of the long tail.

But what Fast Company fails to point out (though others did) was that blogging consistently and doing it well is hard work..

I marvel at how some of the A-listers — the Dave Winers, the Jason Calacanises and the Robert Scobles of the world can consistently produce high quality posts day in and day out. Heck, I was amazed at how my own brother, Roger could put out 3-4 great blog posts a day, every day over the past 7-8 months or so. Sheesh! My dad writes a post a day, seven days a week on two blogs.

How on earth do these people have intelligent thoughts to offer on so many different things every single day? And knowing how much time it takes to produce blog entries, how do they have the time?

But the currency of the blogosphere isn’t necessarily how much content you produce (though it helps to have a lot) is to have a lot of other bloggers paying attention, linking to you and commenting on what you have to say. That’s when your influence (which is the highest form of currency on the blogosphere) really begins to kick in.

It’s not until you get to the level of wielding real influence that things begin to translate into something you can take to the bank: offers to sponsor your content, speaking gigs, writing gigs, job offers, consulting gigs, etc. But it takes a long time to get there and a whole lot of work.

I’m not there yet, though to be honest, I’d like to be.

Back to Scoble, he’s probably been hesitant about running ads on his site because traffic wise, he’s at the lower end of the long neck, at least in contrast to other A-Listers:

But if he just leverages the power of Scoble being Scoble and uses the strategy I proposed for him earlier, he can make major bucks. If he took on just two sponsors, charged them $25K per month for ScobleAds as I laid out, he’ll be pocketing $50K per month, $600K per year. Not bad for one highly influential blogger… and you won’t see a single blinking ad on his site.

Cool.

So there is hope. There is a way out of the long tail ghetto. There are plenty of potential Scobles out there. But they’ve got to out-Scoble Scoble, but do so in a non-Scoble way… if that makes any sense.

Keep on blogging… just don’t expect your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow unless you are really willing to pay the price…