The Real Secret Exposed on How to Make Money Writing Online

What if you could work hard for about three or four years, then sit back and watch your bank account grow fatter? What if you could share information about your fun little hobby, then make money on that information for the next twenty years?

That's the real power of the Internet, and the secret behind Associated Content and similar organizations. Good informative content is becoming the gold standard online as the web shifts more toward Web 2.0, the new incarnation that will incorporate semantic indexing as an integral part of its structure.

That means that your well-written articles that reference just the right words can become a gold mine. Articles and ebooks that you write today can continue making you money twenty years from now. And while one or two will only bring you a pittance, a dozen or a hundred or ten thousand can bring you increasingly large returns. It's the difference between a windowsill garden and acres of planted fields.

How Much Can You Make, Realistically?

If you look at yourself as just a writer, probably not a lot. If you want to get wealthy online, you'll have to be an entrepreneur and businessperson, set realistic goals, schedule yourself, discipline yourself to write. You must stick with your goals and schedule every single day.

If you're capable of that basic mindset switch, you can make a LOT of money - over time. Looking at ad alignment, an assortment of income-producing ads and affiliate sales links to carry on your site, and then ways to boost your viewership, you can build an virtual empire over time.

Let's say you write one very good article on organizing your garden so that you can have year-round flowers. This is an evergreen article - one that contains valuable information that won't grow dated - and addresses a topic that is both hard to find and can be varied many different ways. You run pay-per-click ads through Google, and your domain name becomes (after many other articles like this, valuable and evergreen), busy enough to get pay-per-view ads. You also have contracted with three online seed, plant, and publishing companies to do affiliate sales - that is, you refer customers to their site to buy stuff and you receive a generous commission.

This gives you three potential income streams for each visitor. Assuming you make an average of $5 for each thousand visitors, and you have a thousand visitors to this particular page each month, you make $60 per year from this page. Not bad, assuming you did no work to maintain it after initial setup.

But it also makes you the same amount next year, and the next, and the next. If you write a second article linked to this one and arrange your income streams in the same way, a thousand hits can bring you another $60 a year.

Write an article like this every week for a year, and without any work on your part you'll bring in 52 * $5 every month. $260 every month for no more work on your part. That's for a day a week for a year. Do it five days a week, and you can see how rapidly the income can increase.

Expenses, maintenance, and other issues will reduce this income, but these issues are minimal compared to other businesses. And a smart entrepreneur will create multiple sites like this. An article a day for a year grosses you $1800 a month. In three years, with consistent returns, you'll have $5500 a month with no further major work on your part. Most people can live comfortably on this income. And that's using just one totally-legal online strategy.

Moreover, if you protect and grow this business properly, you can sell off your site to others looking for a head start, or for a consistent income. This gives you cash, without the worry that the pageview flow will suddenly stop.

How to Do It

You need a few basic skills: the ability to write well, the ability to write good concise searchable articles for the Internet, and an understanding of how search engines work. In the beginning, it's okay to host your website on someone else's server. When your traffic builds up, however, you'll save money by running your own server something else you'll have to learn about.

Choose a niche that you know well enough to write extensively about: childbirth, gardening, whole foods, model trains.

Sign up for Google Adsense to start advertisements, and research affiliate sales programs. It's easier and quicker to go through affiliate sales brokers,who handle many different companies that do affiliate sales, but later when your traffic increases you may be approached by individual companies to do their affiliate sales.

Last, set up your website with ads on every page. Keep pages short, with no more than 500 content words each, and write and post new content every day without fail. Constantly improve your page design, learn new search engine techniques, and keep up with new developments.

As you can see, this is a labor-intensive project in the early days, which is why many people choose to supply content for larger sites that pay them a portion of the page revenue.

Problems That Can Mess Up Your Business

Theft: It's ludicrously easy to steal content with simple cut and paste. You can't stop theft, but you can use Textalyser or other plagiarism-catching programs. This also adds an additional business expense. I predict that soon there will be great demand for lawyers with online expertise who are skilled with seeking out and eliminating this sort of industrial theft.

Poor content choices: Some types of content simply don't work. Fiction, for instance, is a terrible choice, unless you're an established writer with a fan base; it is impossible to make searchable without ruining the artistry. Video, also, is difficult to make searchable. Most of the best content choices are evergreen niche articles, and each should be unique enough that it doesn't compete with similar content on your own site. Most importantly, it must be a well-searched topic.

Radical changes in search engine technology: Every small business involves taking a risk. In your case, the biggest risk (assuming you've got everything else put together properly) is that search engines will dramatically change their indexing techniques, thus making your articles obsolete and unsearchable. It would not be the first time for this to happen. However, provided you understand latent semantic indexing (LSI), this isn't likely to happen. Most of the new movements in Internet indexing and organizing are based around semantic indexing.

Increased competition: When you find something that works, someone else will copy your idea and try to improve on it. It's just a rule of business. This has the potential of cutting your profits in half or worse. Each new entry in your niche will impact your bottom line. The best way to minimize this problem is to have multiple sites addressing significantly different niche topics; this way, even if one topic is attacked, the others will be okay.

Failure to maintain technology: Your server must be maintained properly, especially with a reliable connection and easily-loadable pages; over time, you may have to pay more and more for that connection. But you also must maintain your older pages, which still bring you income, so that search engines keep them ranked well and continue giving you pageviews. For this reason, learning how to use database-driven webpages, which are easy to update and change en masse, is a wise choice. If you don't think you can maintain your own technology, you probably need to farm it out to someone else who can do it for you.

Related Online Business Schemes

Informational websites aren't the only choice for content-driven sites. A few of the most popular alternate schemes include:

Sex sites: If you have good original content, these are the most lucrative graphics-intensive sites you can create. However, methods that work on other sites won't work on sex sites; Google filters them out of most search results. Most sex sites pay a lot of money to other sex sites to run ads directing traffic to them. Ads and affiliate sales are still the best way to make money on these sites.

Ebook schemes: If you have access to a good body of ebooks, you can sell or give away ebooks and make a decent living. Methods used by these sites are more complex than content+advertisement sites, but they are easily blended together as well. Content sites can also be used to create ebooks, which can generate an additional cash flow.

Hiring writers: Often, technology whizzes with their own servers and an understanding of search engine techniques hire writers to create original content. This is piecework for writers, and you'll find a lot of it at sites like Rentacoder.com. If you write for these guys, you'll make decent money up front, but they will reap the long-term rewards of your good content.

You may decide one of these schemes is for you. More likely, you'll decide that a site like Associated Content is better, where you can generate your own content and get paid for it over time but not have to worry about the technology. Only you can decide what is right for your skills and goals