Setting Up your Computer for Article Writing

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:05:49 +0000

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.

Keywords
Photos
Information
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)

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.

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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Writing Articles for Profit – A General Outline

admin — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:05:32 +0000

I’m going to outline the general steps in creating articles to publish online. Articles are also known as ‘content’, and as you’ll hear from me and other article sources, content is key.

The article process is as follows, and I’ll say upfront that this is geared towards eHow, but is still absolutely useful for other sites.

Come up with a topic: this is simple enough, it just means decide on what you want to write an article about. This is also where the dreaded ‘writers block’ pops up. I’ll discuss ways to overcome this.
Research keywords: This step is vitally important and if you don’t master it you will not realize maximum earnings. As you research keywords you may come to realize that your topic simply doesn’t pay well, in that case just come up with a new topic.
Write the article: Now it’s time to write the article, make sure you use the keywords that you researched earlier.
Adjust keywords for SEO: After you write the article take a look at it and read it, does it flow naturally? Adjust your keyword density if necessary and never overuse keywords.
Publish the article: If it looks good then publish it. We’ll cover that process later.
Adjust the article for ad targeting: A lot of new writers don’t do this step. Just look at your published article and make sure the ads are appropriate to the content. If you write an article about ‘chocolate addiction’ make sure the ads aren’t about drug addiction. If the ads are wrong, edit the article and adjust your keyword density.
Promote the Article: We’ll talk about some free social networking and other sites to get traffic to your article. More traffic, more money.
Monitor the article: Another often overlooked step. The more traffic your article gets the more money you will make, it’s as simple as that. If you’re article isn’t getting traffic there are ways to improve it, which I’ll discuss in a later post.
Adjust to optimize profit: This is an optional step but it’s sometimes a good idea to revisit an article a few months later and update it if necessary. This is especially true if there are Amazon product links.

So there you have it. I just briefly touched upon the process but I’ll expand on all of them in coming posts.

Writing articles is NOT difficult and certainly not time consuming, just learn SEO and you’ll do very well. Once you get the hang of it you should easily be able to publish an article from scratch within 30 minutes.

The general consensus among eHow users is that articles should average between 1.50 and 3.00 dollars per month. If you publish just one article a day at the end of the year you should have about 350 articles and a permanent, passive income of from 500-1000 dollars a month,

My next post will be on setting up your PC to make this entire process easier and quicker. I spent the last two months hunting down software and informational links to give me the tools to excel at this.

Set up your computer for article writing to make the most money as fast as possible.

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Setting Up your Computer for Article Writing

Writing Articles for Profit – A General Outline