Earn a Living Writing for Content Sites

Content: The Once and Future King

Any discussion on how to earn a living writing online can and should only start one place: Content! If you write well it will slowly get appreciated. You will get Stars, Rate ups, Likes, Tweets; whatever the system is on the site you are writing for. If you write only quality material, as you amass more material it will begin to get appreciated. If the work stinks you still may make some money, but it is like paddling upstream against a current. Step one is always to improve your writing.

Join some of the top article sites around Writing for 3-4 of these sites will slowly begin to build you a substantial portfolio.

Follow the Rules and get Rewarded

Every site has its own system and community to get ranked and improve. Play their game. If they want you to rank other articles; do it. Rate other sites? Go do it too. These sites are smart. They always incentivize playing their game. Because of this it is likely that you will get your best results concentrating on a few sites and just branching out occasionally to check out other the deal on other sites.

Personally I like EzineArticles, Squidoo and Helium. They seem to work well together.

One way to use them:

The way I do it is write an Ezinearticle (2 links) one link can go to a related Squidoo and one to related Helium Article. On Squidoo you can link all related Squidoo articles together and link up to 9 related Helium articles. Helium articles are the"Tip" so to speak . You only have up to 3 links in your "Profile", which I link back to the main Ezine Author and Squidoo Lensmaster pages. Besides that the Helium should rise in the Search engine results, and since you get money per view in addition to your upfront payments you should see some residuals over time. Squidoo will also give you residuals over time and may rank just as high.

Any site that gives you residual payments is a fine one to use as your "Tip" Squidoo would work just fine too, it would just be good to have another site to feed it backlinks.

SEO is a big topic.

I am not going to delve deeply into it here. In a nutshell SEO is the actions you take, both on-site and off-site to make your articles have the best chance to rise in Search Engine (Google) rankings. With good SEO your Articles will generate traffic for a long time to come.

Backlinks:

Hopefully you have a couple of your favorite sites ready to go. Write a few articles. Contribute to the community. Rise in whatever rankings you need to. After you have a few articles under your belt there will be a need for a specific sort of SEO: Backlinks. Backlinks are words or phrases of text on other sites that link back to your own. Basically, the more you have the better your results will be. Check out SEO Backlinks for a better explanation.

You can get backlinks a few ways:

1) By commenting on blogs/forums.
2) Writing guest posts and having your links included in the body of text.
3) Writing your own blog and posting your links there.
4) Having someone link your article on their site/blog.
5) Internal linking. (mostly done by the site you are writing on)
6) Writing for do-follow article sites

One Good way to get unlimited Dofollow backlinks is to try a program called Build My Rank. Rather than go into a long explanation of this service, why don't you check out this great review from my buddy and mentor, Steve Scott:

===>>> Backlinks from Build My Rank

There actually is no "do-follow" tag...

...There is just an absence of a "no-follow" tag. A "no-follow" link is one that will connect your site to the other site through the backlink but supposedly they indexing agents (called spiders) do not follow a link that is tagged no-follow. This is a slightly debatable topic. As some claim no-follow links do well for them. But regardless to be safe, Do-follow is always better.

Here are some of the best do-follow sites. They all have high Page Rank and articles can do very well on them over time:

EzineArticles, Squidoo, Technorati, HubPages, RedGage,Gather and Snipsly

Most, like Squidoo and Hubpages have revenue systems and can be used as a "main" site to write on. Or can be used for their backlink potential and hopefully to pick up a little spare change at the same time.

Duplicate content:

To maximize online earning potential while writing to online content sites you may have to duplicate some content. For many sites this is OK, as long as it is your content.

Let me repeat that for anyone slow on the uptake: As Long as it is Your Own Material. Plagiarism is simply not tolerated. Almost universally plagiarism rightfully brings out the Ban Hammer.

What about Duplicate Content Penalty?

Again, let me write plainly. There is no duplicate content penalty. None! There never has been and never will be. Why would Google want to punish someone for being popular and getting their material linked and quoted elsewhere? It will never happen.

What happens is this:

When duplicate content is found only backlinks from the oldest two sources are counted. If you duplicate content, put it places where backlinks matter first. Post it to Ezinearticles or Squidoo or Hubpages first. Give it a couple of days to be safe and then post it to sites that allow YOUR duplicate material. Like Helium. Do it right you can get some revenue from two or more sites, good links to "main" site and best income possible for a single article.

There is something to be said for being popular, even when writing articles online. Marketing through Twitter, Facebook and Stumble Upon can be pretty effective. These ways first require a large followers list first. This is something you may have to go out and aggressively pursue. On Twitter specifically it is considered common courtesy to follow those that follow you. So go out and follow a ton of people. Tweet and Retweet things you like. Follow people back when they follow you.

Again it is all about playing their game and becoming an active part of the system. The secret here is to do it fast and not get too bogged down in tweets,stumbles and other distractions. Try to limit yourself to 20 minutes a day on this. Just naturally Tweet and Stumble sites you see. Good programs that will help with twitter automation/ follower gains are Hootsuite and Tweepi.

When you have thousands of followers and a hundreds of articles you can schedule 5-10 articles a day to be randomly tweeted/stumbled. Then you can just be social. Automation at its best. Simply learning to make the most of Twitter can really add to your profit.

Social Bookmarking: Path to fame and fortune?

Social bookmarking is another of those persnickety SEO practices. You go to a site that "bookmarks" the material and makes the bookmark publically accessible. Each bookmark counts as a vote. Basically it is a cheap back-link. Stumble Upon is one form of Social Bookmarking. But it is not the only one. Not by a long-shot. There are literally hundreds of social bookmarking sites out there. The "big" ones are Stumble Upon, Delicious and Digg.

There are even bookmarking sites that can earn you money. It might only be 20-30 dollars (if you are very active) but it is another money stream you can get while doing something that needs to be done anyway for SEO.

Take your time:
These methods are not quick, easy or instant paths to success. You have to work it and try to get good ranking articles that can earn you residuals from a lot of different sites. The wider your reach is and the more you have going on the better it will be. It takes time and patience but with effort it can be done. Conquer your fear and just do it. Get out there now and start your writing. Learn the sites and what you have to do and soon enough you will be making money.