The blogger is now an emerging marketplace for people to work from home and potentially make a great living. Although it can be nice to vent on your blog to an audience of your closest friends and family while you live in your mom’s basement, your domain name and blog has the potential to be much more than that. In fact, your blog can produce money. The blogosphere is now an emerging marketplace for people to work from home and potentially make a great living. How do you monetize your blog? Here are five ways your personal blog can bring home the bacon. Offer a Specialty Service
When you create a following on your blog, you also create the sense that you are an authority on the subject you blog about. This is an opportunity. Create a class (particularly how-to), webinars, live seminars or books (ebooks and downloads) that can be monetized. 
Use the opportunity to leverage your name and reputation and help people with your expertise. If you create a product that can be duplicated you can continuously sell these services without having to reproduce your production efforts.
Affiliate Marketing
Not only can you leverage your blog to sell your own services and merchandise, your blog traffic provides the opportunity to make money through affiliate marketing. Signing up for services like Amazon Affiliate Marketing allows you to put coded ads on your site. When your readers click on the Amazon ads and buy things they were going to purchase anyway, you make a cut.
Advertising
Your blog provides the opportunity for readers to see ads. There are a few ways to put these ads on your site and all can produce revenue. Affiliate marketing is one, as mentioned above, but there are a couple of other ways. Companies who have sympathetic messages to your blog are inclined to want to be associated with your site. They will pay you to place ads on your pages and improve their visibility. 


Additionally, companies like Adsense, Media.net, and Adblade will all provide you code to place on your pages. This code creates ad banners on your site and the companies will pay you based on how many impressions the ads receive. If your site gets traffic and especially if that traffic is also interested in the embedded stories produced by the ads, and therefore click on the ads, you will make money. 
The more traffic your site creates the more potential for ad revenue you have. Not only will you get paid more for the per impressions ads, but your site will be more attractive and therefore more valuable to advertisers who want to have an ad posted.
Link Building
This is a less obvious way to monetize your site, but it could be the most profitable. There is a concept called SEO (search engine optimization). It is an emerging market and the demand for SEO services is exploding. Companies are working to increase their clients web presence through their SEO work. These companies charge their clients to improve their visibility on search engines, like Google, Bing and Yahoo. 
One method is getting links from sites back to their clients’ sites. This improves their clients’ web presence and the companies are willing to pay you for posting on your blog so they can include links back to their clients. This allows you to have fresh content on your site, written by professional writers, improving your own site’s SEO and providing revenue for your services. 
The SEO service companies charge their clients for the work, and because your blog can be critical part of the work they do, they are willing to pay you for facilitating their efforts. Often companies charge hundreds of dollars to get a single link published. Therefore, if they can rely on you to post an article that contains a few links in it, they might make around a thousand dollars for that post. Therefore, they are willing to pay you tens if not hundreds of dollars to insure their posts are published intact.


Leverage Your Brand
As you develop a reputation within your topic area, you simultaneously create the perception of expertise. By becoming an expert, you can parlay that into opportunity. For example, you can use your reputation to create appearances on shows, create booths at trade shows and land jobs because you are established as an expert in your field.
Your brand, if it becomes popular enough, can also be a way to create merchandise based on your brand. Selling merchandise with your brand on it can be profitable and cross-promote your site. This can also be a sneaky way to create Christmas and birthday presents that support your work. 
Blogging is no longer merely niche writing into the abyss. It has become an industry and if you are willing to leverage the work you’ve put into creating your blog and your audience, you can become more than merely a glorified typist. You can become a profitable business with growing and limitless earning potential.