How to Increase Your Residual Income from Writing

Residual income is a part of most freelance writers' earnings, and is normally what entices them to participate in sites which offer this in the first place. Every time their article is viewed they make some money, it is a fairly easy concept. Write popular articles, promote them and gain readership and you are well on your way to earning residual income.

How sites can afford to pay residual income

You may ask how can sites afford to pay for page views. Well in each article there are relevant advertisements, for example if you write about curing acne, there will be advertisements running alongside your article on acne, and acne treatments. Every time someone clicks one of these ads the site makes some money. It is this advertising revenue which enables them to pay for page views. Additionally the site may have deals with other advertisers just for displaying advertisements in the form of banners, text and images, whether they are clicked or not.

Sites which offer residual income

This may have got you interested and you may be wondering what sites offer to pay you in this way, the answer is most of them. Helium, Triond, Associated Content and Bukisa are four well known sites which pay you for residuals. The pay rates differ between each of the sites but I believe Helium and Associated Content to be the two sites which are easier to gain readership and page views.

How residual income works

The more articles you have the more likely you are going to get page views. Taking Associated Content as an example, for each 1000 page views you receive $1.50, therefore if you have 1000 articles of one page each you only need all of them to be viewed once to earn $1.50. This is very little money for so many articles but the chances of only getting one page view per article are very slim. One thousand articles of 2 pages each will generate 2000 page views each time they are read, so say you get 1 read per article daily, this means you get 2000 page views a day. Two thousand page views a day equals 60 000 page views a month giving you $90 a month. If you write to popular topics, promote your articles and make them search engine friendly they may get 10 views, 100 views or even more each day. Considering 10 views of each article a day this makes 20 000 page views a day, and 600 000 a month, making your earnings $900. Anything is possible with residual income.

Ways to increase your residual income

Now that you understand the concept of residual income you will want to know how to increase the amount you earn. There are several ways to do this including using search engine friendly keywords, promoting your content and writing to popular topics.

SEO

By using popular keywords in your articles you increase the likelihood of your article being picked up by search engines. It is important to select keywords which have little competition and to use them in the correct density within your article. Additionally think of what people would search for if they were looking for your article 'how to do something' is one of the most popular search entries

Promote

If you are a freelance writer you will want as many people as possible to see your articles. The best way of advertising your articles is by placing a link of your writing profile on your blog, and adding your articles to any of your relevant blog posts. Additionally you can advertise your articles on social networks and add them as a signature to related forum posts. It is also a good idea to create back links on high pr sites like squidoo, ezine articles,and xomba to draw readers to your articles. The more relevant places you post your articles the more readership and page views you will get.

Write to popular topics

If you are writing about black bin liner bags you are unlikely to get many readers, so choose topics which people will want to read. If you write about the latest news you are likely to get a quick hit with many readers for a few days following the news story but then page views of such articles will drop, whereas if you write to health and finance articles page views are likely to be more consistent. Another important point is that some topics display advertisements of greater financial value and sometimes you are paid more for 10 page views of a health article than 10 views of a celebrity biography. The niches you write to can therefore affect your residuals fairly significantly if you have hundreds of articles.

Residual income will continue to pay you money for as long as the site is up and running and you get readers. There is no doubt that residual income can offer a substantial amount of money to those writers who are prolific and spend some time adding new articles, promoting their content, and writing search engine friendly articles.