19 February 2009

Make Money Writing Articles

By Julie Jones

Articles are a great way to make money online. If you are new to the internet, or a pro writing articles can be a great source of income.

There are actually several ways that writing articles can make you money. By submitting your articles to article directories, your articles can be used by webmasters who are looking for content to place on their websites.

The articles that you have submitted to article directories may also be read by people who find them while searching online. This could give your writing quite a bit of exposure.

You can use the articles that you write to generate free traffic to your website so that you can generate more sales. You can do this by placing a link to your website in your article or in your author bio.

You could also use your articles to create a website. If you create a website that consists of informative articles on a specific topic you can sell advertising on your website to related businesses. If you decide to create a website using your articles, you could also place Google Adsense ads on your website and get paid each time a visitor clicks on one of your Adsense ads.

You could turn your informative articles into your own ebook and sell them for a profit, or you could even turn your articles into an email course.

Some internet marketers write informative articles on topics related to an affiliate product. They then include a special affiliate link in their articles to the affiliate product that they are promoting. When a reader clicks on the link and purchases the product the author makes a commission.

When you are writing articles to make money, one important point to remember is that you will be much more successful if your articles are informative and give the reader valuable information. It's important to build trust with your reader and actually offer the reader something of value in your article.

If you can give the reader valuable information that is useful to them, then you will be building a trusting relationship with that reader. This way when you recommend a product or website, to your reader, they will be much more likely to follow your advice because you have already given them something of value and you have already initiated a trusting relationship with them.

One other point to remember when writing articles is to keep them short. People are bombarded with information every day. Very few people have the time or the interest in reading lengthy articles. If you can give your reader interesting and valuable information in 500 to 700 words, you will find your articles getting read and getting results.


18 February 2009

How to Choose a Web Designer

Making Money with Articles: How to Choose a Web Designer

There are two important things to remember when looking for a web designer:

First, it is important to go with a freelancer if you are looking for a small and simple site. You can probably get one done for $30 to $50. There are many freelancing companies on the web that you can tap into to find the designer for you.

Second, it is important that you ask to see a few sample sites that the web designer has done and that you check any ratings that may be available for the designer. This may keep you from getting wrapped up in a project with someone who will not finish or cannot do the type of job that they claim they can do.

If you cannot put together your own website to host your articles on and you don’t want to pay the extra $7 to $12 dollars per month that it may cost to get a host that offers a What You See Is What You Get website builder, then your only other option is to hire a web designer. The good thing is that, if you are looking for a very basic 2-5 page site and you hire a freelancer rather than going with a web design company, then it will be relatively easy on your wallet.

17 February 2009

Free Article Content

Making Money with Articles: Free Article Content

Some webmasters try to use articles from free content directories to get visitors to their site and make some money. This is mostly important for those who have just begun working as an affiliate for several companies and do not yet have any funding, yet need to built small niche websites to visitors to their site so that they can begin making revenue.

Although this can sometimes be the only option for those who are running on a non-existent budget, it is not a way that will effectively build your website or revenue. There are a few potential reasons why this may be detrimental to your business building efforts.

Problem #1 - Search Engines

Search engines will only look down upon your site if it has the exact same duplicated content than other sites. The more sites that share your content, the less it will help you achieve good search engine rankings.

Good search engine rankings are essential in getting visitors to your sit so that they have a chance to click on your affiliate links. If you cannot even get visitors, then will never make an revenue. Working on the search engine optimization of your site so that you will eventually be high enough in the results to get customers, should be priority one.

Problem #2 - Getting visitors to click

Although getting your site high on search engine result pages and acquiring site visitors is hard work, unfortunately this is only half of the battle. You must also be able to convince those visitors to click on your affiliate links. If your visitors see the same content they have seen on a multitude of other sites, they will be least likely to click on your links. This is because most people want to buy things that are recommended by people that they trust or whom they feel like are an expert on the subject.

If your content is just duplicated from other sites, you will be exposed as someone who does not really know what they are talking about and therefore will not look heavily on your product recommendations. This will reduce the number of website visitors who will be willing to click through.

Problem #3 - Author Bylines

Most free content is only given to you if you agree to place the authors byline under the article (you can get into trouble if you try to use it without following the stipulated rules). This poses a problem because most author bylines include links. When a reader gets done reading a really intriguing article, there is a strong possibility that they will click on the author’s byline link rather than your affiliate links. This is the entire reason why these authors offer free content to begin with, so that they may get their name and links out there to the public. Using this type of content may mean shooting yourself in the foot and losing possible profitable website visitors.

Once you put these three problems together, you are looking at a serious decline in revenue simply because you used free website content from article directories. Although it may be the only option for some, if you have the funds to buy your own original content, then you should go this route. If you don’t have the finds, however, you may be better off writing your own content and then hiring professional services once you have made a profit to work with.

Freelance Writers

Making Money with Articles: Freelance Writers

If you cannot or do not wish to write your articles yourself, you can search different outsourcing companies to find a freelance writer to help you grow your business and your website. These freelancers will ghost write articles for you which means that you will own all copyrights to the material that is produced to do with what you want. Freelance writers have a talent for writing, however, they would rather make quick money off of writing for others, rather than taking the time to build a niche website that will need to be heavily marketed and promoted to begin earning revenue. They are usually not marketers, but rather people who have a gift for the written word. On the other hand, those who are looking to make money from articles are marketers. They are looking to build websites that will give them long term revenue, rather than one quick payment and that is it. This Internet pool or freelance writers will open up a good opportunity for you to receive the quality, original content that you are looking for to build your niche site.