There are 3 main reasons why people write on the Internet, the first is simply to try and earn some money, the second is for the love of writing and wanting other people to see their work, and the third reason people write on the internet is to boost their careers, they write their articles as a portfolio to showcase their work to potential employers.

The Internet is the perfect place for writers because their work is accessible to a world-wide audience of billions as soon as it is published, potentially your article could be read by more people in one hour than the total number of people who read the whole Harry Potter series of books, although this is highly unlikely.

Realistically though if you write a great article you can get thousands of visitors every day.

Writing on the Internet with the aim of making money is a lot harder than most people think; it takes a lot of hard work, persistence, patience, dedication and time. The dream of overnight success is just that a dream and the promise of millions that some websites offer (For a small fee) give false hope to many people who have more chance of winning the lottery without ever buying a ticket.

Rather than making millions though there is a possibility of making a good monthly income from your writing and some people actually do make a good living from the articles that they write online.

Writing your article believe it or not is the easy part, but what are you going to do with your article once it is written that will make you money? You can't just publish it on the Internet and hope that someone will read it and send you a bag full of cash.

There are many ways to get your work published on the internet and many ways that you can make money from your work.

For the purpose of this article, lets say that you have written your first article and it is ready to publish on the Internet, where do you start?

Do you create your own website?

Do you submit your article to a paid to write website like Associated Content , Helium, Triond, ReviewMe, constant-content or Wise Orb and hope that someone will buy it?

Do you publish your article here on Hubpages, or on a similar website like Squidoo?

Do you create a blog on Blogger, Wordpress or a similar blogging site?

Or do you email your article to Internet sites dealing with your chosen topic in the hope that one of them will buy it from you like a freelance journalist?

There are many other websites out there finding the right one for you can be a matter of trial and error.

For a first time writer testing the water so to speak, blogging sites are a great starting point, most of them are free to use and you can get paid for advertising on the page, they are easy to use and there are many templates that you can choose from to make the look and feel of your page suit your personality or chosen topic.

Hubpages and Squidoo are also good for the first time writer, they offer you free pages to write as many articles as you want to and you can make money from advertising, on hubpages you can have Google adsense, Kontera, Amazon and Ebay ads on every article that you write which increases your potential earnings, although it can take a few weeks and a few articles before you start seeing any money in your 4 advertising accounts.

The great thing about both of these sites is that they are both easy to master and you get an instant readership when you publish your articles, both sites have a good standing with the search engines which means that your articles can be listed and bringing readers to your articles within hours rather than days.

Paid to write sites like Associated Content, Helium, Triond, ReviewMe, constant-content or Wise Orb are sites where you submit your article and you get paid. They enable anyone to participate in the new content economy by publishing content on any topic, in any format (text, video, audio and images), and connects that content to consumers, partners and advertisers.

Creating your own website, gives you total control over your writing, you can choose the color scheme, the layout for your site and you can choose which affiliate programmes that you want to work with.

Lets face it, if you don't get any visitors to where you write your articles the simple fact is that you will not make any money, getting people to visit your site is a difficult task, but there are many things that you can do to let people know that your site exists.

First of all when you have published your work, you should submit it to the major search engines, there are many companies that can do this for you but you can do it by yourself and save yourself a lot of money, it does take a little more time though and just because you have submitted it to the search engines it does not mean that you will get a high rank on them.

Submitting your work to social bookmarking sites such as digg, del.ico.us, reddit or stumbleapon can and will bring you an instant readership.

A great article a including a list of social bookmarking websites that you can use to promote your work can be found here.

emailing your work to friends and relatives is also a good way to promote your work especially if you ask them to let their friends and relatives know too, word of mouth is a powerful tool.

Money

There are many advertising affiliate websites out their in Internet land, Google Adsense being the most popular, and others such as Ebay, Amazon, Kontera and Commision junction. but there are other ways to make money other than advertising.

You can ask your readers to make a donation through a PayPal account if they enjoyed your work to help you continue to write.

You can offer exclusive advertising to internet companies that have a link to the article that you have written.

You can offer membership to your website for a small fee.

For the writers who only write for the love of writing and want people to read their work and for the writers, who are using their writing online as a portfolio,

The above tips for getting readership apply to you too and even though you are not in it for any money making purposes you should put the ads on your writing pages why not make a few extra dollars in the process after all it costs nothing to add the affiliate links to your articles.