Blogging is one of the most cost-effective ways to earn money through the Internet, if not the most. How can you exactly make money at home through weblogs? Read and find out.

If you are an online user for some time now, you must know what blogging is all about. If you are web savvy, you may be maintaining one yourself. If you have a blog that receives excellent traffic, you can potentially be rewarded of your efforts. In fact, many people have created their own blogs in hopes to make money at home through their little nook on the web. If you have not created a blog of your own, it is not too late to blog your way to profits.

How exactly can you make money at home through a blog? There are several programs available to enable you to earn from blogging. Here are some of the most popular ones:

Affiliate revenue

Most bloggers who make money at home sign up for affiliate marketing campaigns offered by thousands of online merchants. These merchants are willing to pay you commissions or referral fees from clicks originating from your site. For best results, try to choose a good merchant and ads which suit your site best in terms of content and aesthetics.

Advertising programs

There are now a wide variety of advertising programs available to bloggers. The most common method to make money at home through blog advertising is through Google AdSense, which is based on contextual ads. Other programs such as TextLinkAds, Chitika eMiniMalls, AdGenta and BlogAds are more recent additions. Note though that exclusive sites such as BlogAds only allow placement of ads on high traffic blogs. If you have only recently started your blog, you may need to be part of a rather long waiting list to be included in some programs.

Digital Assets

Digital assets such as eBooks, tele-seminars and online courses are now getting incorporating in blogs. If you want to increase your chances to make money at home, consider coming up with some digital assets to support your blog. You have the option to provide them for free in hopes of generating traffic into your site, or you can sell them for certain fees to add to your blog income.

Blog sponsorship

Another fairly recent strategy to make money at home through blogs is getting sponsored by a company. Note though that company sponsorship generally involve blogs which are focused mostly on the company's products and services. While some companies request contents to be solely for their own advertising efforts, some sponsors suffice themselves with addition of the company's name or logo to the blog page. Again, companies mostly sponsor high-traffic blogs.

Tip jars or donations

Many bloggers who want to make money at home resort to the idea of putting tip jars on their page sidebars. These allows donation that leads to the blogger's PayPal account. Though donation buttons are not recommended for every blog owner, this is generally not a bad idea. In fact, if you have a social cause or if you provide service that deserves goodwill donations, you can put one.

Blog merchandise

Another excellent way to make money at home through blogs is to sell items and branded products through merchandising programs such as Cafepress. This will generate you some percentage for sales you refer.

If you have only created your blog, you should expect the road to blogging success to be long and hard. It will take time to attract traffic into your site. However, putting up relevant and fresh content, and exerting effort will slowly lead you to a profitable blog site.