Ways to monetized blogs other than Google AdSense?

What are some ways I could monetize my blog? I'm currently using AdSense at the bottom of each post and it works not so great. The topic of my blog is personal finance, so it's a good profitable niche.

I'm just not sure of how could I monetize it other than a contextual ad network like AdSense or a banner ad network.

There are several ways how monetize quality content and get advantage of the community you have acquired.

The general advices:

• imagine what would you buy if you was a visitor of your blog
• be hyper precise - your blog is a niche, your offer must be niche as well
• use the ways that give you 100% control over the offers (ads, banners,...) Don't go for some general solution as AdSense.

Some ideas to monetize your blog:

• affiliate marketing - more difficult at first view (you are paid only when your visitor buys something, not when he sees something) but for a niche blog with quality content (people must trust you and trust the products you recommend) it's much more efficient
• recommend books/ebooks about the subjects you write about
• write & sell your own book/ebook about the subject (take a content of your blog posts as a base and develop it in a book-like form)
• offer "consultance / expert service & advice" - if people follow your advices & are happy with it, you can offer some paid services. So your blog become some kind of "freemium"

To conclude:

As far as the content of your blog is interesting and bring somme added value (for which the readers are ready to pay), it is not difficult to make money with it. But don't forget that "the content is the king" and without quality content you will earn nothing whatever monetization model you use...

Not an answer to original question, but too long for a comment.

"I'm currently using AdSense at the bottom of each post" << this is an issue, you are not optimizing your revenue.

Use a large leaderboard (horizontal) unit around/below your site header and 160x600 tower or 250x250 square units in your navigation column, if you have one. If your posts are long, use 2 units in the navigation column. You can expect $1-3 CPM rate for any units that appear (or at least start) above the fold. With 2-3 ad units for every page you should be able to make above $5 RPM (revenue per thousand impressions), maybe a lot more for your content niche. Make sure to review ads occasionally and block questionable categories and/or creatives.

Have an email signup module on your blog offering to send new posts as you publish them - building an email list is SUPER valuable. You can consistently bring traffic back to your blog with a growing list of subscribers and when you have sponsors or partners you can leverage the same list to cross promote products and services.

This is the best guide I've seen that explains how to monetize a blog.

Hope it helps!

You should also give "Related content" networks a try. The two biggest networks for that are Outbrain and Taboola.

Try to stick to their text-only units though. They don't take away from the user experience and can add value for visitors reading your content.