If you decide to explore blogging as a means to making money online, there are a lot of opportunities available for you to monetize your blog. One of the best ways to do so is through paid posting opportunities. You are actually being paid to write reviews of products, services or simply websites.

However, you have to take note that this source of income is not passive and consistent. One moment, you could be getting tons of paid opportunities, the next moment you may have none or very few. It depends on numerous factors such as your blog’s Page Rank, Alexa ranking, traffic, link popularity and so on.

In this post, I will list down a simple guideline to help you make money from your blog after 3 months. Although you can start monetizing your blog as soon as you set it up, most paid posting opportunities sites required your blog to be at least 3 months old before these sites accept you into their paid posting programs.

1. Decide on your blogging niche. Select one that you are passionate about and have a keen interest. If it is something that you want to write about even without getting paid for, it would be even better. Most blogs died within 3 months of starting up as the owners soon lose interest in whatever they are blogging about. Make sure you don’t commit the same mistake.

2. Register your domain. It would be advisable to get your own domain as many paid opportunities required you to have your own domain name. By having your own domain, you will have more access to paid opportunities.

3. Sign up for web hosting services. Unless you are not getting your own domain, a web hosting services is a must. By hosting on your own server, you will have more free play in blog design and content, etc.

4. Start blogging regularly. Make sure your blog is update regularly and if possible daily or at least every alternate day. A blog that is not updated regularly will not impress any first time visitor.

5. Send out emails to all your relatives, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, business associates and anyone that you know to visit your blog and comment on your posts. This is good for traffic in the beginning.

6. Visit blogs in your same niche and comment regularly on these blogs. This will helps in requesting links once you are a regular on these blogs. It helps in creating more awareness for your blog, especially if you comment regularly on high traffic blogs.

7. Go on a intensive link building program. Request for links from blogs or sites in the same niche. The more links pointing back to your blog, the higher your blog’s Page Rank will be.

8. Submit your sites to the major search engines.

9. Submit your sites to as many blog directories as possible.

10. Submit your blog’s feed to as many feed directories as possible.

11. Submit your sites to as many site directories as possible.

12. Join as many forums as possible and include your blog’s URL in your forum signature. Whenever you post in the forum, other people will see your signature and some may be curious enough to click on them.

13. Remember to update your content regularly and consistently. Important!

If you follow the guideline closely, you will find that in 3 months time, your blog’s Page Rank and Alexa rankings will have increased many folds. The higher your Page Rank and Alexa ranking and also your traffic, the more and higher paid opportunities you will be offered.

Do it well and you can be earning at least a few hundreds a month from paid postings opportunities alone and not to mentioned that there are many more ways that you can monetize your blog. If you have more than one blog, you could be looking at X times the amount and not to mentioned the workload.

I will be coming up with a list of paid posting opportunities sites soon and do reviews on each of them, just look out for them in the near future.

For a list of good resources on blogging, check out my “Recommended Resources” section.