what are good ways to make money with blogs... and does it work?

[Jake]

Most people who try to make money on the internet fail, perhaps because they have absolutely no qualifications but have bought into the easy money promises.

In most cases, thee majority of blog traffic comes from search engines, being one of the top blogs in your field, can get you onto page 1 of the search results where 90% of the traffic comes from.

You should treat it like a publishing business with regular quality original content updates etc. It's probably best to not stray too far from your niche.

Some web businesses spend more time off site, creating guest articles, quality blog comments and forum posts to develop a reputation and search ranking backlinks. For decent traffic levels you need to study trhe SEO techniques, there are plenty of tricks, some that worked 5 years ago can now be damaging to your ranking.

For more immediate revenues you can write articles for blogs through freelance marketplaces like elance.com, odesk.com or the wildest of the lot Freelancer.com there are also article brokers that reward quality writers proportionately, try constant-content.com, textbroker.com, thecontentauthority.com .

Of course Adsense is the most popular passive revenue source, the high $100 min payout is hard for some sites to reach the tens of thousands of visitors needed to get paid.
Affiliate marketing has the potential for earning more particularly of you are writing about a subject people spend money on.

Here's a list of bloggers who have reported their income and revenue sources some time ago, they are mostly statistical reports but offer a window into how they do it and some inspiration:
http://workhomebusiness.org/blogs-reporting-income/