How to Make Money Writing Online

There are all kinds of ways you can make money online, but the most common is through writing and maintaining a successful blog or website. In the past most people will have started a blog for fun or as a hobby and then seen it grow more and more successful to the point where it made sense to monetize it through advertising and other revenue streams. Nowadays however there are many new blogs starting up that seem to be solely aimed at making money. While this is still possible it often means that people are blogging without the passion that they might have if they were hobbyists or doing it purely for fun. The best way to look at writing a blog for money is to write about something that interests you and then see if the blog brings in a couple of bucks here and there that might buy you a cup of coffee while you work. As it takes off further and further you might find that you bring in enough to pay for your hosting and after six months to a year you might begin to see it as a part time job, bringing in fifty or a hundred bucks every month. The most successful blogs can bring in hundreds or even thousands of dollars, but it is best to not think about that for at least a year or two.

So where do you start? Obviously, the first thing to do is to get the subject of your blog sorted. To do this you need to think of an area that interests you and that has the potential to be a profitable niche. Once you’ve done that, then you need to think of a catchy domain name. Let’s say you’re interested in writing about finance. Obviously finance is not a niche market and any blog that you wrote about finance would be buried three hundred pages deep in Google. But let’s say you’ve just applied for a loan to do up an old car, and you’ve experienced some difficulty finding companies who specialize in this kind of car loan. A site about financing the rebuild of classic cars might be an interesting and profitable niche. Throw in the catchiest name you can think of and then you’re up and running.

Next up you need to do a quick bit of research to find out which keywords are the most important in the classic car loan niche. This won’t be important at first, but it’s still best to have some idea of the phrases you will be trying to rank for later. If you can use them when you set up your site both in the meta-description and in the tags then all the better still. There are numerous free tools online to help you research the best and most commonly used keywords for your niche.

The next bit is the most important bit, and the one that depends on your interest in your subject matter. Now you need to write good content, and you need to do it consistently, week in week out. This is where many blogs who hope to make money often fall down. If you’re thinking more about dollars and less about your subject matter then you’ll never achieve much. Instead, concentrate on building a passionate and interesting blog and don’t worry about backlinks, SEO or anything else for a few months. That’s not to say you don’t need keywords here and there, but concentrate on writing a unique site offering good content to people looking for information on that topic and you’ll find that is worth a hundred backlinks or keywords. Later on, once you are planning on monetizing the site you can then look into promoting the site via link building and guest posting, but the best way to build a site that earns money is always to concentrate on the content.

And lastly, once you have a site that is well written, has a constant readership and is ranking fairly well, you can then choose any of a number of ways to bring some money in. The most common methods are:

Adsense – the famous Google owned ad-serving application that lets you generate revenue using pay per click on images, text or videos. Simply enroll your website with Adsense and get going immediately.

Affiliate Sales – Affiliate sales are programs run by businesses and companies that will reward you for customers, traffic and / or conversions that you send towards their site.

Private Ad Sales – An agreement drawn up between your site and another site to advertise their business on a month-by-month basis for a sum agreed between the two of you.

Continuity programs – This is where your site provides a subscription or service that people pay for, thus giving you a recurring income.

Ebooks – Many sites will sell some kind of guide or handbook in PDF format to their customers, normally telling them how to do something.

There are all kinds of other ways of making money but these are the most common and the ones you should start out with as you build your readership.

Alex is a journalist and blogger. He currently works for the contracting sector writing about everything from contractor mortgages to payday loans.