If you are new to making money online or have been at it a while, you probably know how important it is to have a blog. Blog marketing helps build your online presence, is a good way to market your products and services and to share information with your visitors who can also share their views on your blog.

You can also customize the look and functionality of your blog with different themes and plugins.

There are numerous ways to make money online from a blog. To keep things simple, i'll talk about the top 3 ways that i've used to make money from my blogs.

Affiliate marketing Affiliate marketing is basically selling other peoples stuff for a commission. This means you refer your visitors to a product or service via your affiliate link and collect a commission for each sale or lead you generate. Popular places to find these products to promote are affiliate networks like Clickbank.com and CPA networks like MaxBounty.com.

Clickbank.com deals with mainly digital products like eBooks and software. MaxBounty deals with CPA (cost per action) offers. These are products where you get paid per action i.e. someone filling in their email address or ordering a free sample.

Both types of offer are quick and easy to get started with. Clickbank is the easiest of the two. It is free to join these networks and promote their offers.

Build an email list You can set up an opt-in box on your blog or a link to an opt-in page. What is an opt-in page? This is where you can collect a list of targeted subscribers for your email list by giving away something free like an eBook or report.

You can then recommend products (such as affiliate products) to people on your list for free. Since it is free to send email. You will need an autoresponder to do this that will cost a monthly fee but it isn't much. One of the most popular autoreponder services is Aweber.com. You can get your first month for just $1.

Google AdSense Ads Google AdSense provides advertising targeted to the content of your page. So if your page has content about dog training, the ads served would be related to dog training.

This is the easiest revenue stream to set up and earn from. You can have your account set up in minutes and display ads on your blog in 10 minutes. You earn revenue for each click on one of your ads. You may not earn as much from AdSense as you would from affiliate marketing and your list but it is an easy extra revenue stream.