I personally have tried using YPN a few times before and it was waaay behind AdSense for actually making me some money so I’m not sure it’ll be missed much. Interestingly in the email that they sent me to announce the closing, Yahoo even suggested that people using YPN switch to Chitika, which I thought was very interesting. I will admit Chitika is quite good, but the fact that Yahoo stepped out to suggest something shows just how much they hate Google over there.

This is where OIOpublisher can come in handy. OIO is a Wordpress plugin that gives you a complete banner management system, which takes care of all the billing and timing for you. This makes adding banner ads to your site super easy, plus you can even add your site to their directory which makes it easier for people to find your site and advertise on it.

For me the banner management alone was enough to make OIOpublisher worth it, but it also opens up a number of other possible revenue channels. With the plugin you can also sell sponsored posts, text ads, inline ads or even customize other options (for example it could handle an ebook sale if you had one ready to sell). Again all of the billing and management is all handled by the tool so its a huge time saver. Unlike a lot of other crap tools out there, with OIO you keep all of the revenues that you generate, OIO doesn’t take any cut.

Even better yet you only need to purchase it once (for just $47) and you can use it on as many sites as you want.

I think you’ll find it quite useful and wouldn’t recommend it otherwise, so feel free to give OIOpublisher a try…

One other ad network that I’ve had some great success with on other sites that I run is Chitika. I use Chitika’s Premium Ads which are targeted to your search traffic coming into your blog. By working this way Chitika Premium ads are in compliance with Google AdSense’s terms and conditions and can be used on the same page as AdSense. You also have the option of showing untargeted ads to visitors that didn’t come from a search engine, for example the ad below, if you came from a search engine, will be targeted to whatever you searched. And then if you didn’t arrive here via search then it will just show a random advertisement. When you sign up you’ll get the choice of whether you want to show the random ad or would rather insert blank space instead.

So that’s the basics on Chitika, its totally free to setup and definitely worth a try on your blog. Click here to sign-up.

Most likely, no matter what your blog is about there is some sort of affiliate program that would make sense for your readers.

For example, my blog, The Blogging Fool, uses Amazon.com’s affiliate program to post those various blogging books that you can see on the right side of the page. Anyone that clicks through on one of those book links and then buys anything from Amazon.com, I get a commission on. Pretty simple.

Before deciding whether or not to give affiliate programs a try, take a second to ask yourself two questions:

1. Who is my target reader?
2. What goods or services are they most likely to be interested in?

Answer those two questions and you’ll be well on your way to making money from blogging via affiliate programs.

A few good Affiliate Programs:

• Amazon.com Associates Program – You can almost always find some sort of books or cds that your reader may be interested in.
• LinkShare Referral Program – LinkShare runs affiliate programs for Target, Apple, Macy’s, Netflix, Overstock.com and a ton more. Odds are you’ll find something worthwhile.
• Commission Junction – Affiliate programs include Sony, Hammacher Schlemmer, Petco, Home Depot and a lot more.

This is the start of a new series on making money by blogging. Today we’ll start with probably the most obvious method for making money from a blog, AdSense.

AdSense is a free service designed by Google that anyone can place on a webpage. AdSense then determines what the topic (or topics) of the webpage are and shows advertisements relevant to those topics. For example, on this blog, The Blogging Fool, the main topic covered is blogging and making money from blogging. So if you look at the ads on the right side of the page most likely some or all of the ads are in regard to blogging and/or making money from blogging. Simple enough.

Get AdSense

So if you don’t already have an AdSense account I strongly suggest that you get one right now. It’s totally free and will help you start to make money from your blog. If you’re interested, click on this button to sign up:

Ok you’ve signed up, now what?

Placing Your Ads

The next step is placing your ads on your website. Google’s heat map is a huge help for this. Based on Google’s research, the heat map shows you exactly what sections of a website tend to be most successful. Of course, every webpage is different so this should only be used as a guideline. In fact, no one knows your webpage as well as you do so take a minute and think of how people’s eyes look at your page and go from there.

One great resource that AdSense also provides is custom channel tracking which will allow you track the performance of each ad unit on your page. Make sure that you use custom channel tracking and check every few weeks or so to see which channels are performing best.

Color Choices For Your Ads

One other choice that you must make when placing AdSense ad units on your page is the color of the text in the ads. There are two schools of thought on how to best do this. One is to make the ads blend into your page so that they fit with the overall theme and appear somewhat as part of the content. The second is to make the ads stand out by using contrasting colors to draw visitors attention.

As you can probably tell from the ads on this page I prefer the former, in which the ads are blended into the page. I think it makes the site more professional and avoids giving people the feeling that all you want to do is make a quick buck.

Well that’s all for now, if you have any further questions on AdSense please drop a comment and I’ll either respond with my own comment or write another post to clarify.

Best of luck with AdSense!

And there’s no reason that you can’t get in on the action too. In fact, a cover story entitled “Blogging for Dollars” was in a recent issue of Business 2.0. I read the article and was less than impressed with Business 2.0’s tips on how readers can make money from blogging. In fact the tips were so rudimentary that it was almost embarrassing that someone thought those tips alone could help. Well they tried…and they bring up an interesting point, how does one go about making money from blogging?

Over the next few weeks I’ll be discussing some of my thoughts on the issue. For now if you have anything you’d like to see covered, post a comment and let me know.

Also, before we get started be sure to review some of my previous tips on increasing traffic to your blog because without traffic there is not going to be much money to be made.