Adsense is by far the most used tool for making money with blogs. Adding ad units to your site is pretty easy especially with plugins like Adsense-Deluxe and Adsense Inline for Word Press. The most successful bloggers tend to make the majority of their income from other affiliate schemes but as a starting point there is none better.

Once you’ve signed up it’s best to set up your main channels. A channel allows you to track where clicks are coming from, very useful if you’ve got multiple blogs. Assuming I only had this one blog I would want to set up two channels before I started implementing the adverts. The first channel would deal with ads outside of the main content block and the second inside.

Splitting your adverts into these two channels lets you easily monitor how each type is performing. If all adverts were to be under one channel it would be very hard to work out best placement for ads, which earn the most and where changes need to be made.

If you want to take it one step further, try splitting ads into types; a channel for image adverts, text and link boxes. The more information you have on your adverts the better your decision making will be.