How to monetize my blog?

I have a blog that's reaching over 480+ unique visitors daily, so I'd consider that fairly decent traffic. However, I want to know how to make money from the blog.

I've had AdSense on it for a while now, and I'm not getting the greatest of results. I got 38 clicks yesterday but only managed about $3 from that. I'm wondering, are there better ways to monetize the blog?

My blog is Left 4 Dead 2 | L4D2 | Left4Dead2 News, Information, Screenshots & Videos, btw.

 

Find affiliate programs where you can offer the game for sale through your site and make a few dollars from each sale. You should be able to do that through Amazon.com at least. Also offer complimentary merchandise such as game guides or books on it.

Adsense is designed to make Google money not you so it should be the last effort to fill empty ad slots. You would look for other advertising solutions but 500 unique visitors a day is not really considered a lot. You may be able to find some niche advertisers though that would pay you $10 / month for basic CPM ads.

 

Affiliate advertising is the way to go especially if you have some highly targeted niche traffic for a specific product that you can convert on decently. Usually if you can get one sale from those 480 visitors you'll make more than you did in 2-3 weeks with adsense.

Try to contact other gaming websites, or related site directly to purchase some advertising from you. Depending on who you contact and how many spots you're willing to sell, you should be able to earn around $100 a month from it, especially if you use some rotating ads, just try to keep it under 3 rotating at a time for right now since you don't have a lot of visitors.

 

Sign up for the Amazon Associates program. They offer a wide range of products and a massive amount of banners.

In wordpress, create some pages that are nothing but a sales page for products and items.

On one of my sites, I used the single banners to create specialized product pages
Backpacks – Survival Gear Reviews and Forum

It starts off with some fanny packs, goes to day packs and finally the larger backpacks.

The problem is, wordress likes to delete iframe code when you switch between visual and html editor. So you have to be careful when building those types of pages. I will use something like PSPad, write the code, copy and paste it into the wordpress html editor.

You could go through an create pages on motherboards, CPUs, games, software, and use the amazon banners.

 

Thanks for the great advice, guys! I'll definitely check out affiliate marketing/advertising.