In addition to earning affiliate commissions you can make additional profits from placing adsense ads on your pages as well as selling text links to other webmasters.

Before you can start earning commissions from blogging you need to get traffic to your pages. Here are some tips to get vistitors.

1. Post regularly, daily if possible. This gets your weblog crawled by the search engine spiders regularly and will result in more traffic. You should write your posts yourself but you can also use plr articles. If you decide to use plr articles for posts though I recommend you rewrite them to avoid getting penalized by the search engines for duplicate content.

2. Get links from other websites. This will provide more traffic and long term SEO benefits. The best way to get a lot of links is to write articles and submit them to as many artilce directories as possible. A good service I have just started using is articlemarketer which submits your articles to thousands of directories and websites.

To get links you can also post comments on high traffic blogs and forums which are the same topic as your pages. This will also provide a lot of direct traffic and get you noticed by the search engines.

3. Show your post archives on every page and also categorize each post with tags. Doing this will help visitors as well as search engines find all your old posts. Helping the search engines and your visitors will help you even more in the long term.

4. Your weblog should have an RSS feed. RSS stands for real simple sindication and you can use it to get a ton of traffic to your site. The best way to do this is to submit your feed to RSS directories such as Syndic 8. Other webmasters will publish your feed on their sites providing you with traffic and an SEO boost.

5. Link your blog to your other websites and vice versa. Doing this you will create your own network and increase your traffic.

6. After you post I recommend pinging using a service such as pingomatic. This will get your work crawled and indexed fast.

Once you have built your traffic levels up you can start making some money. The best way to earn commissions is to put your hoplinks to the merchant you are promoting directly in the text of your posts. That will provide the best conversions. and free up space for placing adsense and links to your other sites and sponsor links you sell.

Some might be tempted to put an affiliate banner at the top of their pages but I recommend againts that. Banner ads are very low converting and the space is better used for adsense.

Once you have traffic and your weblog well monetized there are two basic options for growing your affiliate checks. You can either keep growing traffic to your site by using the methods I mentioned above or you can move on and create more blogs.

I actually recommend focusing on one or two blogs. This is because if you make too many blogs it is too time consuming for most people to keep up more than a few blogs. If you have a lot of blogs chances are that traffic on many will die because you can't keep them all up to date.

Using my basic blueprint for making money blogging anybody should be able to create a good income for themselves.