While blogs can be useful as an enhancement to your business, sometimes your blog can be the business. The primary ways bloggers can earn income from their sites are via advertising and sponsorships, and there are more than a few who are making a good living from these sources. The good news is that adding revenue-generating features like ads to your blogs is very easy. The not-so-good news is that your site will need to be extremely popular for the revenue to be more than trivial. Even though riches are hard to come by, many bloggers are happy just to make enough to cover their hosting costs.

More and more advertisers are moving their ad dollars away from traditional media (television and print advertising) to online publications and blogs; this trend is working in bloggers' favor. Hence, the Internet has clearly become the fastest-growing advertising medium. Sponsorships are another method that can provide bloggers with compensation for their efforts. Creating a blog that aligns with a target audience can be attractive to a corporate sponsor. Many companies are eager to have an ongoing branding presence on a well-executed blog.

There are sites that garner revenues from both ads and sponsorships and can confirm what many bloggers say - sponsorships are generally more lucrative and make for a better experience for their visitors. Whereas the most popular ad service that bloggers of all kinds use is Google's Adsense network. Adsense subscribers are paid based on how many visitors click on the ads Google presents on your pages. After filling out an application at the Adsense site, Google will likely approve you and will then route you to a page that lets you specify how you want your ads to look.

But as with other marketing-related blogging initiatives, the main strategic goal is for your blog to have lots of visitors, readers and inbound links. If your site has those things going for it, any ad or sponsorship program you administer will be much more lucrative. But do note that there are some basic tactical approaches that can help a blog get more advertising revenues.