There are countless ways to make money through your blog from placing advertisements, promoting affiliate products and even getting paid for blogging for other people. Here are some of the ways you too can make money from simply blogging.

First off, one of the most popular ways to make money from your blog is by showing advertisements. You can do this with various advertising programs but by far the most popular is Google's AdSense program. With a few simple steps, you can be displaying advertisements straight from Google on your blog. The benefit for you? Whenever someone clicks on one of those ads, you get paid.

Another way that blogging can make you money is through affiliate programs. If you find a product or service that you particularly like and want to recommend to your website visitors, all you need to do is sign up to become an affiliate of the product or service you like so well. Once you sign up as an affiliate, you will be given a special and unique link that you can then place on your blog. If one of your site visitors clicks on this link and subsequently makes a purchase, then you get paid a percentage of the overall cost of the product. Some companies will even pay you when someone fills out a form.

The difference between the two we've just discussed is that one is completely passive, meaning you don't have to lift an additional finger in order to get paid while the other one requires that you actively add these links for your affiliate products to your blog.

You can also choose both of these methods as well. Regardless of which direction you choose to take, you will still be required to add posts to your blog on a regular basis. In order to earn money you need traffic and you won't receive any traffic if you're not posting regularly.

Yet another way that blogging can make you money is by doing it for other people. Maybe you don't want to go through the process of setting up a blog, adding advertisements to it, posting affiliate products or even keeping it up to date. Another option you have that's often overlooked is that you get hired to blog for someone else.

You can simply become a member of RentaCoder or eLance where you offer your services as a "blog writer". There are many companies who need to keep their blogs up to date but simply don't have the time or the resources to do so. By offering up your services, you will get paid for posting to blogs and the blog owner will then benefit from getting content placed on their blogs which otherwise would not have happened.

Just be sure when you're offering up your services that you are truthful and actually are knowledgeable in the subject matter you will be writing about.

So there you have it, at least three ways blogging can make you money. This is by no means an exhaustive list but will get you started in the right direction. Remember, you can set up a blog for absolutely no cost whatsoever and almost instantly be earning an income from it. So the answer to the question we posed earlier about "does blogging make you money?", is an absolute "yes". But as with all things in business, it does take time and effort along with continuous action.