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.

1. Completing online surveys.
2. Doing actual work, such as for ChaCha or another company, not as an employee with benefits, but as a freelance person
3. 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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