If you want to make money from your blog, you can use PPC. Making money with AdSense is good if your search engine traffic sends you around 2000 unique visitors a day. Since you don’t have your own product to sell yet, this will be your first choice.

On the other hand, affiliate marketing is another good way to earn money. You can join major affiliate programs like ClickBank and PayDotCom. Most of the time, a good product review can result in a good sale. But of course, it is not realistic to do product reviews on a daily basis. So your sidebars should do the rest. However, your visitors don’t seem to notice them as you expected.

Before you get paranoid, take a closer look at your blog. See it as a visitor and not as the blog owner. What else do you see besides your ads and affiliate links? Or better yet, do you notice them instantly? Or are there other widgets that catch your eye? If there are, what are they and how do you locate them? Can you make money with them?

Most bloggers join different social sites in hopes of growing their network and placing their recent visitors widgets in your sidebar. Other bloggers display their traffic resources to show the world how big their traffic is. I’m pretty sure you also have a Featured Commenters widget. Not surprisingly, your commenters are very happy. And since you also love your blogroll, you use its attractive widgets instead of a simple love link.

If you think about it, these widgets distract your visitors from clicking on your ads. In addition, they are also driving away the readers of that blog.

Now let’s get back to AdSense, as I think that is your main concern. Why are your earnings still low despite your high search engine traffic? If your ads are below your posts and in the sidebars but under the fold, do you expect your visitors to notice them? I agree that ads at the top of posts distract visitors and they may leave your blog immediately. Of course, they will if they don’t need them.

So am I suggesting you remove all those widgets? Not really, but I suggest you ask yourself a few questions. What do you really want: ad users or commenters, potential buyers or social friends? Or better yet, make money or be popular? However, the latter can be achieved with both, but it is difficult to serve two masters at the same time.

Long story short, you can still keep those widgets. Hopefully, you can discover effective ways to earn money from them.