The Cheap Bastid» making money online

The Online Article Writing Guide – A Step-by-Step Approach to Profit – Part 1

admin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:55:36 +0000

Welcome to the first instalment of my online article writing guide. Now, as many of you know I have just passed my one year anniversary of doing this online thing and now it’s time to share what I learned.

In this first installment we’re going to talk about why a person should do online article writing as opposed to other ways of making online income.

So first let’s identify some of the other ways a person can make money online.

Completing online surveys.
Doing actual work, such as for ChaCha or another company, not as an employee with benefits, but as a freelance person
eBay and online Auctions.

Now, this certainly isn’t all the ways to make money online, but they are, in my opinion, the most popular.

Let us look at the benefits, and pitfalls of each of these.

Online Surveys

By far, this is quite easy, takes very little thought and only takes a few minutes. Not bad at all for a few dollars a month.
Now for the negatives. Well, it’s only a few dollars a month. And, you generally have to wait until a new survey is available. If you take surveys on many sites you have to spread your income over all of them and meet the minimum payout on each before you even see a dime.
This can get real boring, real fast.
Income is NOT persistent, once you stop taking surveys you stop making money.

A Real Online Job

The benefits are simple, with a real online job you generally have a steady income can make some real money.
Competition can be fierce, and, you can be cut with little or no notice.
This requires you to put in some significant hours to make real money
Once you stop working, you stop making money

eBay

This is by far the toughest. There are many people out there who make a killing buying and reselling items all day.
The profits can be huge if you get a product cheap and resell for a profit.
Unfortunately there are many ‘professionals’ out there making a living at this, can be real tough to get into and succeed at.
You need to move large volumes of items to make real money
There is a potential for loss if you can’t resell what you purchases.

Now let’s look at the benefits and pitfalls of writing articles online.

The articles you write will exist on the Internet until the end of time, well, not really, at least until the hosting sites such as eHow or InfoBarrel go out of business. Now I can tell you for sure that this may never happen, they are both doing really well.
Even if you stop writing articles, you will still continue to make money since your content (what articles are known as) will still exist online.
You can write about whatever you want, more importantly, you can write about what interests you.
You can ‘cross publish’ your articles on many sites, thus maximizing your potential earnings.
You can monetize your articles to increase your earnings even more.
You can get referrals to increase you income.
You can take a break whenever you want with no loss of income.
The more you do it, the better you get, the more you earn.

Now for some pitfals, and believe me, there are some…

You need to do some research before you write any article, this can take some time. Sometimes up to an hour per article.
You need to publish a large number of articles to get any kind of sizeable income.
You need to wait after publishing an article (up to 3 months) before it realizes it’s full earning potential.
Some articles (especially seasonal ones) will only earn money at certain times of the year.
Your articles are at the mercy of the hosting website so anything can happen to them, even be deleted!

One of the things I truly love about writing articles online is you can proceed at your own pace. If you want to write one article a week that’s fine, 10 a week, even better. The key is they keep adding up so even with just one article a week you’ll have 50 or so by the end of the year. With 50 articles you should be making about $50 every month, even if you stop altogether.

Writing articles online is all about drops in the bucket, nickels and dimes. Each article will generally only make pennies a day, but after having 30, 40 or even 100 articles out there this will add up quickly. Take a look at the home page of this blog and you’ll see what I mean. My first month I only made $1, the second $30, and from there it just skyrocketed.

You have to approach this with that kind of attitude, there won’t be $50 dollars in your account the day after you write your first article, hell, you probably wont make a penny for the first week or two. There’s a few reasons for this that I’ll get into later. The point is stay focused and keep your goals realistic… One article a week, maybe two. Or just 4 on the weekends only.

Trust me, the money will start to snowball as your content library increases.

In the next installment I’ll cover exactly how an article makes money. I won’t get into it too deeply, just enough to explain the process.

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My One Year Anniversary!

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:21:10 +0000

A few of you may have noticed that I just hit my one year anniversary of publishing articles online to make extra money.

Well, what a year it’s been. I’ve learned so much about what works, and I think more importantly, what doesn’t work.

Most especially I learned that publishing articles online isn’t a race, it’s a slow, never ending process of building up passive, permanent income streams, always looking to improve your income with the least amount of work.

This past year income wise has been great, through my article income I managed to not only pay off all my credit card debts, but buy a new Harley! The cool thing is my online earnings are covering my payments, so it’s like getting a new hog for free!

I’ve learned a while back not to set lofty goals for myself when it comes to publishing new content, I think doing that just sets onself up for burnout, and, just as bad, publishing low quality content. I think my peers will agree that to succeed at this you must publish articles that are not only useful and informative, but high quality. Don’t allow yourself to put out rushed, 1/2 hearted articles designed for the sole purpose of making money. Go the extra yard and put some polish on them and you will be rewarded.

My goals are simple, I’ll just publish one, two or maybe three articles a week over the course of the next year. If I do that I’ll double my published articles by the end of the year, and certainly at least double my income.

Over the course of the next few weeks I plan on publishing a series of posts designed to teach a person new to the exciting (and profitable) world of online article publishing. I’ll start at the very basics and continue to more advanced concepts as the series progresses.

My goal with this is simple, if I can teach just one person how to make some extra cash online I will have succeeded. Lot’s of folks out there would love to make some extra money to help pay the bills but just don’t know how, or even where to start. I’m going to help them through the difficult process of starting out and ‘getting your bearings’

As you can see from my earnings last month that the extra money just keeps going up and up. Soon, even my car payments will be covered by my online income!

I must say this, just 4 days into December and I’m just amazed! I broke the $150 mark yesterday, at this rate I just might break the $1000 mark by the end of the month.

If you would like to learn just how to do this just make sure to come back here every few days over the course of the next month or so. I guarantee you will learn something. Now, I can’t guarantee you’ll make money, but I’ll give you the tools and skill you need to make it easier for you.

Happy holidays everyone!

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I’m Back!

admin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:01:28 +0000

Hi Everyone!

I’m sure most of you are wondering what happened to me and why I seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth for the last few months.

Well, there isn’t any amazing story about tragedy or some other life wrenching episode. Simply put, I burnt out.

You see, I put way too much ‘work’ on my plate. Near the end I was logging into eHow at 7am to rate some articles and make some forum posts, I would then go into work and during lunch research keywords. When I got home I would check my earnings and then write articles and blog posts until 10 or 11pm every day.

I put way too much on my plate, and, when I finished a project I just added more things onto my to do list.

I blame nobody for this, not infobarrel (for those contests) or One week marketing. I can only blame myself for not accepting the fact that I’m human and just need a break once in a while.

I’m back and I’m not going to set unreasonable goals for myself. If I do one article a week, that’s fine. If I do two or three even better. The important thing to remember that online article writing isn’t a race and, to be honest, there is no ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ it’s an ongoing, neverending process.

Now, even though I haven’t written an article in over three months it’s interesting to see that not only did my earnings not drop, but they actually went up.

This is the beauty of permanent passive income. It’s always out there, and always making money for you.

It’s good to be back. It’ll take me a while to get up to speed again but I definetly will.

There’s much I need to talk about, including a new project that I thought of a few months ago.

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Mid April 2009 Update

admin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:54:33 +0000

It’s just about half way through the month and it’s time to look at how well (or bad) I’m doing at this making money online thing..

Well, everything is pretty much as I expected. eHow is on pace for about $200 for the month. Adsense from InfoBarrel and Xomba continues to climb and Amazon is about the same as last month so far.

A bit of surprise is my Bukisa earnings have risen slightly over the last few days. I think, and I really hate to say this, I might have a clue as to how to get some real income over there. I might try something this weekend

I haven’t published an article on eHow for almost a month now as I continue to move content over to InfoBarrel to maximize my adsense income. I’m almost finished with my first pass, moving over the most successful articles, later I’ll go back and move over my seasonal ones and the less profitable ones.

Oh, one thing I’ve already noticed is that even though an article may not make much on eHow, by choosing a different keyword it can be a real winner on IB. One of my articles had 5 clicks in one day over there!

I should finish up moving stuff to IB in the next few days, then I’ll start doing the same at Xomba. Hopefully by the end of the month I should have near 300 articles earning me adsense revenue.

Now, I was hoping to achieve an adsense payout this month but I’m not confident that’ll happen. I’m sitting at about $50 total and right now I’m averaging about $1.50 a day, so it’ll be close indeed.

I would love to hear how other people are doing adsense wise. I know a few of you out there have been concentrating on niche sites so I’m wondering if that is working out well.

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Use Adsense Channels to Track your Articles

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:42:08 +0000

One of the best things about publishing articles on sites like InfoBarrel and Xomba is that you can track each articles performance (and earnings) by setting up custom Adsense channels.

Here’s how to do it…

First log into your Adsense account, then click on the Adsense Setup tab.

Click the Adsense Setup tab

Next, click on the Channels link..

Click on channels now..

Under Adsense for Content you have ‘Custom Channels’ and ‘URL Channels’ Click on the URL channels..

Click on URL channels

And now, click on ‘Add new URL channels’..

Now click on 'Add new URL channels'

After you click on ‘Add new URL channel’ you’ll see a box, just go to your article page, copy the URL and then paste it into the box and then click add channels..

Paste the URL(s) into the box and click 'Add Channels'

And that’s it, you’re done. Make sure you go back to all your articles and get the channels setup. Google limits you to 200 custom channels so keep that in mind.

Tomorrow I’ll show you how to setup custom reports to really track your articles!

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Adsense/Adwords eHow Experiment

admin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:56:21 +0000

I’ve heard of people using adwords ads to drive traffic to their eHow articles. I’ve always wondered about this so I’m giving it a try.

The basis for this experiment is one of my articles that is now earning about 5 cents per view, which is great by the way.

It’s targeting a very high paying keyword.

Now, running an ad based on this keyword is quite stupid since I’ll be paying very high for a click as well. So what I did is found some related keywords that are real cheap, about 10 cents per click.

So now I have an ad, which will cost me 10 cents per click targeting my article which gets about $12 per click.

This has been going for about a week now and I’ve received 4 ad clicks (I’m bidding low for views). My article has earned money 3 days in the last week.

The idea here is that a reader who clicks my ad is a proven ‘clicker’ so I think there is a high probability of the person clicking an ad on my article page too.

I’ll run this for the month and see what the final totals are. Since eHow doesn’t report clicks it’ll be real difficult to judge the true results of my ad, I’ll just look for higher earnings than usual.

If this works out I have 4 other articles that have earnings in the 5 cents per view range that I’ll run ads on too.

I should say that I’m not a big fan of the ‘pay money to earn money’ club. But this article is targeting a keyword that has some fierce competition so I need to get more views to maximize my earnings.

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Online Writing Resources | Try MyLot

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:15:46 +0000

An Online Writing Resource to make some cash

I found this site on Saturday and it looks like I can potentially make a few bucks every week here.

MyLot.com isn’t a traditional article writing outlet. It’s actually a forum where people post up discussions, and post up responses.

I made a total of 8 posts/responses on Saturday and today my earning page showed 27 cents. I know that doesn’t sound like very much but the posting took all of 15 minutes.

Their minimum payout is just $10 via paypal, so it looks like a minimal effort would be involved to get a payout every month.

I think this would be a good thing to use to take up your ‘down’ time, or when you’re bored (like I was on Saturday)

I was able to insert links to this blog as well as one of my articles there, so the site might also be useful for link building as well as making some money.

Here’s the link to MyLot, and yes, that’s my referral link. I would appreciate if y’all use it to support me (and this site)

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Marketing Articles | How to do it and why

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:35:32 +0000

If you read my post ‘Writing Articles for Profit’ you already know that your work doesn’t end when you press the ‘Publish’ button, in fact, I believe that your work has just begun…

The easiest way to earn more money online is by getting more clicks on your eHow articles. Now, the best way to get more clicks is by getting more people to actually read your article.

Marketing your articles can make the difference between making a few cents a day or making a few dollars a day.

Marketing your articles has two benefits.

More people will see your links and head over to your article
The search engines will see the back links to your article and rate it higher in search engine results pages (SERP)

The higher your article comes up in search results means more people will click on it. More visitors = More money. It’s that simple.

Marketing articles means putting links up on the Internet for people and/or search engine spiders to follow.

There are two kinds of links

Do follow, which means the spider will follow over to your article and you’ll get credit for a back link
No follow, which, as you guessed, means the spider will NOT follow over to your site, you’ll get no back link credit but people can still click over.

There are also two places links can come from

Within the domain, internal links
Outside the domain, external links

From my recent post about the eHow ‘More articles from this author’ you know that links from one article to another article are internal links, and although they carry less Google weight than external links, are still relevant in large numbers. Witness the PR2 rating on my earliest articles..

We can add internal links at whim, when we publish (or edit) one of our articles we can add a link to an existing article through the ‘Related Articles’ area. I would use this sparingly, but I will always choose at least one of my articles. Do this for a month and you WILL see results, both in page rank and traffic.

Marketing articles isn’t fun, in fact, when it comes to writing articles I find it to be the most ‘work’ like thing I do. Nonetheless, it must be done if you’re serious about making money online.

In the next part, which will be published on Monday. I will provide my personal list of over 32 sites that allow ‘Do follow’ links, including the PageRank of the sites and whether or not they have a Firefox button.

I adamantly suggest, if you’re not already using it, to download and install Firefox and it’s associated SEO related add-ins.

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Writing Articles for Money | Dropping Income

admin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 03:01:26 +0000

As many of you have probable noticed my daily income has been dropping. At first I was concerned about this… “what am I doing wrong??” “What did I break?”

If you read the forums over at eHow you probably already know that this is a recurring theme on many posts.

Exactly why is this happening? Well, I can’t say for sure, but we do know two things..

People are spending less, and clicking on an ad generally means spending, so less of that is happening
Advertisers are spending less on ads, so our payout per click is going down as well

So, less clicks, less payout per click.

In my case, I have a large percentage of “how to buy…” type articles, which really isn’t the best topic in a recession so my earnings aren’t increasing like I predicted they would.

My average per day earnings in January was about $2.30 a day, now its about $2.65. Not much of an increase despite having published nearly 60 articles in the last month.

I’m writing this because I’ve detected a bit of defeatism on the eHow forums lately. The economy will recover, wallets will open up and advertising budgets will increase and when it does you want plenty of articles out there to take advantage of that.

So I suggest you keep writing and publishing, the internet is a fickle thing, and like any other money making endeavor you have to take the highs and lows as they come. Writing articles for money online is a long term thing, so write and publish based on a long term strategy, don’t let a few months or even a few days of below average earnings get you down.

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Adding ‘Hidden’ Keywords to your Articles

admin — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:27:14 +0000

This is what I call a little micro-tip on article writing. If you need to get more keywords into your article, or just want to add a really ‘bad English’ keyword, like 17 bag laptop, here’s an easy way.

As you add pictures to your article, just name the file as the keyword you want. like 17 bag laptop.jpg If you’ve got more pictures just add a number at the end like, 17 bag laptop 2.jpg

It’s that easy!

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