New Year is safely out of the way now… In fact, it’s quite likely that your New Year’s Resolution has already fallen by the wayside. Well, if your resolution was to find ways to make more money, then it’s a safe bet you haven’t even started yet! In fact, the days after New Year have been pretty quiet with several countries taking both 1st and 2nd off. It’s more than likely that most people won’t go back to work until Monday!

So what can you do to earn money now? Answer: not much. But you can begin the preparation work to find out which ways you might be interested to try. In this article, I will outline 5 websites that I have experienced that have helped me to make some money along with some of the pitfalls of each. This review is not comprehensive, but aims to highlight what is possible if you persevere.

Adsense: Does it make cents?

Adsense of course is the grandfather of the ways to monetize your website. In principle, it’s quite easy to set up once you have set up your account. Simply define the way you want the advertisements to appear, then paste the resulting code IN your HTML or Blog pages. It works well, but the challenge is attracting traffic, and placing the ads in such a way so that they get noticed. If you can get a decent Click-Through Rate, then you’ll do okay.

On my websites, this has attracted a steady, but small stream of income. I usually manage to cash one check a year at the moment. Payments are only made once you reach $100. I’ve earned about $410 over the last five years so it’s not chump change! Nowadays, though, I don’t really use Adsense on this site, but on some of my other sites only.

Payperpost: It really pays, or it used to.

Payperpost requires that you have an established blog, preferably with a PR of some score or an audience. You get offers to write posts that comply with their guidelines, and the post rate can go from $5 to over $100. I really enjoyed the boards at Izea very much and some of the things that PayPerPost do really help bloggers: the insistence on quality posts, regular blogging schedule, some traffic requirements, minimum age, etc..

There are some restrictions on the posts that you will be come aware of, and Google has taken something of a disliking to selling PR that’s had a knock-on effect. But Payperpost has paid me over $1,835 in the two years I’ve been doing it. And I’ve not been particularly aggressive, and I have suffered in the PR Rank Spank. But Payperpost has to some extent been its own worst enemy by focusing on continuing to sell PR to advertisers, they’ve made it difficult to have continued success, once Google finds your blog.

Links for Texts: It works but beware!

Text Links Ads has been on my website for months, now. Initially, I was very timid on using Text Links, but now I’ve found them to be a consistent seller on my website. Of course, it helps to have an active readership and/or a PR ranking. But I’ve been making about $100 for a few months now. It works well. It particularly works effectively on a WordPress blog, because there is a plugin that you can download and install. Simple to set up, simple to administer, but the trick is getting your first customers. You will need a PayPal address to get payment.

Overall, Text Link Ads has been the least active of all the five on this boards, and with sites of some reputation, selling has become easier. But getting those first link sales is the real problem. You need to be patient and promote your blog, then you will eventually draw advertisers. Once you do get advertisers, you will find that money starts to trickle in. In fact, for me it trickled for months. Now it’s beginning to pick up a little. Over 2 years, that’s $1680.

Hoi! OioPublisher muscles in

For those interested in selling advertisements the direct way,OIOPublisher is a plugin that I only recently started using and promoting but in the short time I have used it, it has generated $280 on its own. It provides a number of ad based services for your advertisers including text link ads, banners, downloads, and whatever else you can conceive. You get to set your own rates, manage the entire process and it includes a payment gateway connected to your PayPal account which facilitates payment via Paypal, credit card or subscriptions.

However, it can be a little tricky to set up properly the first time, and it is not free. You have to pay good dosh to download the program. Still with OIO I’ve been able sell quite a lot of stuff lately, and it’s set up to sell any manner of advertising or products. So it’s by far the most flexible and most mature of the advertising plugins. Well worth the money, in my opinion. At $47 for a lifetime membership, it’s certainly not expensive. If you are not selling much advertising, you can still run your own ads as fillers, until permanent clients come along, too! So you can start earning straightaway.

Will you pay me to blog?

PayU2Blog has also been a surprising money spinner for one of my sites. Unlike Payperpost, when you are selected for the program, you do not have any choice over what opportunities you can take. However, you are given considerable freedom in how you treat the opportunities, what you write, and you include. So it’s much more of a paid link rather than a paid post format.

The pay is fairly uniform for each opportunity, though the flexibility makes each one more fun and challenging to write. Overall, I’ve earned $535 for my work with them. The work is fairly steady, too, though you may baulk at the occasionally odd or weird assignments you have to write about. This really suits a general blog or a blog with a wider remit than many of the niche blogs. And that’s why I haven’t really used PayU2Blog on InvestorBlogger Dot Com.

And the Grand Total: $4,740

And the grand total is $4740. That’s not a small amount of money at all. But to achieve even this kind of success requires experimentation – you won’t get the same results I do (perhaps you’ll do much better, perhaps not!) – dedication to keeping going and focus on blogging. After that, anything’s possible. I’m still trying!

Previously published on InvestorBlogger Dot Com.