There are two major types of blogging models that experienced on line entrepreneurs use to make money blogging and there is a third, the most popular model with newbies, which is a plug-and-play alternative that requires much less knowledge and hard work to implement.

The first model is the most common way that experienced bloggers turn a blog into a profit making machine. That is to sell advertising to companies and product sellers who want to reach that blog's particular reader base.

The second kind of money making model is one that is structured to help a single brand improve its image by creating positive associations between the blog's credibility and the product in the mind of consumers.

Both kinds of blogs do make a lot of money especially where the creator is an experienced blogger and marketer.

If you want to blog with the goal of selling advertising, there are two basic ways that you can go about gaining sponsors to put ads on your blog:

1. You can let someone else do all of the selling of ads and they get a cut of the ad revenue.

2. You can do the selling yourself and keep all of the revenue.

Within the first group, many people make money blogging by allowing Google's Adsense program do the legwork of selling sponsors. The advantages of this program are obvious as it requires very little effort on the part of the blogger or webmaster. In essence, Google places sponsor ads on your blog and you get paid any time one of your visitors clicks on an ad. However, most bloggers discover that they make less money through this method than they had hoped that their blog would earn.

Because Google recruited the sponsors, Google takes the major share of the revenue. In general, you earn just pennies per click. Adsense income is usually only a few dollars a week so you will not make serious money with it unless you build hundreds of blogs.

There are actually some marketers who create literally thousands of web sites and blogs focused only on making money from Adsense. They do earn thousands of dollars a month until Google catches them. Google frowns on such sites and deletes them from their search database when they find them. These marketers simply put up more blogs and websites to replace the ones that Google deletes. It's big business.

The other alternative is selling advertising yourself directly to companies who want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog. While this can take quite a bit of time, it is often fairly profitable. One way to pull this off is to identify contacts in industries that are related to the topic of your blog. You can contact them directly or contact advertising agencies that rep such companies and quote rates for your ad space.

This works well for marketers who have a strong background in sales and who are experienced at pitching proposals. They can make substantial amounts of money by selling blog space to interested advertisers.

The most serious hurdle with this model is that you need to have a sizable readership or following before you can entice advertisers, which will involve several months of traffic building before you start to make money with your blog. Companies buy ad space based on the traffic you can deliver. The more the traffic, the higher ad rates you can charge.

As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, more and more big name corporations are getting in on the action. One way that companies are capitalizing on the popularity of blogs is by creating their own blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation and brands. In this way they control the message and portray the company and it's products or services in the best light.

Many companies look to the web to hire an experienced blogger to create a blog designed specifically to appeal to that company's customer base and to create positive associations with the brand in consumers' minds. More than one copy writer and webmaster, who never even dreamed that he or she could make money blogging, has been hired and paid quite a bit of money for this kind of freelance assignment.

If neither of these appeal to you, you should investigate plug-and-play blogging solutions.

Plug-and-play are programs that provide everything you need, including a fully optimized blog, for a price. And, there are free blog platforms as well. However, any solution requires some research before jumping in.

You can find free blog platforms just by doing a Google or Yahoo search but you must be willing do the work of editing your blog and writing articles for visitors to read when they find your blog. Free solutions do take some hard work and long-term commitment.

If you decide to buy a plug-and-play blog setup, insist on a strong Money Back Guarantee with any such plug-and-play blog program you consider.