Blogopoly

If you have been following the steps in my previous posts on boosting link popularity and are now satisfied with your page rank (6/10 is a good target) and traffic, you can start trying to make money form your site. Please don't expect to make fortunes, but it could supply enough to pay for your phone bills. There are two ways to make money from your site, and both involve nothing more than referring your users to someone else's site.

Firstly, you can have advertising on your site. I suggest not using one of the banner exchanges as these will take up a lot of real estate on your page and will add up to 20Kb extra filesize to your pages making it slower to load. Instead use only suppliers of text based advertising. Of these there are two types: contextual and standard. The Contextual advertising networks will parse your page for keywords and deliver ads that are relevant to the content of your page (an example is at the top of this page) - there are two main suppliers of this service: Google AdSense and Overture ContentMatch. Both of these are very selective about which sites can be included in their network, so you may not be approved to enter their program. If you are using the free version of blogger, then you will not be able to enter Google's program as they already run these ads on your site, but you don't make any money from this. Users of Blogger can pay to have these ads removed.
If your site isn't up to scratch for Google or Overture, all is not lost you can sign up to one of the many standard advertising networks, although these ads will not be so finely targeted. You can also sign up to other Contextual Ad Networks, but most of these will not pay you money instead they just give you credits to buy advertising for your own site on the network. There is a new network targeted to bloggers which you may like to check out but as it is just starting out I cannot say how successful it may be. The service is called skoobie.com and this will pay you you real $$$.
Standard Advertising - there are many networks to sign up to here, but most will either only work with larger portals or not pay you money. These are mostly banner networks and as I already mentioned will only be a hindrance to your site. I do not suggest you pursue entry to one of these networks. Instead look for ad networks that use only text ads. Again these are largely represented by networks that do not pay you money, however by and large you can advertise on these sites regardless of the performance of the ads on your site - these are good for driving traffic to your site so are worth looking at to acheive that goal. Make sure the networks you sign up to have an approval process as you may end up with nothing but links to porn sites on your blog. Two unpaid networks I recommend are: Site Mojo and Blogsnob. Of those that pay you $$$ I do not know which ones to recommend, its best to look around and try a few - admatix.com supplies a service and would be a good starting point, as well as Blogads which caters specifically for blog owners.

The second method of driving revenue from your site is using Affiliate links. My next post will cover this topic.