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:

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