Some Knowledge

There are many markets and venues for articles you might write.  In the old days, before the Internet, the few places to publish articles were newspapers and magazines.  You would contract work from an editor and produce an article on a given topic, and then you would get a check.  Things work a little differently today.

There is a much larger market for articles in the online world.  The billions of websites all are looking for content.  The hundreds of millions of blogs all post and generate content of various kinds of writing.  Then there are ezine distribution sites and all the commercial sites that all publish a lot of articles.  If you look for article marketing in any web search you will find an endless stream of data.  It seems everybody is looking for interesting, original content to publish on the web.

How does a person get paid for writing articles on the web?  It all boils down to the same strategy of selling something.  Money enters the equation when there is some product that you charge money for.  You might only use the article as bait to draw a customer’s attention to some product.  You might offer to sell a person an ebook you have created after they look at your original article.  There are many angles to the economic aspect of writing articles.

One website I saw today sells link-building articles.  They charge a lot of money to write an article that has something to do with your website, then promote and post that article to many online article directories.  A 750 word article might cost $700 from this agency.  If I could get $700 for every article I have on this blog I could take a year off and go on vacation somewhere expensive.

The idea behind writing articles for money is to write good articles that attract attention to your income-producing website.  If you want to look at writing as a job, you can always try to sell articles to websites and magazines for some cash.  There are many freelancing sites online that list writing jobs.  The problem with these is that they often advertise work that does not pay well.  I have seen people advertising a job writing an entire book for some publisher that pays as little as $100 for an entire book.  Some of the advertisements do not even list a price, but tell the writers to bid on projects.  This is just not profitable.

One place you can get paid for writing is Helium.com.  They give a small percentage of their profits from ppc advertising on their site after you post an article.  You can also bid on jobs for magazines and other article buyers that are listed in the marketplace.  The problem with Helium is that it pays very little money.  It is a good place to get some practice writing, though, and you can get feedback on your articles from other writers.

Writing is an enjoyable thing to do.  You can learn a lot about the world just by trying to write articles about various things.  It is good practice in the use of language for communication.  You might have to look into various business schemes if you are going to try to make money with writing.  There are many opportunities to cash in on creating content these days, and you are no longer limited by the restrictions of working for a paper publication.  Use the tools of the web to find your own way in the business of writing, and you will be able to enjoy your work and make some money.