Once you’ve got your blog setup with a hosting company and you’re posting loads of quality content the next move is to make your time and effort pay dividends. The chance of you becoming the next Bill Simmons, Will Leitch, or even Jay Mariotti is slim at best but you can still pull a few dollars in a reasonably easy manner.

The Sports Dollar is a site dedicated to generating income for sports bloggers, and this post by Alana G suggests ways for sports bloggers to become more business oriented. I covered a few money making options in a March 2008 Make Money With a Sports Blog post. Those ideas still work and some of them are featured on the list below.

Sales
The biggest money maker is independent sales. Simple math tells you that you’ll make more money if you cut the middle man. Ticket and casino companies are most likely to approach you. I don’t mind selling them ad space but a lot of people do. I’ve been offered money to place a logo on the entire background of the site, write a post pitching a product, and to promote a China-based dating site, and I turned them down. Even though I have a lot of ads I didn’t think those ads worked. Especially a logo that compromised the entire site.

Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM)
Fantasy Sports Ventures- This is my advertising network home. They offer an extremely competitive CPM and the split is 50-50. They’re partnered with Gannett Co. to provide another outlet for the network.

Yardbarker- Most independent bloggers first experience with a network comes with Yardbarker. They pay somewhere around 40 cents for every 1000 views of a 3rd party ad and $1+ from direct deals and this value goes up during key times like the playoffs. YB recently announced a partnership with Fox Sports which offers great exposure for their members.

BuzzLogic- They offer a $2 CPM but they’re kind of selective. Their inventory is kind of thin for sports blogs making your monthly earnings inconsistent.

Adsdaq- They allow you to set your own price for your ads and offer a 50-50 split. Don’t go crazy and set the prices too high (Over $1.50 is probably pushing it) and you’ll make some nice change. Use the backup feature to conserve ad space on your site.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
Chitika- This one doesn’t make a lot of money for me but some is better than none. You can set the ads to only appear to visitors from search engines giving you a better chance for a click thru.

Google Adsense- Most of the opinions I get from other sports bloggers about Adsense are negative. I’ve had decent success. I have the text link across the top, a box at the end of every post, and a smaller scraper down on the right. Obviously, the ads with the best positioning perform the best.

Text Links
- One of the easiest ways to make money but it takes awhile to kick in to effect. It’ll be anywhere from 2-4 months before you make sales. The ads are sold on older, indexed posts of yours. You’ll probably forget you signed up until you see the Paypal payment.

Linkworth- They allow you to set your price but like text-link-ads it takes sometime to get rolling. The ads usually appear on the homepage. You’ll see three Linkworth ads on my homepage at the very bottom of my ad list.

Amazon is the only straight up affiliate program I’ve used with any success and even then the earnings have been minimal. The holiday season is decent but the rest of the year is weak. You have to factor in that I don’t put much effort into Amazon and just take what I can get.