Monetize a Blog

I'm interested in monetizing my blog. It is a blog about travel. If I do the following Google search site:[sitename] where [sitename] is the name of my site I get 2,800 results. As a comparison, the search site:[login to view URL], a leading site similar in content to mine, gets 3,480 results and is rated #1 in the Recreation > Travel > Travelogues > Around the World category by Alexa. The point being I'm not starting from scratch. Obviously, his blog is significantly better than mine. I'm computer literate. I programmed professionally for over 25 years and I'm certified with Oracle as a DBA and a Programmer. However, I haven't worked professionally since 2005 and I never worked professionally with the Internet as a platform. I retired a little early. I want to learn to monetize my blog. I'd like to entertain the idea of hiring a mentor with knowledge of blog monetization to shorten my learning curve. I don't need a coder. Prior to migrating to WordPress, I built my original blog with good old MySQL, PHP, HTML and CSS. It was pretty crude, but it worked. I'm comfortable with WordPress and themes to a point. I'm flexible about the work in terms of hours and pay rate. I foresee conversations via Skype but that's an assumption. If you're interested I can provide you with the website if it's not exposed on Guru and further dialogue on what I see happening between us. You can learn more about me than my mother ever knew.