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There are number of ways to make money from your wordpress blog. The most profitable way to monetize is from affiliate marketing, however there are also publisher ads, banner ads and link selling that can earn you money.

With affiliate marketing, there are number of ways you can promote products. The key is to have products being relevant to what your blog/forum is about. The most effective is writing product reviews and mentioning products in posts. The best places to find affiliate products in my opinion are Commission Junction and Clickbank. [tag]Clickbank[/tag] in particular gives you a “[tag]marketplace[/tag]”, which shows you all the products that you can promote with stats of how much you will earn from sale and how many people have sold a particular product in a period of time (gravity).

Publisher ads (eg. Google AdSense) are usually the backend of pay per click services like [tag]Google Adwords[/tag] can be a good way to monetize blog/forum, however you really need quite a lot of visitors and a good click through rate (number of times ads are clicked) to [tag]monetize[/tag]. The key is to have the ads positioned properly and have rich text content. It’s the content that triggers specific ads by the words that make up that text.

[tag]Banner ads[/tag] are good alternative to [tag]AdSense[/tag], however it is a little hard to monitor them. There are wordpress plugins which allow you to rent spaces on your blog (paid services), however alternatively you can manually monitor the banners.

[tag]Selling links[/tag] is a good way to make money if your blog has a good “[tag]page rank[/tag]” and has reasonable amount of visitors on your website. Good page rank (PR) is anything above 3 and reasonable number of visitors on your website is about 150-200 people per day. The best system that I found to sell links is called Text Link Ads which gives you a wordpress plugin which is simple to install. I have 2 blogs with PR3 and PR2 which make me about USD$100 per month.

There are many other ways to monetize your blog/forum, however in my experience reselling other people’s products via affiliate links is the most profitable way. Some of the websites at Clickbank give you all the banners and promotional text, which is very easy to apply.

Finally, it is vital to have an optin box on your blog/forum, so that people can sign up for your newsletter or updates. This is a really powerful tool that you can use for affiliate marketing. I will let you know more about it in my next post.

Here is another good article on monetizing your blog, but its a little out of date