I would say that a blog is the easiest way for a person to make themselves a website. Blogs provide great content management and you won’t have to worry about coding anything to set up and run your blog. Making money from your blogs is a bit more difficult.
Putting up AdSense (or any other pay per click ads) on your blog isn’t the smartest way to go. It’s the easiest, but unless you get several thousand visitors to your blog every day you won’t be making much of a profit. If you start directly selling products from your blog you’ll have to put some work into it but you’ll make a lot more.
You can either directly sell your own products or you can sell other products. You can be very creative with this; here at TechGeeks we have two “products”. We sell advertising directly to advertisers, and when we don’t have an advertiser we use banners to promote our forum. Even with the mix, we still earn way more than we ever did with an ad network, and we get more members on our forums as a bonus 
.
If you really can’t think of any product you can sell directly, you can sell other people’s products using affiliate programs. This is most popular with micro-blogs using affiliate banners to send users to CPA websites. You can find any affiliate program for products which will appeal to your audience and put that up. You will probably make less than selling your own product, but you will make more than using a pay-per-click model network.
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I definitely agree with you. It's much more easier to setup a site especially this days with the emergence of blogging and cms softwares. Anyone can have a site now. As for my income, it took me a year before I got a regular and decent income from my blog.
Blogs are nowadays easy to setup for everyone. It`s a good instrument to support the regular website of your company. With usage of Google AdSense you can furthermore get easily some more extra money.
This ad is causing me to reconsider my use of google adsense. Once I get more visitors, I think i'll deliver my ads directly at some type of monthly rate. That would make me more profit. Right now my numbers suck, so i'm stuck with adsense. My first goal is to cover my hosting cost.
I agree, I think that what we're seeing is that more and more people are becoming authors and creating their own products. And you're right, webmasters get to keep 100% of the revenue from their own products being sold on their site, while ad networks pay a much smaller portion of earnings. The situation should get better and better, as barriers to entry for both decrease year after year. Perhaps we will reach a point when everyone is selling their own product directly.
Great info, thanks for all of the great advice, i plan on making several blogs in several niches to hopefully earn a little money from them. Thanks for the pointers!