How to Earn More Money from Online Article Writing

Writing articles is an increasingly popular way to earn extra money online. As times continue to be tough financially, more and more people are turning to the internet to make a little money. Some of us write online for fun and pocket money, while a lucky few have managed to make it a full-time career. Whether you fall into one of these categories or are one of the sea of hopefuls in-between (like me), chances are you want to earn more from your online writing pursuits. This article will provide you with some tips to do just that, including some easy-to-use formulas you can start using immediately.

There are a lot of ways to squeeze extra money out of your online earning efforts. You might benefit from better keyword optimization, building a library of backlinks to drive more readers to what you write, or improving your writing skills as a whole. Those are all good things to improve upon to earn money from writing, but this article isn't about any of them. The focus here is on maximizing the most important component of your article writing: time. Streamlining your writing will help you crank out more work in the same amount of time - allowing you to produce a larger volume of work from which to draw in earnings.

No matter what sites you write for, chances are your work has residual income potential. Often referred to as writing royalties or residual earnings, this is the money you continue to earn from an article long after you've written it. Here on Associated Content, your residual earnings are called Performance Payments. As long as people keep reading your article, you'll earn a few cents per view indefinitely. On other sites, you may also be eligible for a share of ad revenues earned on your articles' pages or benefit from affiliate marketing commissions. No matter how your earnings are calculated, you can't earn a dime on what isn't up on the internet for people to read. Therefore it benefits you to write as much as you can. Look at each article as a new earnings opportunity - because it is.

An important step in increasing your article volume is preparation. If possible, carve out a specific time to write a few times a week (every day if you can). Eliminate as many distractions as possible: turn off the ringer, get away from the television and stop browsing the internet. I find it helpful to listen to music as I write - upbeat dance music keeps me motivated and blocks out noise. Do whatever will make you comfortable. For some writers, especially the large population of work-at-home moms (WAHMs), I realize eliminating distractions may not be possible - which is where the second half of preparation comes in.

Aside from simply preparing yourself and your surroundings to write, take a few minutes to prepare your writing itself in advance. One way to do this is to keep a notebook or word processor document with a listing of article ideas. That way anytime you sit down to write, you can refer to the list if you're feeling uninspired. As a bonus, you can also do keyword research on your list of topics to figure out which keyword combinations will work best. Google's Keyword Tool is a great way to see which keywords potential readers are looking for. If you know your article will include facts or statistics, create the document for your article beforehand and put the links for your sources directly into the document. This will save you from wasting time searching for the information all over again or navigating your browser bookmarks to find the right page.

Using formulas can also be a huge time-saver. These will allow you to just "plug" in the components of your article, and may even help you become more concise. The element of pride is ever-present in writing, causing many of us (especially newbies) to agonize over our word choices or go on for way too long about something that could have been summed up quite briefly instead of being direct and to the point. I'm doing it right now, see? Writing your articles based on a formula or guideline will help keep you from doing that.

The easiest way of figuring out a formula for your article is to be aware of the word count requirements on the site you're writing for. For example, Associated Content requires a minimum of 350 words per article. Once you know this number, you can break your article down into chunks. You might want to use 100 words for your introduction and 50 for your closing. That leaves you with 200 words to write. Assuming an average of 10 words per sentence, that's 20 sentences. You can break these up into 10 2-sentence paragraphs, 4 5-sentence paragraphs, 5 4-sentence paragraphs, etc.. When writing online, smaller chunks may entice the reader to stay on the page - big walls of text are unappealing to the eye. Breaking your articles up like this will make it easier for you to go from point to point, particularly in the case of how-to articles. If you're frequently interrupted in your writing, using a formula may also make it easier to pick up where you left off. You can tweak the formula to fit your needs for different types of articles - 2-sentence paragraphs may be great for how-tos, but they won't read well for news articles.

I hope these tips help you increase your body of work. Time is money, after all - so get started on those articles and earn some money!