Yes and no.
J. LeRoy explains the “no” part of the answer perfectly in this post. He says “Monetizing your blog is like going to a cocktail party and expecting people to pay to talk with you. It’s inappropriate and will cause people to avoid you.”
Personal blogs, even when written in your professional persona, aren’t supposed to make money. Certainly, they create opportunities for professional networking and marketing that may very well lead to contracts, jobs, and collaborative projects. But it’s bad manners to try to push a sale or close a deal at the online cocktail party.
The “yes” answer to “Is there money in blogging?” comes when you are blogging on behalf of a client company. Small, fast-paced companies that do much of their business online find that fresh web content, appropriately keyworded, puts their pages higher in search engine rankings and thus draws traffic to their sites. They pay professional marketing writers like me to reseach and then blog about issues that interest their audiences — just as they pay ad agencies to create their ads and PR agencies to handle their press releases.