Monetizing my blog???

If you keep it fairly discreet, people don't seem to care. I was a bit nervous about bringing in ads to a blog I had been running ad free for years, but there was no apparent negative response. I would suggest not using Blogger's default pattern with big ads between posts. The sidebar or a banner is plenty.

Unless you're attracting hundreds or thousands of hits a day, I wouldn't expect monetizing your blog to be a big money-maker for you. That said, ads are mostly invisible to me. They're everywhere on the internet, so I usually just tune them out. If I were a regular reader at your blog, the sudden appearance of ads probably would not drive me away. Unless they were annoying or obnoxious.

If you want to try monetizing your blog, go for it. I'd just make sure that I looked at my blog from a reader's perspective. If the ads would drive me away, I'd get rid of them.

^^^What she said. Adsense and other contextual ad thinga-ma-jigs will only bring in a few cents at a time. If your Google page rank is a 1 or higher, you might could do Blogvertise or other paid blogging. Those bring in a little more than contextual ads but I personally don't like them on my author blog because it breaks the content with something that is obviously an ad; a turnoff for those who subscribe by email and read every new post.

Keep in mind, though, you usually only get paid when people actually click the ads for some (like adwords). So if everyone is just ignoring the ads, you won't have anything coming in.

I think that targeted ads would be much better if you could sell adspace to, say, other blogs that are writing about similar topics, or companies that sell products similar to what you write about. I'm more likely to click an ad if it's something attractive and eye catching. I don't think I've ever clicked on a google adwords because I don't trust the people that pay for them :x

If you are in a lucky niche you can get a dollar per click. And in any case adsense is a good way to start. Then you can look at other programs or direct sales.