Can you earn anything with a Blog?

It's a question that I see often, from both complete novices and also from those who have been blogging for a while but not thought about how to start monetising a blog. I just answered a question like this on a forum and that prompted me to think about monetisation.
I came up with three basic ways of monetising a blog:
1) Paid posts - the main focus of Munny4Hunny.com - the reason I started the blog was that I heard that you could make money with paid blogging and I wanted to find out if this were possible. Suffice to say that it is, although the online world has changed sufficiently for it to be less profitable now. Even after the peak of paid blogging, there is still a reasonable amount to be made, enough to buy yourself the odd treat from eBay...
2) Contextual adverts - Adsense is the king of contextual ads, but it could take a very long time to reach payout. In order to be successful with Adsense, you need several sites all displaying relevant adverts that you visitors are likely to click. To make people click, your ads need to be closely related to your content, ie. the ad content must be attractive to your visitors. To make money, you ideally need to be in a niche with a high CPC (cost per click) rate. If you get the combination right, you may reach payout on a monthly basis, but you will probably need several sites to do this.
3) Affilitates - like contextual adverts, these need to be closely related to the subject of your blog or site. Your ideal affiliate will fulfill the needs of many of your visitors. Most affiliates are selling a product, so ideally, this needs to be a product that your visitors will desire - some will play per click, but most pay commission per sale - and it can take a long time to come to fruition, nevertheless when it does, you tend to get a great return for very little effort.

Once your monetisation is in place, you will need to promote your blog - a subject which bears clarification (although I am sure I have addressed it any times before), but I will save my pearls of wisdom in this department for another post....