Making money online is easy.
Let’s dispatch with this myth right now. Making money online is not easy, but it is achievable with a little motivation, some discipline and know-how. The good news is that once you have the basics down, it does become easier. What am I talking about, you ask? Online content creation, of course. Writing for sites that pay you for your 400 masterpiece is really pretty easy if you know a few of the ins and outs. The most important thing to know when it comes to writing for online outlets, aside from being able to tell the legit sites from the ones that are trying to scam you, is how to generate traffic. All online sites make money from advertising. Your content is what brings visitors to their sites. If Internet surfers can’t find your content by using search engines, odds are your article’s performance isn’t going to be all that great and your income will suffer as well.
Here are a few tips to get you started:
1) Only write for sites that offer to pay you for your work and not the other way around. Authors get paid to write, period.
2) Balance your upfront income with revenue share, or residual income, so that you create a passive income over time.
3) Don’t give up. If your article gets rejected on site, simply submit it to another. Don’t waste your efforts. Your article will find its spot somewhere.
Okay, now that you’ve signed up for some sites and have started generating content, you will need to know how to write for the Internet. Online writing is different than other types of writing. This is because you need to be able to write in a manner that gets you noticed. Let’s look at this from another perspective. Let’s say you wanted to look up the latest information on the healthcare reform bill. You open your browser and type in healthcare reform into the search engine. It returns a bunch (millions!) of pages that have either healthcare, reform or both in the metatag or title. You scan over a few and then pick a couple to click on. More often than not, people will choose a couple of pages from the first page of listings. Some, but not many venture to page 2, but rarely go past that. To generate traffic to your articles, you have to figure out how to get on the front page. But how? The answer lies in SEO or search engine optimization. You have to write your article in a way that allows the search engine to pick up keywords and rank you based on your relevancy to the search. But simply stuffing your article with keywords isn’t going to be all that effective either. Let’s take a quick look at some common SEO myths and how to avoid them in your writing.
Debunking the Myths
SEO Myth One:
Wrting SEO articles is hard.
Some people believe that the process of making your content searchable is difficult. It’s simply not true. Learning how to write SEO is not like having to learn a new language. It’s simply learning to write for a different audience. The main idea behind writing a good article that can be found in a search engine is to write clear and concise articles that actually mention words that the average person will use to find the information you are writing about. For instance, this article is about writing SEO articles. People looking to get more information about writing SEO articles will more than likely use SEO, writing, online writing and a few other search terms in order to find it. I’ve managed to use all of those terms in this article, several times, without using them unnecessarily. As a matter of fact, hopefully you are finding this article easy to read and informational. That counts, too.
The key to writing good SEO is to incorporate searchable terms into your article naturally.
SEO Myth Two
SEO writing only applies to certain types of articles.
Some online content writers actually think that SEO should only apply to certain types of articles. I guess that would be true if you were writing and publishing stuff you didn’t want others to read, but then what would be the point? The idea is to get as many readers to your articles as possible and the only way to do this is to be found through search engines, making search engine optimization applicable to all online content you write, no matter how big or small or what venue you are writing for.
SEO Myth Three
You have to hire a professional to get a good SEO article.
Okay, I’m not even going to waste your time with this one. Please refer to tip number one in this article: Authors get paid to write, not the other way around. There is no need for you to take a big chunk of your online income and throw it at some professional online writer in order to make your content just as searchable as his. As a matter of fact, don’t even think about paying for a course to teach you how to do it. SEO writing actually comes quite naturally to a lot of people. If you feel like you need help, sign up on a writer’s forum, like accentuatewritersforum.com and ask for help. You will get tons of free advice and tips on what works and what doesn’t from people who are actually out there doing the same things as you are but keep in mind that SEO writing comes quite naturally as long as you keep searchability in mind as you write.
SEO Myth Four
SEO articles are boring.
This is simply not true. Articles that have been correctly constructed in an SEO format will be informative, engaging and searchable. However, articles that have been artificially stuffed with keywords will not only be ignored by search engines, but will give you a headache as you try to navigate through it. The ideal keyword density (or the number of times a search word should appear in any article) is 2%-4%. Any less than that and your article will struggle to be found. Any more than that and your readers will start to think you have mental issues. The basic formula for figuring out your keyword density is pretty simple as well. Your keywords should appear no more than 2-4 times per 100 words and only where it makes sense.
So, now you are armed with a little more know-how that should make creating SEO articles easy and fun. Not only will you be able to write engaging and thought provoking copy, but you’ll reap the benefits of the extra attention your articles will get.
