Good question. Some people write articles for the sheer joy of it. Let's be honest. One of the reasons you're reading this lens in the first place is because somewhere inside of you, you decided that you wanted to be a writer. When you were a kid, maybe you wrote short stories. I know when I was in school, I had no choice. Every English class they made us write short stories, poems, and other tidbits. But as I think back to those days, I realize that if it weren't for my teachers cramming Hemmingway down my throat, I probably never would have wanted to become a writer. Sometimes school is a good thing.

Others may not have such pure intentions. Let's face it. Writing is big business. If you think I'm kidding, take a look at the New York Times best seller list. Those people are making a ton of money. Make no mistake about it. Now, I'm not saying that you're going to make a fortune writing articles, but if you follow a structure for writing for the Internet and a plan for marketing your articles then there is no reason why you can't make a decent living online, just from writing alone.

For our purposes, we're going to write articles for two reasons.

1. We're going to write articles for the purpose of getting immediate payment for our writing. There are a number of places online where you can submit articles for pay. The list of places where you can submit your articles and get paid is growing daily.

2. The second reason is to make an income from our articles in what I call an indirect manner or "going through the back door." This is one of the most popular means of earning a living on the Internet, which mixes article writing with affiliate marketing and just about everything else you can think of that has to do with making money.

But how? How is it that people can write articles and not only get paid for them but also use them to earn money from other sources?

To understand how people can write articles and not only get paid for them but also use them to earn money from other sources, you have to understand a little bit about how the Internet works.

It's actually a very logical process. A person who "surfs" the net, is most likely looking for information about something. It doesn't matter what that information is. With today's search engine technology, you can find information on just about anything. Simply go to your favorite search engine (Google will be fine) and type in anything at all. Doesn't matter what it is.

Let's take%u2026"Skydiving"

How many results did you come up with? Millions, I'm sure.

Now, obviously you're not going to go through millions and millions of results. It would take you about 50 years of Sundays. Most people go as far as page 3, if that, and then either find what they're looking for or stop.

Experienced search engine users will know how to narrow that down to what they're looking for specifically.

Let's say you just want information about "skydiving history." Well, you could either type that in, with the quotes, or you can type in "history of skydiving."

Let's do both.

Typing in "skydiving history" we get much fewer web pages.

Wow, that is quite a difference.

Typing in "history of skydiving" we get even fewer results.

Now we're really narrowing down our results a lot.

The point is, the people who are typing in these keyword phrases are looking for something specific. Your mission, as the writer, is to give them EXACTLY what they are looking for. To do that, you simply write an article on that subject.

So, if you wanted to target people who are looking for information on the history of skydiving, the "spin" on the article that you will write will be to concentrate on just that specific topic.

We'll cover all these things in more detail as we go one.

What you need to get out of this though is that as a writer, if you are doing this for the money, you MUST first figure out what people want to read. If you write on topics that are not "profitable" then you're simply wasting your time, unless of course you love writing that much. Well, we're going to teach you how to write for fun and profit, because believe it or not, you CAN have both.

So in summary, we are writing articles, for the purpose of this lens, so that we can earn a small income, at first, from doing so. Over time, as you get more experienced, you will earn more money as a freelancer and the articles you've written