writing

If you are looking for freelance writing work online, you may have come across sites such as Helium, Suite101, Bukisa, eHow and Associated Content.  These are all sites that pay you each month for either the amount of times your articles have been viewed or the amount of advertiser money that your articles have generated.

When you write for these sites, you do not get up front payments, however, if you know a few things about SEO and online writing, you will likely make more money per article than you would writing for up front pay for a site such as Demand Studios.

The big question is, how do you maximize your earnings on these articles and make sure that each and every article you write will be making you passive income for years to come?  There are a few things you need to do to insure the success of every article that you put online.

1. Write Evergreen -  Articles that are related to news items are fine, as long as there will be as much intrest in them next year as there is today. Make sure that every article you write will be relevent several years down the road.

2. Careful Keyword Selection -  If you know anything about SEO (search engine optimization), you already know that you need to search for the right keywords to include in your article and title.  You can get a general idea of the topic you want to write about and then search for it in the google adwords tool to find keywords that have high search volumes.  If no one is searching for the keywords in your article, then no one will find it and you won’t make any money.

If you do this correctly and you are writing for sites such as eHow and Suite 101, who have excellent page ranks, your article can easily rank on the first page of google for your keyword!

3. Use Social Bookmarking – Each and every time you write an article, you should be submitting it to digg, reddit, stumbleupon, redgage and any other social site that you can think of. This gives you backlinks to your articles and exposure.  You can also publish a link to them on your facebook page!

4. Streamline the Process – Madonna was right – get into the groove.  Once you find your pace and can streamline that process of keyword selection and SEO, you can write more articles that will make more money in less time.  One way that I do this is to use the Micro Niche Finder tool.

A lot of people use this for finding blog keywords, but it works just as well for finding keywords for articles.  You just enter in your general topic and a list of keywords is generated along with the ad cost per click for each keyword,  and the number of searches it has per month.  You can also get a SOC (strength of competition) number – the lower the better. If the SOC is is green, you know that you have an keyword term that you can rank highly for.  When I find a keyword that I like, I usually search it in google and check out the page rank of the first 5 results.  If they are all page rank 3 or lower, I know that my article can rank on the first page.

Check out the video below to see how Micro Niche Finder works and start making your freelance writing work for you!

Two things happened this week which dramatically affected the amount of work that I put out.

1. Our kitchen flooded.  We woke up at 3am to the sound of rushing water coming from a pipe under our sink. There was standing water on the floor.  On our new floor. That beautiful new laminate floor that the amazing Scott put in with his own two hands. FUCK! What a mess. (if you know anything about laminate floor, you know what this means) This decreased my work output and made me sad.

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So here’s my frist update in my journey towards saving up $1500 and quitting my day job.  Here’s what I’ve been up to.

1. I have figured out my schedule.  Since my days off from my  job are on Sunday and Monday, I will be writing Sunday through Thrusdays only.  This takes the pressure off of Friday and Saturdays which are both my busiest days at work, as well as at home. 

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I realize that it’s been a while since I updated here, but when a reader left a comment asking if I had died, I knew it was time to crank things up again.

Here are a few good reasons why I have neglected my poor readers:

1. I got married.

2. We bought a double wide mobile home.

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Before I leave for Bonnaroo tomorrow, I wanted to let you guys in on a little secret that I use to get more traffic to my sites and articles. It’s more than a secret tip, it’s actually a process that’s been working quite well for me lately.  It has helped me quite a bit with my Squidoo lenses and online articles.

The first thing I do is decide on the topic I want to write about.  Then I go to PLR Article Directory and find a PLR article that is about the same topic.  I copy it into a blank document and then I rewrite it sentence by sentence.

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Ego. That is the plain and simple answer to the question, “How did you lose 2 grand?”

I write for a couple of companies online.  One of them began laying people off a couple of months ago.  I just kept waiting for that dreaded pink email, but it never came.

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Lifetips.com provides readers tips on subjects such as dating, auto repair, SEO, travel and internet marketing.  And, well, really anything you can think of.  A few weeks ago, I was approved to be the guru for their dating channel.  At first, it seemed that I could submit up to 20 tips/blog entries per month and be paid $10 each for them.  Now, it seems that I will be getting residual income from page views beginning in the new year. Continue Reading ->

I’ve been crazy busy with a few new projects lately!  I decided a couple of weeks ago that I would give writing an eBook a try.  I’m excited to say that last night I finished it and and it is now for sale!

After doing a little bit (seriously, not a lot) of research on how and where to publish an eBook, I decided to use Lulu.com.  It seemed like the easiest way to start as a beginner.

The process went something like this:

I wrote the book in Microsoft Word and then uploaded it to Lulu.  Lulu then transferred it into a pdf file that would be downloadable and readable.  I was directed to a page to set my price, design my cover and fill in a description of the book.  The whole process was incredibly easy except for one thing.

The topic that I chose for my eBook was Beginning Massage Techniques.  I am a professional massage therapist by day, so I know quite a bit about this topic and had no problem writing a nice little eBook about it.  The book shows you how to give a massage, stress relief tips, and 5 basic massage techniques.  It also includes a full body massage routine that you can perform on friends and family.

The only problem that I had with Lulu, is that during the conversion process to a pdf, I lost all my embedded hyperlinks.  I spoke with someone though Live Help on their site and they told me that at this time, their software does not accept hyperlinks in an eBook.  I then spent some time deleting my project from Lulu, reworking the eBook to actually spell out the links I wanted to include and then uploading again.

If I do this whole process again (and I’m pretty sure that I will), I will probably go through another provider so that I can have embedded links.

Now, here’s where the giveaway comes in.  I am giving away two copies of How to Give a Relaxation Massage to my readers.  All you have to do to enter the contest is leave a comment in this post telling me what other kinds of “how to” eBooks you would like to see written.  Another way to enter is to subscribe to my RSS feed.  Leave me a comment telling me that you did this and you’ll get another entry. You can receive two additional entries by blogging about this contest. Leave a comment telling me that you blogged about it along with a link to your blog.

I will use Random.org to draw for a winner on Saturday, December 20th.  If you’ve ever been interested in giving your partner a great massage, you will love this eBook.

UPDATE: I have also loaded my own info page about the eBook on blogspot. Check it out and let me know what you think.

As soon as Christmas is over, small business owners everywhere  begin the slow descent into hell known as tax season.  For those of you who are freelance writing full time or plan to in the next year (like me) organizing information for your taxes can be terrifying.

Freelance Zone posted an excellent article today that deals with paying taxes as a freelancer.  They suggest that this week you gather all of your income information from this past year and use whichever system you prefer to estimate how much you will owe in taxes.

Here’s where the timing of this comes in.  If you look over your tax information this week, you can see whether or not you need a few more deductions for your business.  There are tons of legal deductions you can take as a freelance writer.  If you notice that you have room for deductions, consider purchasing something that you would need for your business.  You can do it now, while things are on sale at Christmas.  What do you need/want? An iPhone so that you can do your business anywhere? A new laptop? A new computer desk?

Make no mistake, when it comes to taxes, you will be spending money.  Now is the time to decide whether you want to give your money to the IRS or use it to buy something useful for your business.

In the past year or so, I have come across countless opportunities to make money writing on the web.  It’s been a creative and sometimes harrowing journey for me, but it has paid off in ways I would never have imagined.

I like to share freelance writing opportunities with my readers, but was recently asked by a reader in the UK which of these sites she could write for.

I honestly had no idea.  I’ve never even considered that situation. Being from the US, I had never even thought to check out which sites were available to international writers.  Since her question, though, I have done a little research to provide you with a few sites that writers outside the US can use. (and maybe we US residents can learn a thing or two, as well)

1. Daily Article – Writers submit work and set their own prices per article.  The buyer gets full rights to the article.  You are notified whenever one of your articles is sold.
2. Associated Content – Most of us know about this one.  Associated content pays up front for original articles, but the up front prices are pretty low.  The good thing about AC is the opportunity for passive income.  You get monthly bonus checks for page views.
3. Triond - Triond won’t make you rich, but it’s a great place to hone your writing skills and make a little passive income each month.
4. Review Party - Write reviews of books, music or DVDs and get paid by earning money through Google Adsense and the Amazon Affiliate program.  You use your own adsense ID and Amazon Affiliate numbers.
5. Bukisa – I sent an email to the nice folks at Bukisa to find out if they allow international writers because I am really excited about the passive income potential for this site.  They sent a prompt reply saying that anyone can write, regardless of country, as long as they have a PayPal account.  Bukisa lets you post articles and earn money for page views.  You also earn money by having people sign up using your Bukisa link and joining your network.
6. Today.com – You can sign up to have two blogs through Today.com.  They pay $1 per post (one post per blog per day), plus you get money for page views.  For November I got a payout of $50 from Today.com.  Consider this: if you spend 15 minutes or so writing at Today.com each day, and let the money accrue in your PayPal account, you will have enough saved up for a cruise by the end of the year!  You get the choose the topic of your blog, so you get to write about whatever you like.

There are a few other sites that I researched that did not specifically state that they only took US writers.  If you want to give those a shot, here they are:

• Shroong
• Squidoo
• Gzyn
• Xomba
• Life Tips
• Epinions

Hope this helps you guys.  I’d love to hear from some of you who are outside the US…what sites do you like to write for?

Update: Today.com has just announced that they are accepting writers from the following countries:

Australia
Austria
Barbados
Belarusia
Bermuda
Canada
Czeck Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
Faroe Islands
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Greenland
Guernsey and Alderney
Hong Kong, (China)
Iceland
India
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Korea, South
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Malaysia
Monaco
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Portugal
Singapore
Slovenia
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
UK
USA