Judging by the amount of traffic on Amatomu‘s trends graph, the SA blogosphere doesn’t get enough traffic to monetize with Google Adsense or Amazon affiliates, especially when complete unrelated products are shown, e.g. a post on How Creativity Works gets a link to a book on “Getting Started with Home Internet Pornography” (okay, so maybe it’s slightly related). But are there enough South African readers in the audience to make a high-payout affiliate program like ZA OfferForge work? I’m sure none of my American readers want a quote from Outsurance or ADSL from DataPro, but I don’t think I get nearly enough SA visitors to make any real money out of it either. And I hate blinking ads with a passion. Let me choose related text link ads to put at the end of posts, then we’ll get somewhere.

Are you having any success with monetizing your blog? What works? Affiliates? Adsense? Selling nudey pics of your co-workers? If only there was a way to make money from posting viral ads…

Update 2008-03-29: After running with Offerforge for a while I’ve started getting really decent payments. I just wish it was less labour intensive, with a Google Adsense component to automatically pick campaigns related to the content. Then again, picking campaigns related directly to blog posts may be far more efficient until we have AI to do it for us.