Best way for writers to earn money online 2016

I write online, as a hobby, have done for the last 2 years. My day job is web application developer. This puts me in a good position to make recommendations, as to the best way for writers to earn money, online.

I will only touch the surface of many important subjects in this article. You should be able to figure the rest out over time.

We will first look at the best place to begin earning online and then we will look at how some people are make big money online.

But first a quick word about scams
This article is about earning money and it is damn hard work. If you want to get ripped off Google “get rich quick”. There are plenty of people that will try to scam you out of your cash.

Don’t quit your day job
It is in the nature of making money online, that you start by making a small amount. Then gradually you make more and more. Eventually you might make enough to quit your job and write online, for a living. But, in the beginning it will be small amounts.

Affiliate sales VS PPC (Pay per Click)
These are 2 of the most common ways that web site make money. The main player in PPC is Google Adsense. They put ads on your site and when someone clicks on one, you get paid.

With affiliate sales you refer someone to a web site. If they buy something on the site you get a commission on the sale.

It's much easier to make money with PPC, but you can make much more with affiliate sales. If you want to learn more, read my article how to monetize your blog.

Revenue sharing sites are the best place to start. These are sites that let you write articles and then share the ad revenue, from your articles, with you.

Reasons why it’s better for beginners, than starting your own site:

• These sites have a large amount of trust from the search engines, which means you articles will rank better here than on a new site. A site gains trust by getting good backlinks and aging for a few years.
• These sites have a lot of internal traffic that some of which will visit your articles.
• The revenue sharing sites have forums where you can ask questions and many articles on how to earn more money and get more readers.

I have researched several revenue sharing sites and Hubpages is currently the best option. The platform is powerful and easy to use, it gives a good return on the time you spend and it has a helpful community.

Here are a few tips for writing on Hubpages:

• Write 100 articles. Don’t write 10 articles and then complain you're not making any money. At around 100, your articles will reach a critical mass and start attracting more readers.
• Don’t write articles of less than 500 words. Articles of 1,500 words do the best.
• On each article put 5 images. You can get free images from photobucket.
• Put 3 movie clips on each article.
• Use 15 tags on each article.
• Put either an Amazon or Ebay module on each article.

There are many revenue sharing sites with different setups. Here are 2 alternatives, which I have found can generate you similar income to Hubpages:

eHow - They only allow "How to" articles and you can only write for them if you are from the USA. Because all their pages are "How to" articles they tend to rank better on the search engines for these types of articles. So if you are going to write a "How to" article, I recommend writing it with them.

Bukisa - Bukisa is very focused on high quality content. They pay per 1,000 visitors to your article and it's currently at around $3.4 per 1,000. Payment is done via Paypal.

It's worth noting that you can republish your articles, on some of these revenue sharing sites. You might consider combining and/or rewriting the content a little, because it will allow the articles do better with the search engines.

There are also a number of free blogs. In my opinion blogger.com is the best one. They are owned by Google and well supported.

The benefits of using a free blog is that you have far more control over the site and you keep all of the profits.

So which is the best alternative?
No single platform is the best to use. What I recommend you do is to use several platforms to write your articles. The benefits of doing this are twofold. Firstly this protects you if something goes wrong with one of the platforms. They might, for instance, temporarily fall out of favor with Google and your earnings would nosedive, for a while. Secondly your articles will rank better on the search engines, if you interlink them, over multiple sites.

Linking your articles well will help you get more search engine traffic and more money.

If you look at figure one, this is a simple and widely used linking strategy. You have many web pages linking to one page. You will frequently see this on blogs, where they have a menu on every page that links to a small number of pages. The idea being to push the small number of pages up the rankings on the search engines.

If you look at figure two. This is a more complicated strategy. But it does the same thing. I have found the linkwheel to be a more successful link building strategy than the one on figure one.

Tips for getting the best ranking results:

• Make sure that all the articles are related. For instance make them all about "insurance".
• Use the keywords, which you want to rank for, in the anchor text.
• Put each of the articles on a different web site. This is not necessary, but it does help.
• Put your hyperlinks in the body of the article.

If you are interested in learning more about getting traffic to your articles read my two articles series on how to increase your search engine traffic.

If you are really going to put time into earning money online. Then you should Consider getting your own web site. Simply install a Wordpress blog and start writing your articles. There are 2 ways you can make money, that isn't available on revenue sharing sites.

1. You can join sites like reviewme.com. They pay you to write reviews for certain sites/products. The amount depends on how popular your blog is. Small sites make $20 per review, but the big blogs get paid around $200 per article. You still make ad money from those articles. So you can make a lot of money by writing 5 quick reviews, each month.
2. A web site that you own has a sale value, like any business. The best measure of how much a site is worth is it's monthly income. Multiply that with around 10 and you get the site's value. Sites get sold for more than $10,000 each day and sometime for much more.
   

I wrote a walkthrough to show you how to create your own blog.