The simple answer is no. It isn’t. As someone who has spent countless hours learning how to be successful in the world of online content, I know first-hand at how easy it is to fall into the trap of believing that the online world is just a mecca of wealth waiting to open its arms to you.
But the sad truth is that it isn’t. I’ve mentioned how challenging it can be to write online for money many times in this blog. Not because I want to be discouraging, but because I know that it takes real work. And I also know that there are many self-proclaimed gurus who are marketing tactics that tell you that writing online for money is NOT hard work.
So exactly how do you get people to fall in love with your content so you can reap the rewards? I could write my ideas all out here, but the truth of the matter is that the best source out there is one of my favorite blogs, CopyBlogger. They’ve compiled a lovely list of 49 Creative Ways You Can Profit From Content Marketing.
What I love so much about this post is that it perfectly captures the nitty gritty. It reminds you that the best way to market your content is to write good content. Produce quality material to engage your readers and get page views. Earn trust. Create relationships.
The online business market is remarkably similar to the offline business world. You have to connect with people, believe in what you do, and stand by your content as a product. You have to be willing to step outside of your comfort zone. Online content needs to be transparent and straightforward, or your readers will see through it, and you, and find someone new to follow.
Do yourself a favor and check out that post. It’s not only going to help you be a better writer, but it will make you a better marketer of your writing.
It’s no secret that my favorite site to write for is Suite101.com. It’s through that site that I learned how to write for the web, and it’s also through that site that I have been able to “meet” and network with some of the best writers on the web. One such writer is Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen.
I’ve never met Laurie, but I do read her blogs. When I first started writing for Suite, I’d shyly troll the helpful forums looking for unsolicited advice and words of wisdom. Laurie’s voice was always there, providing insight, even when she didn’t know it. Like other veterans, Pawlik-Kienlen was quick to remind us newbies that it didn’t happen overnight, but over time, we’d all become smarter, stronger and better writers.
And on what does she have to go? Well, she’s not only a prolific web writer with hundreds of articles and a handful of websites, she teaches a course on how to make money blogging at Simon Fraser University. Further, she has been a contributor for magazines such as Reader’s Digest, Woman’s Day, MSN Health and others. She’s got the chops to back it up.
What I like most about visiting the blog at The Adventurous Writer (just one of Pawlik-Kienlen’s blogs) is the inspiration that comes from it. She embodies a can-do spirit that comes not from the viewpoint of someone who wants to make money, but from someone who has been there, done that, learned the hard way and wants to teach you how to do it, too. To me, there’s a huge difference. Her famous “quips and tips” are genuinely helpful.
Unlike some “gurus” who use thinly veiled marketing attempts to “prove” themselves as a guru, Pawlik-Kienlen just shares what she knows. And lucky for all of us, she’s shared it in a new eBook, “73 Ways to Fire Up (or Just Fire) the Muse.” That link isn’t an affiliate link; I am not making a dime on this promotion. I just know that it’s a valuable book riddled with ways to make you (and me, and everyone else) a better writer, and a better blogger.
So head on over to The Adventurous Writer and see for yourself. Once you do, you’ll see the difference valuable advice can make. I am pleased to say that Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen has been an inspiration to me since I started writing online. And now she can be yours, too.
Read a review of “73 Ways to Fire Up (or Just Fire) the Muse” by Suite101 Featured Writer Alex Sharp.
It has been some time (embarrassingly so, I admit) since I’ve updated this blog. But I haven’t abandoned my online marketing, writing, or niche blogs business. In fact, quite to the contrary. And all of the crazy goings-on in my life have inspired this post: What writing online for cash can do for you.
When I started writing online for money, people thought I was nuts. They immediately assumed I was being duped. That somehow it couldn’t happen. And that not only was it a scam, but I wasn’t a “real author.” But I’m almost in my third year of making money online and I want to share my personal success and how I got there. If nothing else, my story is proof positive that patience and persistence pay off, and often pay better than print work.
In short, my story goes like this:
I started writing for one site (Suite101.com) and loved it. I learned a lot from the community and made payout the first month, with scarcely five articles online. Even more notable, I did so with almost ZERO knowledge about SEO and how it can work to my advantage. I was as green as they get. So I took my time and started using Suite’s learning modules, community, and I got better.
About six or so months into Suite, I branched out and began writing for more sites. Then, after about a year or so, I started really getting into niche blogging and affiliate marketing.
And now? I just became the online marketing manager for a company whose sites rank within the top 500 websites in the WORLD. And how did I get here? By taking what I’ve learned from writing for cash and making a go with it. I became my own boss and started to be passionate about how online content can make money.
I helped small businesses build their web traffic, just by editing the verbiage on their websites to maximize use of SEO. I helped larger companies and universities leverage social media, just based on what I had learned in marketing my content. And now, I am sitting in a downtown Chicago office, headlining our social media strategy and figuring out new ways to leverage our business.
I could not have gotten here without learning to write for cash online. Like many businesses, I had to work hard to get here. I still work hard. But that hard work has not only provided me with a steady income, but in great opportunities like my new job. My background is in theater, for crying out loud! I don’t have a marketing degree, and until I started writing online, I had never worked in a marketing capacity in my life. But I loved it, and I ran with it. I grabbed all the information I could and I worked my bottom off to put that information to work for me. And it has paid off. Big time.
Not only that, but all of these experiences have allowed my husband to go back to school full-time, and let us begin the transition to our new phase of life. Because I work in an entirely online medium, and because I’ve spent the last few years building up various, revolving residual and passive income streams, I can work from anywhere. So we’ve decided to sell our home, renovate an old Airstream and travel full-time. I’ll continue to work a little online, to keep the revenue coming, but we can finally travel all around the U.S. with nothing stopping us. Income will still be more than enough to live on in this new life, and we’ll have the freedom we’ve always wanted.
That may not be the dream for everyone, but for us, it’s our ideal lifestyle. We both love the outdoors, living off the grid, hiking and traveling. And the hard work I’ve done for the last few years will allow us the comfort and the flexibility to do so. I started off earning just enough money for a “date night” with my partner. And now? It not only pays my bills, but builds my retirement account, too.
So, in hearing my story, and how my patience and perseverance has paid off, how are you going to reach your goals? How does writing for cash help you? And how hard are you willing to work to make that happen?
Back in late November, I wrote a review of Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. As I mentioned in the review, I consider myself to be an above-average skilled blogger (hey, I actually make a living at this) but I still learned a fair amount.
Anyway, I wanted to let all of my readers know that if you didn’t pick up the book before, now is the time to do it. Though it expires in less than two days, you can now get three bonus buys when you purchase a copy of 31DBBB.
In addition to a healthy-sized eBook you get:
- a report, “9 Things to Do to Get Your Blog On Track in the New Year, which effectively gives you ten more days worth of building up your blog;
- a 55-minute podcast from Leo Babauta from Zen Habits (one of the biggest self-help blogs online), including a wealth of information he uses to keep his blog successful;
- a 42-minute podcast with Neil Patel, who has successfully built his own for-profit blogs, but also consults with companies like AOL, HP and General Motors about social media and traffic.
The entire package is only $19.99. While the book itself is worth the price, hearing different approaches and inspiration is worth that tenfold. Being successful online is often about hearing what others have done and creating your own plan. This book, and the podcasts, significantly help you do just that.
Earlier, I wrote an entry about another site that pays you to write, Constant Content. Though I have been a member for a long time, I had never really taken the time to get to know the site, or how it works. But that changed, and so far I’ve submitted a handful of articles.
I started off slowly, only submitting three articles. Two were for a specific content request and one was a general piece available to anyone. Wouldn’t you know, after only one full day online, two of my pieces sold. And let me say, it took me a lot less work than Demand Studios and I got a lot more of the cash! Each one sold for $35 outright, with the user purchasing them for full rights.
I can wholeheartedly endorse the process, now that I’ve been through it a few times. So, if you’re an article writer who likes to earn what you are worth, set your own prices, and decide what you’d like to write about, this site is for you.
Constant Contact’s reputation as being a stickler for grammar, spelling, and style holds true. I made a couple of minor errors (that I should have caught, but didn’t) and two of my pieces were rejected at first. But I fixed them and resubmitted them without issue. I consider myself to be above-average in the grammar department (I rank about a 4.6 at Demand) so I don’t find this being a problem. But people who aren’t comfortable with their grammar may find CC to be a challenge.
That said, I’ve seen plenty of encouraging posts from people in the forums who learned a lot about how to be better writers and proofreaders. I would recommend this site to anyone, especially those looking to make real income from their online writing.
Last April, I wrote about talking about how, with affiliate marketing, timing is everything. And it is. This week, I was able to cash in on another piece of timely content that earned incredibly for me back in October, and then again this week.
One of the ways I find interesting content that will likely do well online is by scanning various media sources. And, without entirely giving away my secret, I’ll say that back in October, there was a celebrity on television endorsing a product. And I knew that this endorsement would be huge. I just happened to see it air at about 7:30 EST, so I quickly did my research and got my piece online.
Once it was written, I entered it into my Google bookmarks, ran it through some social media channels, and published it to my Facebook account. Then, I went to the television show’s forum (I was already a member, so it didn’t appear to be only for spamming) and posted the link there. The page views did not skyrocket immediately. I knew this particular show wouldn’t air in most of the country until later in the day. But sure enough, slowly, the views came.
By the end of the day that October, my one little article had over 10,000 page views. The next day, since there was still hype, it had about 4,000, and since then, the article has continued to get about 4,000 page views per week. It was written in an evergreen fashion, but it was “news” because of the endorsement. My earnings at that sight for that particular boost in action increased almost 500% over their typical earnings. Let’s just say it was significant, and certainly one of the best days I have had as far as revenue sharing is concerned.
Then, a funny thing happened this week. The episode re-aired. And boy did the hits come! While it didn’t perform quite as well as last time, only 7,300 hits the first day and 1,400 the second, it still did well enough that my earnings got a huge boost.
I share this story to talk about how paying attention can pay off. One endorsement is all it takes, and I made well into the hundreds of dollars already on just that one article. So even if it never got a page view again, it was well worth the time I took to pen 500 words about it.
Look for inspiration where you can find it, and try to be one of the first to write about a topic, specially if you can provide a different angle. Doing so pays off. This is not the first time I’ve had this luck, and it won’t be the last, but it was a great way to start out the new year.
What sort of things have helped you boost earnings?
One of the sites I signed up with a long time ago, but have only recently started to really work with is Constant Content. Unlike some of the other sites that pay you to write, which base their pay on revenue sharing and referring other writers, Constant Content is a platform for people to buy your articles outright.
To start, you upload your content to the site, and wait for the editor to review it. Be forewarned, however, that the editor isn’t going to make changes, but rather will accept or decline the article. You want to make sure that your content is truly proofed and ready for sale. Once your content goes live (they also allow you to sell illustrations and photos), it’s available for a customer to purchase.
One of the nice things about Constant Content is that they allow people to purchase the content at several different levels: usage rights, unique rights, and full rights. The three levels allow your customers to buy the content with how they will use it in mind.
“Usage rights” allows you to earn multiple times, because it can be downloaded more than once by many different people, and typically have the lowest price point. The buyer is not allowed to change any of the content. But, once something has been purchased with usage rights, it’s no longer available for sale under the other licenses. “Unique rights” allows the buyer to be the only one who buys the content, and all they can change is the formatting and creating links within the content. “Full rights” will allow the buyer to be the sole purchaser of the content, but they can do anything they want with it, such as changing a few words, adding links, reworking the piece entirely, what have you.
So beyond this, you can choose how you would like to sell your work. If you only want to offer an article for multiple downloads, that’s fine. But here’s the catch: they get a cut. And Constant Content has to make money, right? They take 35% of the sale price.
35% sounds like a lot at first. But when you consider the platform and what you are earning outright, it’s actually quite a good deal. To make it easier, check out the different ways to rewrite your articles so that you can easily get a lot of unique, quality highly-keyworded content on Constant Content right away.
One of the ways I make a handsome chunk of change is by writing niche blogs. Niche blogs are blog-style websites that provide valuable information along with product resources. In the most basic of terms, they are websites that are built around a niche, making a profit by offering advertising for that niche, and some affiliate marketing products.
Niche blogging is nothing new. There are many people who are aware of the income potential of niche blogging, but don’t quite understand how to get started. By the same token, many people think they know how to get started, but fail when they can’t find a niche, or can’t identify the factors that make a niche successful.
For these reasons, I am launching a series of learning modules. The first one is Identifying a Profitable Niche. This 20-page module is designed to introduce beginners to niche blogging, and show them how to find a profitable niche. I’ve put together an easy-to-read guide that teaches the steps it takes to find a niche, and make sure it is full of profit potential.
One of the reasons I created a shorter, more specific guide is because many people learn in different stages, and end up buying products that only have five or six pages of reading material that actually speak to where they are at in the learning game.
Identifying a Profitable Niche is a guide to help anyone of any experience level find a niche that can be profitable online. It walks you through identifying the strong keywords, how to assess the competition, and find the niche that is right for your blog.
Not interested in niche blogging? This method can also help you identify profitable keywords to target for affiliate marketing, article writing, and content development. It’s only 20 pages, but it’s highly targeted and includes screenshots to walk you through the whole process.
While this normally retails for $15.00 per purchase, I am offering 20 readers of this blog a shot to get the whole thing for just $7.50 – 50% off the retail price! The first 20 readers to buy the Identifying a Profitable Niche Module using discount code NEWYEAR will get half off the retail price! But hurry, because this offer expires at at 11:59 on January 1!
While it is typical that the more you write, the more you earn, it is possible to write too much. The inspiration for this post came from my perusal of a variety of “writing online” community forums. It seems like every day, there are several posts made by people looking for new sites that pay you to write online.
It is important to diversify the sites for which you write. After all, the last thing you need is for one site, housing hundreds of pieces of your work, to go out of business, taking all of your hard earned cash with it. But you can also write for too many sites.
One of the things I’ve learned from reading and participating in these online forums is that the people who are always clamoring to find new sites for which to write, are the people who always complain about how little they make or how hard it is to make a living online.
By that same token, the people who ARE making the most money writing online, or at least doing well, are those that concentrate on three or for high-profile, legitimate sites, and dedicate themselves to producing a lot of content there. It’s sort of like the quantity vs. quality debate. Is it better to write a few articles for a lot of sites? Or a lot of articles for a few sites?
My vote is for a lot of articles at a few sites. By doing this, my income stream has steadily increased every single month. I’ve never had a month where my earnings have declined, even when I’ve taken an entire month away from writing. My strategy is to stick with three high-profile sites (Suite101.com, Examiner.com, and eHow.com) and keep the money there.
I still supplement my income with occasional work at Demand Studios, which pays a flat rate, and I still promote my niche blogs elsewhere. But I keep my money-making content where it will earn, and where I know I will get paid.
After you’ve been writing for money online for awhile, it’s easy to slow down, get a little complacent, and feel a little stale. It’s a repetitive business in many aspects, and mentally, it can take a lot out of you. Sometimes, all you need to get going again is to find a motivator.
For me, that motivator is money. I love checking my stats every day. I have a handy little spreadsheet that tracks my earnings for me, and filling in its cells is exciting. I have a sheet for every month of the year and within it, a row for each day. I have a column for each site, and every day I can see the total from the day before. It also keeps a running total the month, but also for the year.
Because I watch my numbers every single day, it is important for me to see growth. Sometimes that growth doesn’t come quickly enough for me, or it drops off in the summer, which is annoying. During those times, I know I need to keep producing, so I offer myself a challenge.
My favorite way to see a boost in earnings is my own “10 in 10 Challenge.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ask a lot of people in the online writing business which affiliate programs they use, and you’ll hear a lot of them say “Clickbank.” It’s recommended in a lot of the online courses in affiliate marketing, and I used to promote a few products in the Clickbank line. But now? I don’t even touch it.
My philosophy about affiliate marketing is to always promote something of value. And while there are some valuable programs available through Clickbank, the vast majority of them look scammy, have little to offer, and are not reliable enough for me to attach my name to them. The last thing anyone who writes for cash online needs is to be “that person” who gets someone into a bad product or experience.
Beyond the questionable reputation of many Clickbank products, it’s just a time consuming interface to use. It’s clumsy, not very defined, and not the most intuitive program (i.e., Gravity? what?). In the time it takes for someone to search and hunt down a reputable, decent program on Clickbank, I can churn out at least two articles with nice keyword placement.
One of the most important things you can do with your online writing is to use your time wisely. That’s why I no longer use or promote Clickbank. I can find reputable, solid programs elsewhere that save me time and earn me money.
Anyone entering the world of online writing for the first time is bound to have questions about keywords. I cover keyword research extensively in my book, and on this site, but I’ve never really gone into where keywords should be placed in an article or other online content.
As a writer, I know that every site has their own style guide with their own rules and preferences. But effective use of keywords is something that you can use across any site, even within the confines of those preferences. Additionally, many successful writers have different opinions on what does and does not constitute the best place for keywords.
Some writers aim for a certain percentage of keywords in the total content of the article, while others simply try to use keywords wherever they seem to fit naturally throughout the body of the piece. My personal strategy, that I feel works well, is to combine the two and use a hybrid method.
In my popular posts about sites that pay you to write, I gave a nod to Squidoo. At that time, I was fairly new to making “lenses.” Lenses are the pages that you create at Squidoo, instead of articles or blog posts. I created a few lenses, and then I just forgot about them. Until last month.
Toward the start of November, I got an email from PayPal notifying me that I had earned a considerable (double digits, not quite triple) sum of cash from Squidoo. Curious, I visited my Squidoo lenses and found out that one of my lenses had been featured as the lens of the day. I had upward of 50 comments to approve, and my lens had actually ranked in the TOP TEN lenses for the site for some time. I was, frankly, shocked.
My lens hadn’t taken me long to produce, and it certainly wasn’t as fancy as some of the major lenses out there. But it was fun. I just didn’t earn a lot from it at the time. The only reason I created that lens was to be able to drive some traffic from my lens (at a site that has a high rank with Google) to my baking blog (which currently has a page rank of 3, not bad for less than a year in age!). It seems to have worked.
Looking at the analytics of my baking blog more closely, I started to see that Squidoo was bringing in some traffic. It wasn’t my top five, which is why it didn’t pop up on my radar earlier, but it was bringing in about 100-200 visitors per week. That sounds like a small number, but if those visitors are subscribing to my feed, or clicking on ads, I’ll take them, no matter how paltry the size of the group. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the easiest ways to monetize a blog is by using Google Adsense. One of the most popular blog monetization tools available, I recommend that many sites use it as a way to generate revenue. That said, there is another way you can utilize Adsense as a tool for your blog. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve said this before, but I think that it is worth repeating: earning money online is not easy. It takes time, effort, and sometimes sacrifice. I can think of many times I would have rather been gardening or hiking, or even getting household chores done, but my writing had to come first.
One of the easiest ways to make sure that you can be successful as an online writer or niche blogger is to make a writing schedule. Set aside a certain number of hours each week and commit. For me, scheduling writing time is something that is really difficult. I can’t set a schedule of 1 hour per day, from 3:15 – 4:15 because life is unpredictable.
But what I can do is decide how many articles I will write or how many hours each week I will spend creating content. This more relaxed approach allows the pressure that leads to writer’s block to cease and to keep me from feeling burned out. Knowing that I can opt-in to things I need to do keeps me exciting about returning to the keyboard to write.
Here is my writing plan:
- Write 10 articles per week at various sites
- Put in five hours per week of blog maintenance and affiliate maintenance
That’s it. I know that once I have met my goals, my income is still on the upward trend and I am adding to my residual income. Read the rest of this entry »
If you have not already secured your copy of The Complete Article Writing Package, now is your chance to do so before the year is out, and save big! Right now, instead of paying $47 for the book, you can order your copy for just $15 when you use discount code “HOLIDAY” at checkout!
The price of the book goes back up after the holiday season so don’t wait!
31 Days to Build a Better Blog
Even though I consider myself to be a fairly seasoned blogger, I still like to learn from others. I am an avid reader of Problogger, which is a great blog for anyone aspiring to write for cash full time. It’s through this blog that I learned about 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ($19.99) by Darren Rowse.
Rowse is the creator of ProBlogger, so this e-book isn’t something that was just purchased as a cheap PLR product and rehashed for sale. It’s the real deal, and full of information, no matter how good you are at niche blogging or promoting content.
Like many popular coaching e-products, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (31DBBB) breaks down the lessons into reasonable daily assignments. I was really impressed by how thorough the explanations were, as well. Instead of just saying “today do this with your blog,” Rowse explains the “why” behind the action. Instead of just doing the action and learning that it needs to be done, Rowse teaches you why an action is beneficial and what you gain from it. You sometimes also learn about what you will lose by NOT doing it, something I consider to be equally as important.
As a seasoned niche blogger and article writer, I can appreciate all of the positives of the book. After all, it is thorough, it has a great, active community forum for discussing the lessons, and it is actually an affordable price of $19.99. It’s 94 pages of a month’s worth of lessons that can be done at your own pace. But there are a couple of drawbacks. Read the rest of this entry »
As I go forward with this site, I am going to start increasing the amount of information I present about niche blogs. Niche blogging is a rapidly growing segment of online income earning, one with which I have been quite successful myself. But having a great niche blog doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t being indexed by search engines.
One of the easiest ways to get your niche blog indexed by Google (and other engines, but let’s face it, Google is king), is to use blog bookmarking sites.
While there are many social bookmarking sites that get their fair share of Google love, there are only a select few blogging community sites that get the same love. Submitting your niche blogs through them gets them indexed by Google fast. Sometimes as early as just a few hours later.
It isn’t just enough, however, to type in your URL and leave it at that. Make sure that when you are submitting your niche sites that you pay attention to using the right tags and keywords in your submission. Have a description of your blog ready, with a sprinkling of keywords in it, before you submit your blog to the blogging communities.
The short list of blog sites that you should submit your niche blog URL to is listed below. All of them have a free service available, and there is no need to upgrade to the paid versions to get indexed.
- MyBlogLog (if you choose just one, this is it!)
- BlogCatalog
- Blogged
- NetworkedBlogs
Getting a Google Adsense account isn’t always easy, but it can be. It used to be that Google required you to have your own domain, and great content, and then you could apply. While having those things is a good idea, it isn’t the only way to get started.
If you’re looking to get a site up and running with Google Adsense, the fastest way to go about it is by getting a free blog account at Blogger. Blogger is owned by Google, which makes getting an Adsense account a lot easier. They even have it as part of their sign-up process. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been slightly more than four months since I have updated this blog. And while that is far too long, personal circumstances have had me away from a lot of my online writing. Fortunately, it was nothing so serious that it hasn’t passed and now I am back with a vengeance.
I the last four months, I have written less than 25 pieces total. That includes all the sites for which I write. I took a hardcore serious break. But I still made money. That’s the power of residual income. Even when life happens, you still earn.
Unlike traditional freelance writing, writing online for residual income pays you long after the work has been completed and turned in. And to be perfectly honest, if I had gone through the last four months without my residual income coming in, our bank account and bills would have been in serious jeopardy.
Instead, my content kept earning. People still read my articles, and they still bought with my affiliate links.
While this post doesn’t explain much beyond my absence, it does speak to how important it is to build up a bank of content on the web. It’s crucial for instances like mine. Kind of like a “short-term disability” program for online writers. When something happens, you still get paid.
For some people, one of the hardest parts of writing online is promoting their own material. But with millions of other websites writing about the same things, promoting material is essential for success.
Social bookmarking is one of the easiest ways to promote your content. It’s free, it’s fast, it increases page views and expands your network. It also provides you with backlinks to your blog or content, strengthening your credibility and improving your ranks among the search engines.
But many writers shy away from using social bookmarking, and I think that’s a big mistake. Social bookmarking isn’t generic. It’s highly targeted and specific, which means that the traffic and the audience that comes to your site is also highly targeted and specific.
Instead of just a few close friends with the same taste being exposed to your content, social bookmarking allows for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people to see your content. Then they share it with their friends who then share it with their friends. Before you know it, your content is being passed along the web to many other people with similar tastes and interests.
Social bookmarking not only benefits your content, but it connects you to a myriad of other ideas. I’ve found many inspirations for new pieces of content just by surfing the content my online network has posted. With that, social bookmarking shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s a crucial component of any online content writer’s toolbox.
When people search for content online, they often want to find “how to” do something. That’s exactly why “how to” sites, like eHow and wikiHow, are so popular with the search engines.
Here’s an example:
The term “kite flying” is searched approximately 40,500 times per month, and when entered into Google, there are 1, 900,000 sites that can offer me information about kite flying.
However, if I search “how to fly a kite,” a search that is only performed 4,400 times per month, I get 1, 230,000 results. While almost 700,000 les results might now seem like much, it means that there are 700,000 less sites to compete with when it comes to that search term.
One of the trends I have noticed in my own writing is that “how to” articles do well with readers. They are looking for information, and the ads that the keywords in the article bring up are amost always enticing to readers. They offer more information than the content, and as such, can be great earners.
Another trick with using “how to” in an article is to eliminate the “to.” Many searchers think along the lines of keywords only, and they eliminate the extra words. “How fly kite,” and “how kite fly,” for instance, both garner about 30,000 searches each per month with under 1,000,000 search results to compete against.
Writing “how to” content is an easy way to get pertinent ads next to your content. Many companies bid on “how to” terms because they know they are actively searched for and likely to get them page views.
People get into making money online for a variety of reasons. Maybe they’ve always wanted to have a job that allowed them to work from home. Maybe the tight economy has them searching for ways to make a few extra dollars each month. Regardless, the number of people seeking to make money online has grown by leaps and bounds.
As with any job, however, not everyone who sets out to make money online will be successful. Depending on one’s definition, success can be a vareity of things. But I think most people who want to start making money online do it so that ultimately, it’s all they need to do to stay afloat.
In this post, I want to talk about ways that people can fail while trying to make money (specifically, a living) online. When it comes down to it, there are four major reasons that act as a roadblock to success:
Making Money Online Mistake #1 – Failing to Plan
Building online income is much like building a house. You need a solid foundation and you need a plan in place. And you need to know that it won’t be built overnight. You wouldn’t dream about buying a bunch of wood and nails and hoping your house worked out, so why would you do the same thing with making money online? Having a plan in place is an important first step when seeking to make a living through only online income. When I set out to make my income online, I made a plan on paper and taped it to the wall above my computer. I still make changes as I see fit, but I know exactly where I started and exactly where I am going.
I make daily, weekly, monthly and yearly goals. Daily, I try to write three pieces of content. Weekly and monthly, I try to earn a set dollar amount that will help me get to my yearly financial goal. If I want a day off, I write six pieces of content before the day off, so I don’t fall behind. Plan, plan, plan your way to success.
Making Money Online Mistake #2 – Lacking Focus
People get caught up in trying to find the best and easiest way to make money online. They don’t investigate and they don’t focus. One month they’ll write a bunch of content, and the next they’re looking for something new. I spent almost eight months just writing content and learning the ropes of internet content before branching out. It helped me build a solid foundation (see above!) and make realistic goals. Focus on one goal and area at a time. Get good at it, and move forward.
When writing content for the web, it’s easy to get caught up in all things SEO. We do keyword research, we look for expensive keywords, and we spend time researching content to make sure our time produces earnings. But more and more, search engines are turning to a technique called Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI to rank webe content. It’s one technique you don’t want to overlook.
With SEO, we try to use a specific keyword or phrase enough so that it makes up about 2-4% of the words in our articles (give or take, the jury seems to always disagree on what is best). Doing so helps the search engines find our content, understand that what it is about, and rank it accordingly.
But consumers are smart, and so are search engines. They don’t want content that is just written for ranking in search. They want content that is informational and actually useful. This is where LSI comes into play. Instead of just looking for the main keyword or keyword phrase, search engines are now looking for terms that seem to be related to the keyword phrase.
For example, if you are writing an article about wedding attire, and your keyword phrase is “bridal accessories,” the search engine is going to look for things that go along with “bridal accessories” to judge just how thorough and valuable the content is. So in our example, words like “veil,” “garter,” and “bridal bouquet” would be pulled out and boost the ranking of the article.
LSI is important because search engines are always evolving. People are always trying to get more from the web content. And to be realistic, as the amount of content on the web grows, the quality must also grow in order to stay competitive. Only the best content will end up near the top, and that requires paying constant attention to new search engine techniques, such as LSI.
Some of you have asked me to check out your personal blogs or niche blogs for ways to improve your site for SEO effectivenes. In doing so, I’ve come across one SEO mistake that I’d like to share with everyone. The dreaded “Click here” mistake.
When you blog or post an article, the text that you turn into a link is called “anchor text.” As a writer, you should always make it your goal to call out that anchor text with much more than a “click here” or a “read more.”
When search engine spiders crawl websites, they’re taking a look at the links you have on your site, and they’re examining anchor text for relevance. As a result,anchor text that reads “click here” tells the spider nothing. However, anchor text such as “common causes of insomnia” will provide a keyword-rich piece of anchor text that truly demonstrates your topic.
As a reader, I am more likely to click on a link that tells me exactly what I will learn in doing so. When I click “common causes of insomnia,” I know exactly what information I will read next.
Do your site, your content, and your readers a favor and start linking with strong anchor text. You’ll be surprised at how much this alone will help your search engine rankings, and you will be one step up on your site’s competitors.
