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How writing articles can make Money

Updated on July 28, 2012

The first thing you need to think about when writing an article

When you are setting out to write an article for the purpose of earning money you want to think about the subject matter of the article. You can write a wonderful article that no one reads, if you have no readers you will not be able to earn with that article. I have made that mistake more then once!

The google keyword tool will give you a good idea about what sort of demand there is for your topic. Using the keyword tool will help you to 'get into the mind of' people searching the net. By choosing high traffic keywords you can be assured that there are people out there who want to know more about your topic. 


There is Demand for my article but how does it earn?

So you have a topic for an article that is in high demand. You will need to learn some SEO and traffic generation skills but we will talk about that later. For now I want to make sure you understand how offering free information is going to benefit you.

Lets pretend that you have an article written and published, you are an expert and have done the SEO and traffic generation stuff, traffic is finding your article and reading it. This traffic is not paying you for your information so where does the earning come from?

The answer to this question is pretty simple once you understand it. A visitor comes to your article looking for information, say they want to buy a product but don't know which one to go for. They read your article and feel emboldened to make the purchase. Google does the real work here. They will place the most relevant ads on your article possible so that when the reader is ready to buy the product you helped them understand better they can just click an ad instead of having to go searching for a store that sells the product.

Your visitors read your article and then click an ad, this part is pretty straight forward. There are some more complex things to consider. Depending on where you publish your article you may find that the hosting site takes ad exposure for a certain % of the time. Here on hubpages the ads are yours to earn from 60% of the time. If you have a blog you will get 100% of the ad impressions but may find it harder to get traffic. A hosting site like hubpages ads credibility to your articles in the eyes of google and the payoff of sharing the ad impression seems fair to me.

When you decide where to place your articles online you will want to be sure to read how the hosting site works, how they share any money earned and what they will do for you are important to understand so as to avoid having a bad experience.

Some article hosting sites like hubpages offer the ability to earn through more then one affiliate program. The google ad sense set up is pretty common across the web and is a popular affiliate program. Other affiliate programs include amazon and ebay, these ones work slightly differently tho as you will only earn money if someone actually buys a product, ad sense will pay for clicks alone and stores like amazon pay for customers who buy.

If you really want to earn there is even more to learn!

There is a lot that goes into producing high quality articles that will earn a decent amount of money for the time you put into them. Remember those jargonistic terms I used earlier? SEO for instance? Well its short for search engine optimization. Not sure what that means? Well its just fancy talk for the tips and tricks used to get an article or website or blog in the first few pages of a search engine such as google for your keywords.

You have researched keywords that get traffic so that you can write about something that is in demand? Well guess what? You just used the most basic tip for SEO there is! You can pat yourself on the back, you should be able to get some traffic now! Patted yourself on the back? Good cause its important to savor every success! Now for the bad news, most people do this and you are in competition with them! Do not let this get you down! There are many different things you can do to get an advantage in that competition. Competition also means more earnings because the clicks you get with ad sense are likely to be worth more.

I could share the tips and tricks that I have tried but there are people who can explain it all far better then I. My suggestion is this: if you want to earn real money writing articles online you are going to have to work for it, and its a steep learning curve! Writing quality content is a must and so is researching! Read everything you can find on making money online, keywords, SEO and traffic generation. Hubpages alone has a wealth of free information for anyone willing to look for it!

If you are not already a member and wish to sign up and start writing articles here you can do so by clicking this link and following the sign up/create a profile instructions. If you are already a member and would like to try a few other article publishing sites these may be of interest to you.

Xomba - Xombytes are like hubpages, articles in their own right and Xomblurbs act like an article bookmark, a brief description of the article and a link to your article. To top it off they also share ad sense revenue with google affiliates (you).

SheToldMe - This site shares ad sense revenue and also works as a bookmarking site for your articles. Post a link and add a description to help attract new readers for your articles.

There are a few more good ones and you are sure to find them as you build your portfolio of articles. While you are first getting started to many accounts on to many sites is likely to become confusing, my advice is to keep things manageable so you do not loose focus.

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