WidgetBucks has taken the world of blog advertising to a new level.

Adverts are a great way to monetize your blog, but they can sometimes be a little too 'in your face' to gain the best response and make you the kind of money you're looking for.

WidgetBucks does things differently. All the widgets are fully customisable so they fit right in with the look and feel of your site. What's more you can actually start earning from the widgets in more than one way.

You'll get paid for everyone in the USA or Canada that actually clicks on an ad and goes through to find out more, but there is also a chance to receive a payment which takes into account the number of times each ad is actually displayed.

This is useful if your blog receives a lot of traffic, as you'll start earning from the moment the first ad goes live on your blog.

You can also earn extra cash for everyone you refer to WidgetBucks, so you've really got three great chances of pulling in some extra cash here.

Seeing as WidgetBucks is still fairly new you could well attract a lot of referrals from your blog.

This is arguably the best part of the whole program.

It's been proven that adverts which don't look like adverts generally get a higher click through rate than blatant adverts do. Some people just don't like the feeling they're being sold to. The widgets offered by this site take that into account.

They've been designed to make sure they blend in with the rest of your content. Put simply, they don't look much like adverts at all. You can get them in banner style sizes if you want, but there are hundreds of different size, style and colour options to try out.

What's more, WidgetBucks widgets are contextual, which means that they will display content that is wholly relevant to your site. If your blog is all about the best and the worst camcorders, you can create a widget that compares the three best selling models and then write a post around it.

There are loads of merchants involved with this program already so you're bound to find a wide range of items that will appeal to your blog readers.

OK, what exactly is MerchSense in the first place?

Well it's basically the lazy man's way of getting those widgets live on your blog as soon as possible with the minimum of work. Just like Google AdSense.

All you need to do in this instance is paste the relevant code into your site and the WidgetBucks MerchSense feature will take over and decide what your widget should display.

This is a great benefit, but it's worth thinking about whether you want the widget to keep changing its contents on a regular basis without your input. If you have written a blog entry which mentions specific products then you won't want those to disappear from your widget at will - if that happens people will be left wondering why your rich media display doesn't seem to bear any relevance to your blog entry.

Whether or not you decide to use the MerchSense feature will depend a lot on how much control you like to have over the content of your blog.

If you don't use MerchSense you have a much better chance of experimenting and testing different products for different lengths of time to see what pulls in the biggest response. Once you've found something that works you can stick with it.

If you sit back and let WidgetBucks do all the work you will notice peaks and troughs in the performance of your widgets, but you won't know what caused them. For my money I'd recommend not using the MerchSense feature and taking control of things yourself to grab the best chance of making some great money.