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!

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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.

2. I watched this video with Tony Robbins, Frank Kern and John Reese. This increased my work output and made me want to do a marathon article writing session.

So, really, I guess it all evens out.

I did write some DS articles, as well as get a new niche blog up and running, which is great. I also wrote one new ehow article and did 2 new Squidoo lenses.

I’m very glad that I made this decision to save up cash and quit my day job, especially this week, when my day job has been nothing but one clusterfuck after another.  Self employment, here I come!

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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. 

I have run the numbers and if I write 2 articles per day (5 days a week) for Demand Studios, I can easily meet my goal by the end of December.  If something happens at Demand, such as not getting my articles approved in time, I can pick up the slack at Bright Hub or Textbroker.

2. I have decided to keep on working on my niche blogging sites and article marketing because they are consitently bringing in affiliate sales and adsense money.  I’m almost at the $100 per month mark with adsense.  I will also be writing for eHow and Suite 101 since they are great residual income that I can add in to the mix. 

3. I will only add income to my ticker when I actually get the money.  Not when I do the work.

4. I have already done 1 article for Demand Studios.

5. I have gone through all 29 of my lenses at Squidoo and made sure that they all have backlinks.

So far, so good.

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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.

3. We have spent the last 3 months completely renovating said mobile home, including new flooring, walls, appliances, paint, furniture, blah, blah, blah.

4. We moved into said mobile home.

5. My son graduated from high school and I have been fighting the debilitating depression that has ensued.

6. I have been concentrating on my niche blogging empire.

Excuses aside, I have missed writing here.  It’s been great learning about building niche blogs and I actually enjoy the research and putting together of them. (plus the extra money that I have made)  What I am not, by any means, enjoying, is my day job.

I have a fairly physical day job and there are fewer and fewer days when I come home without some sort of an ache or pain.  I knew when I chose this career that burnout is extrememly common after 5 years and I have made it to year number 6.  However, I am in a downward spiral and it’s something that I have been thinking a lot about.

Here is my thought:

Can I make a living (what I am making now at my day job) by writing full time from home?

I have decided that the answer is yes.

Is it a scary notion?

YES!

There are several companies online that I am able to work for and get up front payment for articles.  If I can put my ass into gear, I can actually make a living at it.  There are also several places where I write for residual income.  This income has been steadily increasing and I am hoping to eventually make a living strictly from that alone.

That’s the dream.

For now, I will feel much more comfortable quitting my day job if I have a little writing income set aside and I prove to myself that I can work for these companies day in/day out and not pull my hair out or pull the trigger or any other sort of pulling.  I have set a goal to save up $1500 by the end of the year that will go into my savings account just in case one of my gigs goes south or something weird happens.

Because we all know that I am the queen of something weird happening.

I want to quit my day job by the end of the year. I will be reporting here on an almost daily basis to keep account of what I have been doing to make money writing online.  You guys can keep me accountable and I will share my experience with you.  I even made a nifty ticker just for the occasion.

See?

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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.

Next I do some keyword research to decide what the title and targeted keywords will be.  I use the Google Adwords tool for this.

Here’s an example:

Today I decided to write an article for website I contribute to (and make residual income from)  about weddings so that I could use links to point back to my wedding website and wedding squidoo lens.  (I promote a variety of products on these sites, so it’s really about making money on down the road.)

I went to the PLR Directory website and began looking for wedding related articles that I could rewrite.  Also, if you don’t want to do the rewriting yourself, I highly recommend using Human Rewriter.  They have excellent service, the articles come out great and they are cheap! I came across one about wedding gifts that was about 400 words long that looked like it would be easy to rewrite, so I opened a new document and rewrote it in about 10 minutes.

Then I went to the Google Adwords keyword tool and entered in wedding gifts to find a good term for my title and main keyword.  I like to select the “exact search” option so that I can get a realisitic idea of how many searches are actually being made for this term.  I saw a lot of interesting terms, but I was looking for one that had a good number of searches and that I thought I could rank on the first page of google with.

After trying a couple of differnt terms, I decided that I could do well with the keyword “engagement gift ideas”.  It has around 5,400 exact searches per month, but how did I know that I could probably make it to the first page of google with this term?

The answer is that I use a plugin for firefox called SEO for Firefox.  It is free and easy to download and install.  I simply to to “tools” in my browser, and then options and then I turn it on.  Then I begin to search for phrases in google.

The first thing I noticed about “engagement gift ideas” was that it only returned about 9,100 search results when I searched for it in quotes.  This is a very good sign.  Anything under 10,000 is going to be pretty easy to rank for.

Next I turned on my SEO for Firefox tool and checked the page rank for the top ten google results.  What I found was that even though the first two results had page ranks of 5 and 6, the remainder of the ten had page ranks which were very low – 0 to 3.  This lets me know that with a few backlinks and the right web address, I could probably get my article on to the first page.

The more my articles are read, the more traffic will go to my sites and Squidoo lenses.

Then I simply went back to my article and titled it with my keyword, insuring that the keyword would be a part of the web addresss.  Then I made sure that my keyword was used two other times in the article and I published it.

There you go.  My super secret method.

I’ll let you know where the engagement gift article ranks when it goes live and gets ranked.

P.S. I dare you to try to beat me at my own game with this keyword!

P.S.S. I’ll be camping for 6 days with 80,000 other hippies, so don’t get your panties in a wad if I can’t answer your questions or approve your comments right away.

UPDATE: I checked the article this morning (it only went live last night)  and it’s number 7 on page ONE of google!  WoooHoo!!!

UPDATE AGAIN: As of today 7-22-09, the article is at position 2 on page one of google! It works!

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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.

However, after a couple of weeks of hearing of others who had been laid off, I got an email saying that my articles were too broad, not specific enough and that I could now only claim 10 articles at a time.  These would have to be emailed to the head editor for review before they could even be submitted to the site for the regular editorial process.

What?!

I decided that it was not worth my time (cough: dignity) to write for them, so I quit writing for them for three solid months.

I rethought my decision last week when I realized that I have a wedding and my son’s graduation to pay for very shortly.

I then kicked myself in the ass when I realized how much money I could have made if I had continued to write for that site while my dignity was up on a soapbox.

What was I thinking?

I was just admitting to my fiance last night how I often hurt myself by refusing to “play the game”.  This is another classic example.

Live and learn.

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I have only added a couple of tips to the site so far and am spending some time approving comments and getting rid of spam.  I have yet to make a blog entry there.  My question is this: Does anyone else out there write for Lifetips? If so, what has been your experience there? And do you still write for them?  I’m interested in hearing from other writers about this site.  It seems that the site has undergone many changes in the last several years, but I’m actually really excited to see what the new year brings with this gig.

If you are intereseted in giving it a shot, visit the lifetips website and browse through channels that you enjoy writing about.  At the top of each page, the guru for that subject will be listed.  If there is no guru, that means that they are hiring! You can apply right there at the site.

Incidentally, when I got my approval, they encouraged me to apply to write for their sister site, WriterAccess.  I have submitted my application and am waiting to hear back from them.  From what I have read, the rates look really competitive.  Anyone have any experience with them?

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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.

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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.

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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

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