Tips for Aspiring Web Writers

As I’ve already mentioned, of the many ways to make money online, it’s building websites or blogs that you own that is the most ideal setup. By having and managing your own projects, you work only for yourself and you own your time.

One main point of difficulty with our ideal setup though is that you will have to spend some cash to be able to succeed. You can’t just do that if you’re penniless and just starting out. You therefore need to learn how to generate your initial cash flow online on a budget.

Before we get to that, I insist that you follow a few good rules of thumb.

Rules to Follow

The first rule is to promise to never signup for PTC, survey or community earning programs that will require you to pay a membership fee first. Many of these are scams and even if you do manage to find a legitimate program, spending some cash when you have very little just so you can make money is not a very wise decision.

The second rule to follow is to be careful with free information. There are lots of free videos, articles and even courses that promise to teach you internet marketing, SEO and making money online for free. Many of these however aren’t complete in their free forms. Following free information can be disastrous. You will have to buy the paid versions to get the complete story.

General Plan of Action

Now that you’ve got the two basic rules in mind, the next step is to follow a general plan of action that will help you make money online on a budget. I’d like to warn you in advance. The plan I am about to share below is a product of my own experiences and studies. They may or may not work for you or you may have to tweak them to fit your unique situation and personality. So here’s the plan of action I followed:

1. Get a day job or keep the one you have.

It’s wise to first get or maintain a full time day job. You will need this to pay for your daily needs, bills and the initial costs of trying to make money online. Also, it’s very important not to quit even when you get to taste your first fruits of success. The reason for this is that online money generating endeavours aren’t always successful. Your plans might flop, in which case, you need a job to support you.

2. Set up a blog in WordPress for which you own the domain and that is self hosted.

You will need a blog when you go looking for your first paying gigs online. You will find it very difficult to get a job on the internet if you don’t have experience. When a potential employer asks you if you’ve got experience writing or working online, at least you’ve got a blog to show.

Make sure your blog zeroes in on a niche, has basic on page SEO and has some links pointing to it. You can get free links by submitting to free blog directories and asking your friends to link back to you through their blogs.

Again to get good cheap hosting and domain registration, go to Hostgator.com.

3. Find a way to get your first writing job or order online.

Go to Jobstreet.com, Best Jobs, Fiverr, Elance, Odesk and Freelancer and put yourself up for hire. Even if you’re offered a low rate, don’t turn the offer down. You need to gather some work experience so you can later apply for higher paying positions

4. If there’s opportunity to get a job with a big name foreign guru or company, take it.

This is so you can learn more from him. How do you know if a person is a reputable guru? Research about him online. Also, keep in mind that big name employers usually hang around in reputable job boards or services. You can find some good ones in Jobstreet and Odesk

5. Start researching about profitable niches and markets.

While you’re working for someone, start researching about profitable markets/niches with acceptable levels of competition. Considering starting another blog or website that’s focused on a profitable niche and start promoting.

Budget services that will help you promote include the following:

• Article Ranks – off page SEO ($2 for every article submission)
• Free Traffic System – off page SEO (free)
• Facebook, Twitter – social marketing (free)
• Mail Chimp – email marketing (free for a small number of subscribers)
• YouTube – video marketing (free)

6. Start marketing products or services.

Sign up for free with contextual advertising providers like Google Adsense and affiliate service providers like Clickbank so you can start monetizing your blog/website.

7. Share cost of more expensive tools or services with people you know.

You can’t rely on free or cheap tools and services forever. This is especially true when it comes to SEO services. Contact some of your friends who are also into making money online and internet marketing. Agree to share the cost of expensive services such as those used for off page SEO like Unique Article Wizard, Article Marketing Automation and Content Crooner.

Naturally you need to make sure you can trust the people you decide to form ties with. Most services do not allow joint ownership. That means you may have to take ownership when signing up with a service so you are forced to rely on the honestly and integrity of your partners when it comes to paying services on time.

The general plan I’ve outlined above should be more than enough to get you going. Remember, you do need to fork out some cash at some point if you want to start earning big. If however, you’ve got close to nothing to begin with, just follow this plan, or tweak it to your liking and you will eventually be able to save up enough cash to fund better promotional efforts for your online projects.

Once you’ve passed the hurdle of getting some traffic/visitors to your website/blog through various promotion methods, the next step is to make sure you’ve got something on your pages to earn money from. This is the point where you have to think about how to monetize your blog or website.

Contextual Advertising

What It Is: The basic idea behind this method is that you sign up for a contextual advertising provider. Once your application is approved, you get to generate advertising code that you can take and paste on your web pages. The service provider will then serve ads that more or less fit your content. You earn from every click on the ads on your pages. The most popular ad provider by far is Google Adsense. Those who get booted out of Adsense however can turn to services like Bidvertiser.

Advantages: This is the easiest and fastest route to take if you want to start earning off of your online content. The requirements for qualifying aren’t very high.

Disadvantages: The steps and strategies for earning well from contextual advertising can actually get a bit complicated at times. Contextual ad providers base the ads they show on the content of your web pages and topics/niches/keywords don’t all have the same dollar values. So if you’re in a niche where advertisers don’t pay a lot to get ads up, you could end up with ad units that’ll earn you as little as $.01 per click.

Even if you do manage to be in a niche where clicks on ads will give you an average of a dollar or so per click, you still need to determine proper ad placement and dimensions. Some ad dimensions and placements earn better than others.

The top most glaring disadvantage of contextual advertising is the difficulties of properly interpreting and understanding the terms of service of various service providers. Even when you think you’re following all the rules, it’s still possible for a provider to detect some form of non-compliance that can get you booted out. When that happens, you stop earning and you may even forfeit the amount you’ve already earned that hasn’t been turned over to you yet. This has happened to many, many, many website owners who publish Adsense.

As a general rule, because you can’t tell when and if Adsense will boot you out for a violation of some obscure rule, it is always best not to monetize your blog or website through contextual advertising alone.

Selling Services

What It Is: As already mentioned, you can create a page or post on your website or blog inviting potential customers to pay for you to write or perform some task for them.

Advantages: This is also a quick way to earn cash online. There are a lot of clients looking for excellent writers, virtual assistants and service providers.

Disadvantages: Even with thousands of potential clients out there, it can still be difficult to find them. You need to attract the right kind of paying client traffic to get offers. Moreover, even if you get clients to land on your For Hire page, you need to make sure you’ve got enough good content, experience and pricing structure to convince them to get you instead of your numerous other competitors. Consider impressing them with top content and solid testimonials from previous clients.

The top disadvantage of selling services is that you are selling your time for dollars. You need to work long and hard to earn a lot. This can get really tiring and stressful

Paid Posting

What It Is: This is generally applicable for bloggers. As the term suggests, you get paid for writing a piece of content that gets posted in your blog for an advertiser. Advertisers may either be after getting information out about their company, or, in most cases, getting their links on your content.

Advantages: You don’t need to be a very popular, high profile blogger to get paid to post. You can sign up for services like Blogsvertise and Pay Per Post. Depending on your rate and on the service, you can get paid as high as $10 for a very short post.

Disadvantages: Although you don’t need to be popular, you do need to have a blog that has a high page rank (PR). For your blog to get a PR 2 or 3, it should have been around for some time and it should already have quite a number of back links (other sites linking back to it).

Also, some services like Pay Per Post require you to disclose somewhere in your blog that some of your posts are paid. The problem with this is that some readers and Google don’t like blogs with paid posts. Google in particular can take your page rank away if it finds out you do paid posting.

Regular Advertisers

What It Is: Simply put, this is all about getting advertisers to approach you to advertise on your site or approaching and inviting them yourself to advertise.

Advantages: This can help you rake in real good money and the best part is that you’ve got control over pricing structure and placement. There are many different ways to price advertising slots on your website/blog.

Disadvantages: You need to have a blog or website that’s attracting huge traffic. Many big advertisers will only consider paying for an ad slot if your blogs or website has close to a 100,000 visitors a month.

Affiliate Marketing

What It Is: Affiliate marketing lets you promote and sell someone else’s product, service or program. To sign up as an affiliate, you can go directly into a company’s website that’s in your niche, check for an affiliate program and apply. You can also take the easier path which is to sign up for a Clickbank, Commission Junction or Share a Sale account among many other options to start promoting and selling other people’s products.

Keep In Mind: To earn well from affiliate marketing, you need to get your head around learning copywriting, email marketing, tiered commissions and link cloaking. On top of that, you also need to make sure you’ve got a good steady stream of targeted traffic.

Advantages: Website owners who’ve been burned in contextual advertising often try out affiliate marketing next. Once you manage to get a steady stream of targeted traffic, you’ll be setting yourself up for recurring income that you can potentially earn even when you’re not working on promoting your site.

Disadvantages: Needless to say, promoting affiliate products is not easy. This is especially true in this day and age when people are more aware when they’re being sold to online. Market too aggressively or to openly and you’ll get snubbed, criticized and labelled a spammer.

Selling Own Products

What It Is: This is a step above affiliate marketing because this involves creating your own product in your niche and selling it. Products can be courses, memberships or tutorials that come in the form of ebooks, videos, audio packs and physical products.

Advantages: You get more control in the content and promotional direction of your own products. You will always be certain that every module, part or section of a product conforms to your own strategies, techniques, beliefs and methods.

Also, you can create an affiliate program for your own products. Once you’re done with the initial promotional work on a product, you can sit back, relax and leave most of the marketing to your affiliates. The more affiliates, the greater the income potential.

Disadvantages: Creating and selling your own product can take a great deal of time, effort and expertise. Product creation alone can already drain your energies and potentially your resources dry. Add to that the energies you need to spend on building your reputation as an industry leader and developing your relationship with customers and affiliates.

Selling Websites

What It Is: This is a relatively new way to earn money from creating and developing websites and blogs. As suggested, this involves setting up complete websites and selling them to others. Two top web services that lets you list websites for sale is Flippa and Sedo.

Advantages: After creating a website or blog, you don’t need to worry about long term maintenance. That’s all up to the new owner after purchase.

Disadvantages: This is another example of selling time for dollars. If you stop creating and selling, you’ll stop earning. Moreover, because there are so many websites up for sale, you’ll have to make sure you’re selling a really attractive website. For a site to sell high, it needs to look good, be technically structured correctly, have some consistent traffic and already be earning.

These are the seven major ways to monetize your blog or website. For starters, you can focus on making your website acceptable to contextual advertising service providers. When you’ve had a taste of earning online, you can go into each of the other money making strategies. You don’t have to limit yourself to just one or two monetization models.

With a monetization strategy up and rolling, you need to figure out how to get paid.

Online, you’ll most likely hear more experienced internet marketers mention terms like autoresponders, lists, list building and email campaigns. These all relate to the area of expertise known as email marketing.

Even when you’ve reached the top of search results through SEO and you’ve got thousands of followers and fans, you may still need email marketing campaigns to generate more sales. Email campaigns will not only let you reach new potential customers. They will also let you sell over and over again to your old customers.

Basic Idea

The general idea behind email marketing is that you find a way to legitimately and legally collect people’s names and email addresses. These get stored in an online email marketing service. This is your list. In such a service, you get to write general messages and emails that get sent out to everyone in your list. One message can be sent to your entire list even if there are hundreds in it. This is where the term autoresponder applies. An autoresponder series is simply a series of emails sent automatically to people in your list.

What should you put in the messages and emails you send out?

That answer to that depends on what you are trying to promote or market. Emails to your list can update readers of your blog to a new post you’ve published. They can also be about tools, services, products or programs that you are selling or trying to earn commissions off of.

Writing Emails

This is where subtle web writing should come into play. You can’t just write to your list and tell them to buy something. Just like the people in your online social pages, groups and circles, you need to develop a relationship with the members of your list. When they know they can trust you, they’ll listen to you.

Your first few emails should not be about selling anything. Try asking your list members how they are and what their needs are. Let them know you’re around to help. Point them back to web pages that give information on who you are and what you do. Also, your first few messages can contain links to free information, products or services that can be of use to your list members.

Take note that your list members are most likely also readers of your blog. Hence, continue engaging with them through informative and helpful posts in your blog.

Once you’ve built a strong connection with your list, you can start sending messages to promote or market your web pages or products you are an affiliate of. This still does not give you the license to market aggressively though. When you write to recommend a product or service, you need to let your email recipients know you’ve tried these products or services yourself and you’ve benefitted from them.

Tools for Marketing

So how do you grab names and email addresses and start sending emails automatically. You need a tool to start doing this. The top three on my list are:

• Get Response
• Mail Chimp
• Aweber

Only Mail Chimp offers a free option for people who plan to only build small lists. Aweber isn’t free but it is by far one of the more reliable email marketing services available.

In one of these services, you first need to create a web form that will capture the names and emails of people who decide to sign up to your list. Paste this form in a prominent area in your blog or website where people can easily see it like the upper portion of your sidebar.

One way to convince people to sign up to your list and give their names and email addresses is to offer a free report, ebook or any other piece of valuable information in whatever form. You can for example offer to give away a free step by step guide to something. They can get that guide by filling in their names and email addresses on the web form on your site.

After they’ve filled in their details, they get prompted by your email service to confirm their request for your guide or free report by clicking on a link. After confirming, they officially become part of your list and are sent to a page on your site where they can download the free guide or report.

After this step, you can start automatically sending them a series of emails leading up to your promotional messages. These series of emails can be sent following an interval schedule so you don’t need to log into your service to send emails.

Email marketing campaigns are very important components of making money online. Seasoned internet marketers will tell you that the money is in the list and they will advise you to build your list first and foremost even before you have a finished product or service to sell.

Basic marketing through emails is already a great way to generate income. One more promotional strategy however that is slowly coming into play is video marketing.