How to make money from blogs.

I am still a blogging beginner, still trying to figure things out. There is a lot of help available out there if you search for it. I have learned a lot the past few days and I want to share some of the things I have picked up so far.
I'll start with the basics, if you want your blog to be popular you need to have a good design, try to get things well laid out and minimise clutter. I am still in the process of rearranging things here. Another obvious thing is good content, not much I can say about that its up to you to think about.

Putting ads in your blog.
Follow these simple tips for placing ads:

• Where you put the ads is very important, make sure people can see them but try not to make them too obtrusive.
• Think about the look of the ads e.g. colours and fonts, try to match the design of you blog so that they don't look out of place.
  
• Make sure the ads are relevant to your blog.

There are a lot of ad providers, here are some of the popular ones I've come across.

Adsense
Google adsense is very popular amongst bloggers. This is the first one I signed up to and is probably your best bet for making some money. Easy and quick to set up. You can use the built in competitive ads filter to block ads that pay very little.


Chitika
Eminimalls is Chitika's most popular product, I have recently set one up at the top of my site. You can control what products get advertised using key words.



I only have experience with the above two services but there are others like
amazon associates, TextLinkAds and Widgetbucks just to mention a few.

Increasing traffic
You have set up your blog and placed some ads now you need people to visit your blog, lots of people. Generating traffic is very difficult to do and can be a slow process so you have to be patient. Once again I'll list some of the tips I have gathered so far:

• Leave good comments on other peoples blogs.
• Use things like feedburner for rss.
  
• Sites such as blogflux, technocrati, blogexplosion, del.icio.us and stumbleupon can help expose your blog to others and really boost traffic.
• You can try submitting your articles on digg.

I hope you've found this useful, for more info check out the links below.

Links:
Problogger.net
stevepavlina.com