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One blogger found that a trio of potential revenue streams simply did not work for him; he did credit paid sponsor ads for their help.

Sponsorships Work Better Than AdSense

Plenty of 'make money blogging' ideas abound on the Internet. They range from contextual advertising to affiliate marketing, to placing ads in RSS feeds.

Just as Web Analytics World marked its first year, Manoj Jasra looked at three approaches that didn't pay off. He listed Google AdSense first as one of them.

"Embedding AdSense is a simple way to attempt to make money but if you're not getting tens of thousands of page views, I am not sure if it's worth it," he said.

A couple of affiliate programs delivered nothing despite a few hundred referrals sent to their sites.

As for Google's latest purchase, Feedburner, its ad program returned about 22 cents after approximately three months.

In his site's first birthday post Jasra did credit three sponsors, including his employer, Enquiro, with making the blog's continued work possible.

It is fairly routine to see prominent blogs with display ads appearing on them.

No vagaries of whether an ad may or may not be clicked; those publishers generally enforce some semblance of ad quality, and most importantly they keep the money in-house.

People get into blogging for the right reasons and get out for the wrong ones.

Getting in should happen because someone is passionate about whatever it is they are going to blog.

Starting one up for purposes of monetizing it with ads is a lot more work than people realize.

But if ads are the motivation, keep in mind something Jasra noted about his search referral traffic.

94 percent came from Google. Knowing how and why Google users arrive at a site has to be the key piece of intelligence a publisher needs to understand these days.