Contrary to what a lot of people might think, blogging is hard work if you want success, and at the end of the day how successful your blog is depends on how much work you want to put it on it. Myself, I spend a minimum of 5 hours a day at blogging, and trust me when I say that the only reward at the end of the day (at least for the moment anyway) is the satisfaction of knowing that I accomplished something that might be of interest to millions of blog readers who sit at the computer during their busy work day looking to kill time while they wait for somebody to respond to an email, are waiting for a software program to download, or just looking to relieve their boredom on the job.

Bloggers are a dime an dozen, and good blogger knows that there when it comes to competing for visitors to their blog, the hardest thing to do is to get there blog out there, to draw attention to their blog. Every blogger knows that the more traffic to their site, the more likely adsense and affiliate associations are going to pay off. You're not going to profit much from a few hundred visitors a day, let alone a couple of thousands of hits, and more often than not you are going to be disappointed and frustrated by your inability to "cash in" so to speak on your creativity.

I've been blogging for almost five years now, and trust me when I say there is no better way to "cash in" with your blog then to update your blog with creative, provocative and controversial articles that grab a reader's attention and updating your blog more than 2 or 3 times a week is a must. Of course you could always dedicated your blog to one particular product, go on and on like a snake oil salesman does, but if you're going to blog about a particular product day in and day out, well how boring is that for the blogger and the reader? People get tired of reading the same thing over and over again, and eventually those people find a more interesting blog to visit. Your blog content should do better than that when it comes to repeat traffic and visitors, who for all intents and purposes are just looking for something interesting to read, while interacting with the blogger.

Don't get me wrong, spruiking somebody else's product via a blog might work for some bloggers who are dedicated to selling a product like a car salesman, but at the end of the day, dedicating your blog page to a product that can be found on thousands upon thousands of webpages on any given day doesn't leave much room for the blogger to make money from their blog.

If a blogger wants to sell a product for somebody, the best way to do it is via affiliate programs, or if you have the "gift of the gab" and a few exclusive merchant contacts, by selling advertising space to your exclusive merchant contacts.

Of course finding the right affiliate program, merchant and the right product to promote in a post, in the header of your webpage, or on the sidebar requires a little legwork too, but for the sake of saving you some time and frustration I am providing you with some leads to make that task a little easier for you. All affiliate programs I provide you with are free to join and give you access thousands of products to promote. There is a catch though, first you have to be accepted into the affiliate program, and then once that happens, the merchant has to approve you in order to place a banner on your blog. Myself, I don't always get accepted by the merchant because admittedly I am very controversial and provocative with my blogging, but since there are thousands of merchants with thousands of products to choose from, I'm not bothered by it.

Some of the affiliate programs I use include Commission Junction, Clixgalore, Shareasale, Linkshare and CanadianSponsors. As to how well these programs perform depends on how much effort you put into making it work for you. As for which one is the better affiliate program, one does not work better than the other does, though some of the affiliate programs do offer more options than another to build your affiliate network with the various tools they provide. I must warn you that it is tedious work, but if you have a couple, three hours to spend on building your affiliate every couple of days, you might find the rewards worth the effort. All merchants in the aforementioned programs also provide you with the banners (HTML being just one example) and other than copying and pasting the banner codes where you would like them to appear on your website, your work is almost done. Of course, you have to find the right merchants and products to promote on your website.

If joining an affiliate program isn't for you, then perhaps directly contacting merchants you happen across while surfing the Internet is the better option for you. You can usually find a link to join an individual merchant's affiliate program at the bottom of their homepage.

As for the "meat" of your blog, the content, remember that it's the content of your blog that brings visitors to your site, and the tools you use to promote your blog. A blogger isn't going to, and shouldn't expect to make much money from their affiliates if they can't bring and keep traffic and visitors to their blog if the content is boring and not kept up to date. Believe me, I maintain three blogs, Crooked in Canada, Hot Goss, and Da Shitz On Sportz, so I do have a little bit of insight on how much time and effort it takes to make blogging for a few dollars worth one's while, in fact I struggle with it each day, but I keep plugging away.

While I'm not expert on this particular topic, please feel free to contact me for more information if you think I can help. I am also grateful for any offer of assistance anybody may be able to offer me to make my blogging experience a little more profitable.