You’ve set up your blog somewhere that allows advertising, so now what do you do to make money?

The first thing you do is realize that you probably won’t be making a whole lot, if any.  It seems like such an easy concept to just start your blog and start having the money roll in, but it sadly isn’t that easy.  You will need traffic, good content and need to make sure you don’t pick the wrong types of ads.

Affiliate Programs

Amazon.com probably runs the most well known of the affiliate programs, but there are literally thousands of them out there for just about every niche you can think of. You place an ad on your blog, and a reader clicks on it to go to the companies website, they are marked as having come from your page. If they purchase anything, you receive a varying percentage of that transaction. Some programs will even allow the customer time to think, and if they return to the site within a specified amount of time, you still earn credit for the sale.

Display Ads

These are any graphical ads on a blog. You usually will want to contact companies directly about them purchasing advertising space. This has become more popular as of late due to being steady income where as the others all rely on user interaction to generate revenue.

Inline Ads

These are those words you see in some blogs that have two lines under them, and when you have your mouse over it, an ad pops up. This is another one to stay away from as it usually turns readers off because they have to be careful where they hover their mouse on your page.

Pop-ups/Pop-unders

These are uckily dying off, but pop-ups show up right in front of you without you doing anything, and pop-unders hide behind your web browser until you close it. Both are not a good way of winning over your users, and should should be avoided.

Sponsored Reviews

This is one of those ads you want to avoid. A company will pay you write about them, and in the process, this can damage your standings with some search engines as they frown upon such intrusive advertising.

Text Ads

This is usually accomplished through Google AdSense, but there are other systems out there.  These allow you to put little blocks of what look to be classified ads on your site, and you hope people click on them.  When they do, you get paid varying amounts of money based on how much the advertiser has bid.

In the end, you should use whatever form of advertising makes you the happiest, but do definitely heed our warnings on the bad ones.