Make Money by Writing Articles

As a beginner, you’re probably wondering how you could make money right away. Now, there are tons of programs online that promise you overnight riches, and if you’ve already figured out that they are unreal, let me congratulate you – you’ve already half-way to making real money.

Now, to make money you have to work for it. There are no exceptions, no shortcuts, just good old-fashioned work. To get money, you have to provide value. To have someone give you money, you have to provide them higher value than the money’s worth.

Let’s step back a little and take a look at what Internet Marketing is on the fundamental level, so we can understand what has such a great demand that we would not have a problem to sell.

The Internet in marketing point of view is essentially a big publishing machine. Everything you see on the Internet is published and distributed to people’s homes. So everyone who is involved in the Internet marketing, is essentially a publisher. And what publishers need the most? Content.

Therefore it makes most sense to write content and sell it. Make no mistake, good content has a great value for online marketers, they’re begging for it. In fact, the demand is so huge right now, that even the worst quality content is sold. There’s but one requirement – it has to be unique. And it’s not a problem at all – us humans are able to talk about the same thing in so many different words that thousands of books can be written about just one topic.

To begin making money online from writing content, you need 3 things:

  • Know which topics are the most popular
  • Familiarize with some basic widely accepted writing guidelines
  • Know where to put your offer to get the attention of the buyers

And I’m going to give them all to you next.

First of all, the topics or niches. There are thousands of them, but there are just a handful of those which are really popular. Here’s a quick list of such niches from my experience:

  • Internet marketing
  • Weight loss and fitness
  • Forex trading
  • Dating

That’s not a complete list, but it’s enough to give you a start – write about any of those topics and you will not miss. Simply search for these phrases with your favorite search engine and rewrite in your own words everything you find.

Next, there are just a few simple rules you can follow for best results:

  • Your articles must be 300 words minimum
  • Create an outline first for easier and faster writing (ex., intro – what you’re gonna write about, key points of the subject, recap, conclusion)
  • Keyword optimization

While the third guideline is not a requirement, it would really help you sell your articles if they were keyword optimized. Using keywords also helps trying to find what to write about. Use the free Google’s Keyword tool to find these keywords. Steve Wagenheim has some great tips on article writing, I recommend you to check them out.

WSO ArticlesFinally, once you’ve written a bunch of articles, it’s time to sell them. I will show you one way that I find to be the most effective.

Go to the Warrior Special Offers Forum on Warriorforum.com. This is one of the busiest places online where the Internet marketers are offering their products and services as well as where they’re looking to buy what they need. You will notice that there are quite a few listings titled as PLR articles, or PLR pack (PLR stands for private label rights). Those are the offers very similar to yours. Check out a few and try to model your own offer after them.

I want to emphasize that because unique content is of a great demand, you have to understand three important points:

  • You need to limit your offer to a limited number of buyers (say, 50 to 100)
  • The competition is never a problem – there will always be buyers in busy niches
  • Quality matters – the higher the quality of your articles, the happier your clients and the easier for you to sell them

Also note that these listings aren’t free and there’s a fee of $20, but it’s all worth it. If, for example, you sell a pack of 20 articles for $20 to just 10 people, you’d already be earning $200. It all depends on what limit you set (and remember, people buy these articles for their uniqueness, so don’t get too greedy).

Before you add your listing, make sure to read the sticky threads and make sure you have means to accept payments. The easiest way to do that is with PayPal (you can create a free account if you don’t have one) and simply posting a payment link in your listing.

Some other popular places to post your article packs:

Building Your Online Business

Writing articles that are in demand is a quick way to make money online, but looking further it would be great to build a business that would replace your day-job income (or create one) and that would bring as much passive income as possible.

While there are many ways to do that, I want to give you a blueprint that would start with the previously discussed way of making money online – creating content, and what essentially goes down to the core of the Internet marketing.

I will break it down into the following steps:

  1. After selling your articles, keep track of your client contacts (emails) and offer them any new articles that you produce in the future. That’s the first step in building relationship with your clients and it’s a straight way to create a decent business. Many marketers use this model alone to make a great income. As your client list grows, consider an autoresponder service such as Aweber or GetResponse.
  2. Build a website that would offer your articles as a service. “Article a day” type of services are very popular. Such services provide a paid membership for a limited number of users and send new unique articles every day (one per day). Such a membership usually costs about $30/month ($1 per article) and people eagerly subscribe because they get what they want for a fraction of cost (a quality article of 300-500 words costs at least $5).
  3. Market your subscription site as a product by partnering with similar product owners. This is the easiest way to market a product – simply look for other products (virtually any product in IM niche may be interested to partner with you), and offer them a commission of your sales or to exchange products to each others customer lists. It’s a win-win for both of you and a great way to expand your client base.
  4. Put your money where your mouth is and start an authority site in the niche you’re writing your articles about. Your customers are buying content from you because they have such sites and make money from it. You can do that too. The nature of such sites is to become a publisher with a readership. That means advertising opportunities which bring passive income for you.
  5. It’s easy to get overwhelmed doing all of the above, so consider outsourcing your tasks. There are thousands upon thousands people like you who are just starting making money online, once you get to such a level, you can hire them to do all these tasks for you, while you focus on expanding your business or just enjoying your life.
  6. Rinse and repeat. Expand to other niches and create more services and websites to scale your business.

As a final note, let me point out a common pitfall of most Internet marketers who are just starting out. For whatever reason most people jump on the step #4 in my above list and more often that not fail, because they cannot compete. I don’t know if they try to model after the successful marketers and miss the fundamental “dirty” work that has to be done to begin with, or if they just get wrong information. But the matter of truth is that you can’t eat the elephant in one bite, you have to eat it in little chunks, step by step.

In other words, you start your career on the lowest level, then work up the ladder. But fear not, everything works a lot faster on the Internet and you can create a great business in just one year if you focus and do it right.

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