Adsense, or ads in general, are not the only way to turn your blogging into a profit. Here are a few sites I’ve come across recently which give bloggers a leg up in earning some cash from their blogging content, whether writing or photography, and even indirectly from their own skills. Have a good conversational skills? There’s something for you below, too.

Love photography and have a photoblog? Interested in making a bit of money selling your good quality, newsworthy  digital photographs directly from your website? Spymedia recently relaunched their site with an upgraded interface and more services. Supported blog platforms include MySpace, hi5, Friendster, and Multiply, with others in the works. [via Mashable] Your photos are presented in “spystreams” which is essentially a photo slideshow.

SoulCast lets you get paid for your blogging. Sign up for free, create a blog on their site about pretty nearly anything, insert your Google Adsense publisher code into your profile, then start blogging. There’ll be up to three ads and a link unit on your home page and post pages.

Is SoulCast worth the effort? Hard to say. It’s a social site of sorts, for text discussion, and the topics are extremely varied. This might affect the ads that show up on your blog there, regardless of what you write about. I think it’s designed to give diarist-style bloggers a chance to have some fun and maybe make some money. Still, I’ve signed up two different profiles for two different types of writing. I’ll give it a couple of months and report back here.

Another blogging-related way to make money with whatever skills you may have is to get paid for talking to people. How does that relate to blogging? Well, you would be promoting your skills on your weblog by write articles that inform readers about your topic. To let potential clients know that you’re available for consulting, you’d have “call me” type of buttons on the site.

There are two web-based services that I’ve come across so far which let you do this kind of consulting over the phone: Ether and Jyve. Both take care of payment processing for you. Depending on the service, calls are either paid for before the official call starts, or can be paid forafterwards as well. (You can also sell digital content via email, site download, and even through Skype’s file transfer feature, if you’re using Jyve.)

Jyve uses the free Skype software for Internet phone calls (VoIP - Voice Over Internet Protocol), so both caller and callee have to install Skype and Jyve. Ether does not have this restriction, so callers can call from a regular phone or an Internet phone. They call the toll-free Ether phone number and your extension, and once they pay for the call, get transferred to the phone number you’ve configured in your profile.

I don’t know if anyone has actually made any money using either service, but I have seen people advertising their Ether number on their website. I’ve signed up for both services and will be selectively placing them on a couple of my sites (both service buttons on each site). I’ll report on my findings after a few months.