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.

How to Make Money Fast

Lots of people turn to the internet as a way to make money online. However the biggest problem people face is being overwhelmed by information. They read, read and read even more and the end result is total confusion. Months can go by with very little action being taken and when people do get started they seem to think that they’ll make money fast. This just isn’t the case and if you think you’ll be able to give up your day job in a matter of a few weeks you are very much delusional. Unless of course you already have skills in internet marketing and SEO etc.

However if you have no skills in keyword research, competition analysis and search engine optimization I suggest that you just get started NOW. Age of a website is one of the most important factors in being ranked well by Google so the quicker you start creating sites and get them indexed, the quicker you will make money. Although I am still very much learning how to make money online myself, I am at a place financially where most people would like to get to. Put it this way, I earn more than Caroline Middlebrook! And I can bet you that I earn more than the average “make money online” blogger who still thinks that getting readers is what’s needed.

So anyway, let’s get to the crunch. If you know nothing about making money online but want a system that will allow you to get started quickly, then here is my guide and this is what I would do if I was starting again. It should be seen as a fast track method ideal for those with limited time due to having a day job and a family to look after.

1. Decide on 10 topics. I suggest you go to ezinearticles.com for ideas. Basically look at the subcategories and turn these into topics for a blog. Stay away from business and finance topics because these are notoriously difficult to get traffic for. My advice is to look at home, hobbies and leisure because there are plenty of people searching for these topics, there are loads of things you can write about and there are also many advertisers (usually). Try and choose a good cross-section of topics such as:-

Motorbikes
Lawn care
Babies
Tropical Fish
Scuba Diving

2. If you don’t have any money to spend you should set up a couple of accounts with blogger. Don’t have more than 5 blogs on the same account and also make sure that you vary the topics on each account. In other words, don’t have 5 blogs all about tropical fish on one blogger account because this will look a little strange if you happen to get a visual inspection.

If you have the money to spend then buy a domain name and get some hosting with host gator. When starting out will only need Baby Croc but if you are keen to get loads and loads (eg 20 or more) of domains then you should get a aluminium reseller account.

Having the keyword in your domain helps a lot so basically you would make up something like Motorbike Chaos or Lawn Care Fanatics. You don’t have to worry too much about the exact domain name, just as long as your main keyword is in it.

3. You might feel overwhelmed at the thought of writing 5 articles per blog meaning you need to write 50 articles. Don’t worry, if you just want to fast track you’re way to creating blogs what you just need to do is write a paragraph instead of a whole article. Let’s just say you’re creating a blog on motorbikes and you want 5 blog posts written. What you would do is decide on 5 article titles e.g. Harley Davidson Motorbikes, BMW Motorbikes, Kawasaki Motorbikes, Motorbike Helmets and Motorbike Maintenance. Just write a quick paragraph for each article and publish it. You can do your research on the company websites or at ezinearticles.

4. Blogger blogs can often get indexed themselves however you should always try and get at least a few links pointing to your blogs. This is much easier than you might think. Just go and create an account with Mister Wong, Mixx and Propeller and add each of your blog’s posts to these social bookmarking sites. I have chosen these particular sites because they have a good high Google Page Rank and allow you do get indexed fairly quickly. Personally I use Bookmarking Demon 4 to submit to all the sites I want.

5. If you’ve decided to go down the route of creating bloger blogs you will want a way to see what visitors you are getting. I suggest you sign up with Statcounter as it’s fee and pretty good. Just follow the instructions on how to add the code to your blog.

This whole process shouldn’t take you long at all and within a week you’ll probably have 10 blogs most of which will be indexed and they can then be allowed to start the aging process. Once you have followed the above advice you can then start reading more on SEO, keyword selection, competition analysis, back links, blog farms and all the other things that Griz, Vic and Court now teach you.

Go back through your blog posts and start turning them into proper posts of about 500 words or so filled with lots of nice juicy keywords. Re-write some of the articles and submit them to article directories and do blog comments etc. Taking action is one of the most important things you will have to do when learning how to make money online and if you simply procrastinate and read lots of blog posts instead you really don’t have any chance in making it in this business. You might also need to practice building confidence.

Free Ways to Make Money Online

If you want to earn money online but have little or no money then there are a number of options available to you.

Blogger

Blogger is basically the only blogging platform I have found that is free and you are allowed to make money from it in basically any way you wish. You can use Adsense and also affiliate links. Just as long as what you have created is not spam and you have looked at the TOS generally. The disadvatage to using blogger is that you don’t really own what you have created. You aren’t allowed to sell your blog, an if you do sell it you probably won’t get as much for it as you really deserve. Also, who knows, blogger might go bust and you will lose everything. This is very unlikely to happen however because it’s owned by Google and they have a very healthy bank balance as far as I know.

Some people might say that you have an advantage with blogger because it’s owned by Google but I tend not to find this to be the case. However you can get indexed without even getting any links but in order to get ranked in Google you need anchored links.

Wordpress.com

Google really seems to like wordpress.com and you don’t even need to get much in the way of links. The problem is that it’s very difficult to make money from wordpress directly due to them being very strict about this. You can’t have adsense or click bank affiliate links. They do allow other types of affiliate links from the likes of commision junction. Just be careful about how and what you write about. Basically, wordpress.com is for social bloggers rather than internet marketers so be careful not to sound too promotional.

Squidoo

These are basically pages that you can make on just about any topic you desire. You can fill the page with text, photos, video, ebay auction and all sorts of other things. You can get a squidoo lense ranked fairly well in Google but you still need to get back links via normal sources such as blog comments and article directories. The downside to squidoo is that it’s very cluttered and if a visitor arrives at your squidoo lens, they can easily get distracted by all the other links and banners available. However unlike bigger and wordpress.com, you can sell your squidoo lens if you like. I have not done this personally however. I basically use squidoo for the purposes of getting links and just fill my lenses with a bit of text that contains a anchored link plus I also stuff them full of ebay and amazon modules just to pad it out. I make a little bit of money but it’s nothing great.

Hubpages

This is a great way to start making money with Adsense very quickly. However they do take 40% of ad impressions so it’s not as good as having your own website. Of course the benefit is that you can create as many pages as you like and pretty much any topic. If you get some anchored back links to you hubs then google will often rank you very well so it’s easy to get quick traffic. Yahoo also loves hub pages. You need to be careful about what content you create though. If you are going after a overly saturated market such as payday loans or weight loss then you need to make sure that your content is extra special and isn’t just a rehash of everything else. I make pretty OK money with my Hubs and it’s a lot better for me personally than squidoo. Hubpages has a much more simple and clean layout so is better for ad sense CTR.

Of course, in order to be able to make money from these free methods you still have to understand SEO. However using these free methods of making money online will only cost you time and will allow you to experiment with SEO and understand it better. Once you have a basic grasp on making money online you can then spend some money on things that are important - ie links. There are many systems/services that you can buy into but not all of them are worth the money as you can read in this 3waylinks.net review.

Caroline Middlebrook LMAO

Have you watched the latest vid by Vic at bloggerunleashed.com called Caroline Middlebrook LMAO? I'ts all about the fact that there are many bloggers out there who pretend that they have their readers' best interests at heart but really they are only looking for ways to make money themselves. Vic has an unusual presentation style but you'll have a much better chance of making money online with him that you ever will with Caroline.

Caroline herself admits she is having a hard time making money online.

Why You Shouldn't Write for PayPerPost

One of the things I was thinking of doing with writing paid posts for PayPerPost. But after doing so many reviews on other websites I have come to the conclusion that it is way too much work for the amount of time writing them. It's also pretty sole destroying writing review after review about payday loans, vacuum cleaners and shopping comparison sites.

It might be a good thing to do if you're starting out and don't have any money. Writing 10 reviews at $10 each gives you $100 which you can spend on something like Bookmarking Demon.

Instead of spending all my energy on writing pointless reviews I have decided to put that energy into writing more articles, re-writing for article directories, squidoo, huppages etc plus firing up Bookmarking Demon everyday.

My routines is pretty much:-

• Long Tail- Find a long tail phrase to write about. Generally I just us Google's keyword tool and don't worry too much about finding out what the daily search amounts are. These are never very accurate anyway. I find terms by typing is stuff like "how red wine" or "what flooring." If I really want to get an idea of serch values I use Free Keywords from WordTraker.
• Research - I then go onto a site like EzineArticles or Buzzle and find a couple of articles on the particular topic I want to write about. I then re-write every single word so that I don't get hammered for stealling content. It can take me a while getting my head around the article but once I've finished I re-write it again
• Re-Write and Waffle - When re-writing an article it's a lot easier than the first time. I can therefore write it much quicker and waffle my way to an extra hundred words. I've been trying to write at least 700-1,000 words whereas normally I would only do 400-500. The reason is that Grizz of Make Money Online For Beginners says that you can get more keywords into an article but without keyword stuffing. It might also make you look more authoritative.
• 2nd re-write - I re-write the article again but not 100%. Normally I only re-write half of each paragraph.
• Submit and Publish - Once I have three versions of each article, I submit one to Article Marketer, one to buzzle.com, goarticles.com, hubpages and squidoo then the longest one will go on my own blog.
• Social Bookmarking - I then load up Bookmarking Demon to submit a bunch of URLs from my sites and other people's.

Lately I've just been concentrating on my Home Improvement blog as this is making the best money but I also want to try and bolster up my Food and Wine and gardening blogs as I kind of ignored them because they weren't bringing in any money. They used to be static sites but I really hate using Frontpage so I converted them into blogs.

In addition to this I also re-wrote some flooring articles and added loads more waffle to create a blogspot blog How to Install Flooring. I don't actually give people advice on how to install flooring, I just talk about why people should install that particular type of flooring. Normally this isn't something I would ever consider doing but ultimately I really just want to make money. If people don't get what they're looking for, sorry.

Anyway, back to what I was originally writing about. I want to find ways of getting passive income. By expanding and promoting the domains I already own, hopefully I will only need to do a little work to maintain them and stop them from dying. If I spend all my time writing boring reviews, this is time I'm not researching keywords, writing, re-writing and promoting. Does this make sense?

Another point is that Google will find out eventually that you're writing for PPP and take your PR away. You might say "oh, who gives a toss?!" But you wouldn't be saying that when all your work dries up. It won't affect your ranking in the SERPs but you won't be making money from any other paid review service either. Your blog no longer has any value for any advertiser. They only care about the little green bar. And the chances are that you're writing review because you're not getting SE traffic and not making any money.

So you're back to square one. Not making any money online.

An intro to making money from blogging

If you've done any online marketing or blogging at all you'll probably know about sites such as Sponsored Reviews, Pay Per Post and Blogsvertize. For those who don't what these sites do is connect advertisers with bloggers in order to promote their products or services.

As a blogger you can receive various amounts of money depending on what sort of Google Page Rank and alexa rankings you have. What you need to do is set up a blog, whether it be with self-hosted or on a free service like blogger or blogspot. Then start writing about the topic you have chosen a couple of times per week. Once your blog is one month old you can then sign up with blogsvertize who will probably start sending you jobs for about $5. Once the blog is 3 months old you can then sign up with the other services.

What a blogger needs to do is write about the company's website and give a review of it. Some companies look for honest opinions whilst others look for you to only write about the positives.

Anyway, I started DailyDosh.net just the other day and have been writing various articles about debt and set them up to autopost every 3 days. The site isn't currently indexed, has no PR and no traffic but in a month I hope to start earning some money writing reviews.