Saturday, 1 May 2010

How To Make Money Writing Articles

Writing articles is something that most people who are looking to make money do. The thing is, there are loads of different methodologies in this regards. I know of quite a few people who make money by writing for others but there are problems with this. They get fed up writing about things they have no personal experience or interest in. Also, they aren't able to make very much money because there are so many freelance writers in India churning articles out at next to nothing.

So I would suggest that anyone looking to make money writing articles, you are better off writing for your own websites. You probably won't be able to make as much as you like straight away however if you take a longer term outlook, this way of making money is much better.

The problem is that when it comes to how to make money with a website is there are those who preach very different things.

Write About Your Passions - Some will talk about how you should write about what you are passionate. So if you are passionate about collecting antique plungers then this is what you should write about. Where the difficultly lies is that there might not be that many people who share your passion.

So what happens if you spend hundreds of hours writing about antique plungers only to find that a mere 5 people a month search for antique plungers? If you are going to get so little in the way of searchers you will not make a decent amount of income.

Write About Topics You Know Nothing About - The complete opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to making money writing articles is to write about things they have no idea about but could bring in a lot of searchers and therefore money. This means that people end up writing about hair loss, acne and bad credit loans.

The problem is that if you don't know anything about these subjects and you haven't got any personal experience in them, you could end up writing total junk. You end up just rewriting articles that might have been rewritten from other sources. The end product is simply junk and you could be giving misinformation.

Worse still, many people choose to write junk on purpose. They will write hundreds of words of pure fluff that tells the searcher nothing informative. The articles can also be littered with spelling mistakes and poor grammar - on purpose. The articles might even have been written by a computer program.

The idea is that if the article tells the searcher nothing about what they are looking for, they will simply click on an advert in hopes that the ad will provide them with what they are looking for. More money can be made this way, until, that is, the search engines decide to deindex you for providing crappy articles.

When this happens your traffic will grind to a halt and you will make absolutely zilch. Nada. Niente. Nothing.

Is that really what you want to get yourself involved in? It can be soul destroying to wake up one morning to find that your income has dried up completely. I know because I've dabbled with the "darker side" of content creation. And I have to tell you that this isn't what I want to do any more.

Write Articles On What You Know - A happy medium is simply to write about what you know or have had some experience in. You don't have to be a world-leading expert nor do you need to be passionate.

What you need to think about is problems you have faced and how you have resolved them. It might not even be yourself that has dealt with it. It might be a friend or family member and you could write about their experiences. Maybe do an interview with them.

Have a look at this list and think about how they might apply to you:-
  • Your garage has a wasp nest in it.
  • Your child has head lice.
  • Your car has a dent in it.
  • Your heating bills are too high.
I'm sure that most of you will have had to deal with at least one of these problems. So just write about it. Write about how you felt. Write about different solutions you investigated. Write about what worked and what didn't work. Write about how you would deal with the problem if it happened again.

When you write an article you will need to think about what title to give it. This is the most important part of on-page SEO and they way to do this is to imagine what people might search for. Think about what you might have searched for when trying to resolve your problem

So, let's imagine you have a wasp nest in your garage. What do you think someone would search for. Here are some ideas:-
  • How to get rid of a wasp nest from my garage
  • Ways to get rid of a wasp nest from a garage
  • What to do if you have a wasp nest in your garage
Another thing to bear in mind about searchers is that people are lazy, impatient and cheap. Meaning they often include words such as these in their searches:-
  • Easy
  • Simple
  • Quick
  • Fast
  • Cheap
  • Affordable
So when you are writing, try and include some of these words in your article. Please don't try and stuff these words in in an unnatural way. If you go overboard it can make your articles appear spammy and this will piss a lot of people off.

Conclusion - I honestly believe that you need to be very careful about how you write your articles and try to make them as good as you possibly can. If there are a few spelling mistakes, don't worry, just do your best.

Put yourself in the position of the searcher. When you publish your article, think about whether or not you are really delivering what the searcher is looking for. If you title your article something like "Buy Really Cheap Wasp Killer Here" a searcher is going to get really annoyed if they click on your article and find that you don't sell really cheap wasp killer.

Bold