First I’m going to show you how to setup your computer for article writing.  This is important.  If you’re like me and work all day you need to have your system setup for high speed, hassle free article writing.

Don’t worry, there’s no expensive software to install.  In fact, if you don’t own some of the recommended programs i’ll provide a link to a free alternative.

When you write articles you need to have four things. 

1. Keywords
2. Photos
3. Information
4. Storage and Organization

First off we’re going to setup your keyword links, I’m not going to talk about what they do, but by all means click around and discover what they do.  We’ll come back to them later

Open up your favorite browser, open favorites and create a folder called Keyword Tools

Go to the following sites, bookmark them and move the bookmark into the keyword tools folder (Links open in a new window)

• Wordtracker
• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Trends

These are the keyword tools you will use, know them and love them because they will make you lots of cash.

Next up are Photos.

Once again, in your browser create a new favorites folder called (oddly enough) Free Photos

Same drill, go to each of the following sites, bookmark them and move the bookmark into the free photos folder.

• Dreamstime
• Free Digital Photos
• Freerange Stock Photos
• Free Foto

You’ll be using these sites to get photos for your articles.  They are all free so you should use them since articles with photos earn more.

Next are informational links

Create a folder called Information, then go to the following sites and bookmark them.  Make sure to move the bookmark into the information folder.

Amazon  (you’ll see why in a later post)

The information folder is where you’ll store links to sites that you can used to get, you guessed it, information.  As an example if you’re doing an article about camping a great site to get information is Cabellas (an outdoor related store)

I can’t tell you what links to put into this folder besides Amazon.  You will know the types of articles you’ll be writing and will eventually get a feel for what sites provide the best information.  The trick is to add a bookmark and move it into this folder, you may need it for another article in the future.  As you complete more articles and find more sites you can eventually make sub-folders; camping, cooking, clothes, recipes etc…

Next go to Windows Explorer and create a new folder on your hard drive called Articles.  This is where you’ll be storing all of your articles, eventually there will be sub-folders but we’ll get to that later.

Next make sure you have a spreadsheet program and a word processor.  Microsoft Word and Excel are the obvious ones.

You’ll be using Excel to track your article views and earnings.  You’ll actually be writing your articles in word and saving them locally before you upload them to the article sites. 

If you don’t own either or both programs download and install OpenOffice.  This is a highly rated, free program that does everything Microsoft Office does at a better price, free.

Now, you need to install Mozilla Firefox and the Firefox Pagerank Plugin.  These are two VERY IMPORTANT things you must have!!

The last thing to do is create a text file on your desktop called Ideas.  This is simply a quick access location where you can quickly jot down keyword or article ideas when they come to you.

For you Windows Vista users there is an awesome sidebar program called Notes that you can install for free, I use it instead of a text file to jot down ideas.  Right click on your sidebar, go to ‘Add Gadgets’ it should be right there on page 1, called Notes.

So now your computer is setup for high speed, low hassle article writing.  The goal with all this is to have everything at your fingertips so you can finish your articles quickly and make some cash.

If anyone has additional things to add or any suggestions feel free to let me know.

Next we’ll talk about finding topics for articles.

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