We all have dreams when we start our first blog. Some want to become famous, some blog for the fun of it, some for the publicity and others to quit their day job and blog full time. While this might never become reality for most who start blogging some do reach a level of traffic and exposure with their blog that they need to start thinking about ways to monetize their blog.

Yaro, the owner of Entrepreneur’s Journey, posted his top seven blog monetization methods. Let me first list the monetization methods and comment on them afterwards:

Recursive Affiliate Income
Direct Ad Sales
Text-Link-Ads.com Brokering Service
One Time Affiliate Income
Paid Reviews
Google AdSense
Miscellaneous Programs

When I first read the article I was astonished to see Adsense making it barely into the list while affiliate sales made the number one spot. If you ask a blogger about the kind of advertisement that he is using on his blog the number one answer will surely be Google Adsense which will most likely be also the number one earner of most blogs.

Text Link Ads and Paid Reviews only work if you have either a high enough Pagerank / Alexa Rank / Traffic level or are some kind of personality. While some bloggers like John Chow have great success with Paid Reviews most blogs will barely write any reviews in a year.

Affiliate sales are a great way of earning more money if the topic of the blog is suitable for this kind of sales. A blog about general topics will have a hard time making any affiliate sales while one about digital camera reviews will surely create some.

Direct Ad sales are a very good method of earning revenue without someone else profiting from it as well. You get paid all of the money from the sale. You need to take the initiative here nevertheless and either write mails to companies who would fit nicely or create a Advertise page on your blog to show everyone that they can advertise on your website.

I personally think that Adsense is not implemented correctly on many popular websites (Yaro’s for one, John Chow is also making not enough money with Adsense considering his traffic levels) and therefor underrated in their lists.

Another example (of Adsense being underrated) would be Chad Randall’s article The Seven Levels of Revenue of your Blog which lists Adsense on level 1 (the lowest level) while CPM Banners make level 6 and fixed sponsors level 7.

Both articles are worth the time to read through them. You still have to take a look at the current status of your blog, the most important factors are: Traffic level, Pagerank, Authority, Alexa ranking and the topics that you write about. My suggestion would be to try hard at any of the methods offered and see which work in your case and which do not.

I tried affiliate systems for two months on my blog with no success and decided for myself that they simply do not work there.