I think I agree with pretty much everything you say with the exception that so long as I don't overdo it monetisation houldnt be an alternative to the primary objectives.

Assuming your primary business is as a VC, and in your investments, and whilst this is a private blog, the benefit to your professional profile far outweigh any monetary gain from direct monetization.

1. Personal branding in the tech and VC community
2. Company branding in the above
3. Competence
4. Personal and company “outlook” – for a startup, knowing more about you, your thoughts on the growing online marketplace

These factors I am just going to call the “Fred Wilson” effect as Fred is a prime example. The investment deal flow he sees is probably 1 tier higher than he might otherwise have seen if he wasn't so accessible with his blogging.

I believe your focus should be on 2 things

1. Subscribers – you write some great content, and it should be seen by more people – the more people see it, the more links you will get, and lots of the SEO to bring in yet more traffic and subscribers is taken care of. A self-propelling deal flow machine.
The revamped theme will expose a little more content to the search engines as previously there were some bugs preventing crawling beyond the first page in the archives.
2. Your portfolio e.g. you could have highlighted the Zeus/Joyent announcement in some way – it didn't get a lot of press outside the Joyent and cloud computing blogs.

You could probably achieve more than 10x your current opt-in / subscriber rate

In your case, I would highly recommend setting up an Adsense account, and placing a 336 x 280 rectangle directly under the title on each post, you can place this directly into your code. With that placement and your current traffic levels I wouldn't be surprised if you made around $500 – $1000 per month right away, of course depending on CTR you can get.

Once you had all of this established, I would buy a keyword rich domain name in the equity/financial niche, do some strong keyword research here to find a profitable search term with little competition(they are out there) and then launch a new blog built around that search term. Place adsense on it in the same manner as above, and drop a keyword rich sitewide link from this blog. The idea is to leverage your work here to build up some authority on the new domain.

Once you have done this, I would highly recommend that you study some seo principles and start doing a little link building for the new domain to continue building authority. After a while, I would not be surprised to see your new blog making two or three times what you can make here.

Once the other blog is making some money, you just need to rinse and repeat, do it all over again. Eventually, you will have built a network of mini niche blogs that will pay your bills and then some. It takes work, but it can be done fairly easily once you grasp all of the concepts.

Hope this helps.

Do you think it is that most bloggers (like me) could make a ton of cash from their existing blog, as is, or would we have to change what we write about?

I personally own a couple of smaller blogs that both make over ten grand a month each and they are less than a year old. Its not that blogs can't make money, its just that many bloggers don't know how to build money making blogs.

Nic Brisbourne reports on this article from Webpronews:

Anyone who writes a blog or (I would guess) reads a blog like this one wonders occasionally what the monetisation potential is. Annecdotally I have known for a while that the answer is ‘not …