Profiting from blogging is the main reason that a lot of people get into blogging and a useful extra income for a lot of other bloggers. There are a lot of ways to earn an income, although not all are available to everyone around the world.

Unfortunately, for residents of South Africa, and maybe other countries, being paid via PayPal is not an option and this will rule out a load of the available opportunities, but even then there remain some ways to profit from your blogging.

For me, turning a blog into a profit involves 3 steps:

1. Implement the blog
I prefer to install WordPress and a set of useful, favourite, pluggins. You might have other options you prefer. But the first step it to set up the blog and get it looking right. Without a good looking website, you are never going to make much of a profit. Advertisers will not want to know as visitors will leave straight away.

2. Prepare your blog
All too many bloggers expect to make an income without this step, which is vital. They come asking why they are not earning a huge income having only just implemented the blog.

Yet, step 2 – preparing the blog – is the most vital step to get right!

The first part of preparing your blog is to write posts, and a lot of them! If you write 5 posts a week for 3 months, then you will have plenty of material on your website that will attract search engine visitors. This is also content that they can read and be interested in.

At the same time, you should be writing articles and posting them to article directories and submitting them as guest posts to other blogs. This will start to gather you a few regular visitors and to increase the Google Page Rank of your website, by increasing the number of links pointing into your website.

3. Start to earn some money.
Although you can start to earn some money as soon as your blog is published, the best profits only come when you have put the time and effort in to prepare your site in step 2.

But once you have a few regular readers, a decent page rank and a lot of content to attract the search engines and readers, then you can start to sign up for schemes that will make you money such as:

There is much talk around Free Mechanized Wealth Schemes, but what exactly are they? Are they genuine working from home methods, or scams to get you to part with your cash?

Well, in my view, whilst the ideas and techniques used in such programs are genuine enough, selling such basic information with such trumped up promises is not much above the level of a scam. They promise that you will be earning a load of money through a couple of hours of work each day, through tasks for example setting up links on Google.

But, Google do not pay you for this work, though looking at the screen prints of the adverts, I can make a good guess at what they are doing. Here are, what I believe to be, the basic steps that are entailed in such money programs.

1 – Find a product to sell – actually very easy to do! If you have a slight interest in any field, then you could even select a product from that area to work with.

2 – Set up a straightforward site – this is the basis to be working from. Yes, a web site designer may charge hundreds or thousands for such a website, but there are enough DIY tools.

3 – Buy several visitors – this, I think, is the setting up links bit that is often mentioned! You are not doing it for Google, but you are paying to display the adverts for you.

4 – Handle orders – but, if the system was as good as it is made out to be, this step would not be needed. I can usually do this sort of system without having to actually handle any orders or goods!

I would then take the system a step further by saying that we should then look at first, getting more people finding the website for free and secondly getting more sales value out of each customer. But these are crucial steps that I have never seen mentioned in any of the advertising for Mechanical Riches Methods that I have looked at.

It is not a case that what these people are trying to sell you is totally unreasonable and unachievable, do not get me wrong. It is merely that most of the information is already readily available for free, so why pay for it? Also, the promises of vast riches ignore the fact that to get to this position there must also be huge expenditures in pay per click advertising to generate the sales. If not, then the visitors are being found with several magic wand that the rest of us do not know round.

Appreciate that any work at home system, whether internet based or not, is going to take several effort to get it going and running well. There will be a lull at first then a gradual build up, or you are going to be ploughing thousands into advertising.

But, you might do it if you have the desire to succeed, the time to spare (an odd hour here and there) and the character to stick to the work.