There are many ways of making money with a blog. Here are my top ways for both the new blogger and the well established blog.

Most methods of starting a blog rely either on the blog having a good Google Page Rank or a lot of traffic, or both. A blog with neither is not going to earn a great income, although you can earn a little income. So the ideas are split depending on whether they work best with high traffic, high page rank of both.

High Traffic Ideas

Google Adsense – easy to run and even easier to earn from, the incomes from this can be massive! Signing up should be a must for anyone wanting to earn an income as at the very worst a small income will trickle in, but if you have a lot of visitors to your blog, then these little advert blocks scattered around the site can automatically include related adverts, with no effort from you.

Affiliate Advertising – there are 2 ways to do this. First, the easy way is to just carry a few affiliate banners about different products that your readers might be interested in. Nothing clever, just an advert for a product or a merchant that could be useful to the reader. Put the banner into the main area of your site so that every page carries and and hope to earn an income. The second version is more direct as you actively post about products, recommending them and then adding a product link from an affiliate scheme. A lot harder work, but the affiliate link is more obvious and more likely to be followed as there is a direct recommendation.

High Page Rank Ideas

Selling links – some people do not agree with this, but by selling links through a variety of schemes you can earn a healthy income. A little difficult sometimes to get started, but with many paid links systems you will be paid recurring fees, so once the link or banner is included, you will either get a hefty initial payment or good monthly payments.

Schemes With A Bit Of Both

Paid posting – depending on whether you have a high traffic blog, a high Page Rank blog or one with both, then there is probably a scheme or two for paid posting that is open to you and this is where most bloggers wanting to earn an income will end up.

Some systems want only high traffic blogs and will even go as far as insisting on rel=”nofollow” being added to every link so there is no risk of the posts been seen as being for increasing Page Rank.

On the other hand, there are systems that totally ignore traffic and look only at your page rank and are there basically just to sell links from blogs to increase Page Rank.

Then, of course, there are the systems in the middle that calculate a score for your blog based on various metrics, including the numbers of links in, the Page Rank and the levels of traffic on your blog.

Lay the foundations to your blog and you will be able to earn an income from it.