Unfortunately, for residents of South Africa, and perhaps other countries, being paid via PayPal is not an option and this will rule out loads of the available opportunities, but even then there remain some ways to profit from your blogging.
For me, turning a website into a profit involves 3 steps:
1. Implement the blog
I prefer to install WordPress and a set of useful, preferred, pluggins. You might have other options you prefer. But the first step it to set up the site 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 traffic will leave straight away.
2. Prepare your blog
All too a lot of bloggers expect to make an income without this step, which is vital. They come asking why they are not earning a huge income having just merely implemented the site.
Yet, step 2 – preparing the site – is the most vital step to get right!
The first part of starting a blog is to write posts, and loads of them! If you write 5 posts a week for 3 months, then you will have a load of material on your website that will attract search engine traffic. This is also content that they might read and be interested in.
At the same time, you should be writing articles and posting them to article sites and submitting them as guest posts to other blogs. This will start to gather you a few regular traffic and to increase the Google Page Rank of your web site, by increasing the number of links pointing into your web site.
3. Start to earn a few cash.
Even though you could start to earn several money as soon as you starting a blog, the best profits merely come when you have put the time and effort in to prepare your site in step 2.
But once you have some regular readers, a decent page rank and ample of content to attract the search engines and readers, then you might start to sign up for schemes that will make you money for example:
* Google Adsense – earn money merely by traffic clicking on links that are shown on your web site.
* Sponsored Posting – in return for writing about whatever an advertiser wants you to write round and linking to them, you get paid! Showing the importance of step 2, typical fees on one system I use would be $2 for a Page Rank 1 website but $9 for a weblog with a rank of 3.
* Affiliate Schemes – find a merchant that sells a product related to your site, talk about it, link to is and hopefully your readers will buy some, earning you a commission! If you have an international audience, then digital products as for instance Click Building society products may be best.
* Sell Your Own Product – maybe set it up in Click Lender or just sell via PayPal, but you might even only sell an Ebook of your best posts.
Grab helpful knowledge about the topic of internet marketing – please make sure to study the web site. The time has come when proper info is really at your fingertips, use this opportunity.
