Before starting to exchange links with some people that you don’t know, you better try other methods of advertising. For example, you may offer a certain space on your main page to the one who offers more money for it, and in this way you could also make some money with your blog.
But here I talk about advertising. Not about making money from the ads that are on the site. Of course, you may receive money if you use Google AdSense, but this is more than AdSense. If you like a certain library in your town, you can talk to them and tell that you have a free space on the site, that your site is about books and that you will be happy to place a link to their site on your own site. This will be possibly only after they will pay you the amount of money that you ask them. You can negotiate the price if you would like that.
A known site will experience the inversed situation: the library will come to the owner of the site asking him to place a banner on his site, but when you are at the beginning, this is one of the methods that you have to apply to provide advertising on your site.
The other method, which is more used is to place a link and perhaps a picture to another site, if that site places a link to your site. This is done for free, no one asks the other person money, unless if one page has a page rank of 9 and the other site is 0, in terms of page rank. Usually, sites like these don’t collaborate, but if they do, the site with a higher oage rank will not be only satisfied if they get a link on your site. This could bring them more disadvantages, than benefits. They will usually ask for money from you. In this case, you have to balance very well if this is a good opportunity for promoting your site or not.
To use advertising on your site, you can address to some widgets, which apparently are the latest fashion in terms of monetization coming from advertising. One of the methods is Widgetbucks and the other one is SmartLinks. I am sure that there are plenty of those, but this is all I have managed to find out.
You can promote other people and of course, receive a commission for doing this, by having an RSS feed button. You may ask: how can this is possible? Well, if you write an article in which you promote the services of a certain company and if you have many people who are connected to your RSS, you can announce them that the company has new offers, new discounts, products, holiday benefits and so on. And this without even place a banner on your site, just by writing a short article.11