I have two main blogs -- one is my personal blog, which has no advertising at all, and the other is my commercial blog, which makes an average of $50/day, and is rising steadily. So yeah, you CAN make money from a blog.
Traffic, traffic, traffic. The CTR averages a measly .8, but the high traffic more than makes up for it. Besides Adsense, I'm also making extra change from CPM ads which takes full advantage of the high traffic.