I think having a blog is one of the most versatile ways of making money online. First off, Its really easy to get people to your blog with back links. You can get back links several ways but in my personal experience the two best ways are commenting people's blogs, and getting someone to write articles for you.

Second, there are several ways to make actual money from your blog in this article I'll be listing some of those ways:

AdSpace - sell blocks of space on your blog.

Sponsor Ads - sell special spaces for sponsors. Let them be able to put a banner or text link on your site.

Write blogs - sites like blogvertise pay you to write about companies or products. I did one last week on gift baskets and got paid five dollars for a really easy write. Sites like blogvertise allow you to choose categories that are relevant to your blog. For instance, if I have an electronics blog I can choose to only write about electronics.

Adsense and the likes - put contextual ads on your website. Every time somebody goes to your site. There's a chance they could click on the contextual ad. When somebody does click on your contextual ad you earn a certain percentage. This is a great option to use if you have a lot of traffic

CPM programs - there are several contextual programs online that will allow you to put banners on your site and pay you every single time they are viewed. CPM stands for clicks per thousand. So for every thousand times someone visits your website, you get a certain percentage of what the CPM offers. For example if the contextual site offers $3.50 per thousand hits then that means if 5000 people visit your site you will make $17.50. I know this doesn't seem like much, but you can add several contextual ads sites to your website at once.

Affiliate Links - there are several million sites online that offer of affiliate programs. One of my favorite sites of Amazon simply because they offer many different products on the website. For example, I have a website, so I can go to Amazon and pick out different affiliates that I know that I will be using a my recipe site. Affiliates that offer such things as kitchen gadgets, gourmet foods, cheeses, or other items that you use for food or cooking! Once I find the affiliates to use a can not only set the affiliate link's. But I can also set up affiliate websites. Then I can either "sneak" in the affiliate links onto my blog, for example get an affiliate for Jamie Oliver cookbooks, then write a blog about how great Jamies cook books are (which they really are!) or I can also include the actual mini stores on my blog. This is nice because people can visually see what I offer on my site.