Write for Money

This whole course is ultimately about how to write for money. Specifically, though, it focuses on using articles to generate traffic to your website. How do you "monetize" that traffic once it arrives? Although that is really beyond the scope of this book, it is what this lesson covers - just so those of you who are new to making websites and doing business online have some idea of how it all works.

There are countless ways you can make money from the visitors to your websites. Maybe you already know how to make the money offline. Perhaps you are selling children's books, money-making tapes and CDs, or cleaning supplies, for example. In that case you just start doing the same business online. I have two brothers who are making good money selling products on the internet.

On the other hand, there are those like myself who don't want to have a house full of shipping boxes, and want to be able to leave for a month at a time. I sell downloadable e-books, but mostly I make money by hanging advertisements on my websites and collecting commissions, or getting paid directly for the clicks. I like the simplicity of this business model. I just write, and make money - no shipping of things, no need to be home, and it all keeps running while I sleep.

Here are some of the ways you can make money with your website. All of the following have been used successfully by many people.

Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs

Kontera, Google AdSense and others will set you up with an account and let you place code on your pages to display ads. They get paid when these ads are clicked, and give you a big chunk of that revenue. I have done very well with AdSense, but there are several good options now. You can find the others by searching for "pay per click affiliate programs" in any search engine.

For simplicity, this model can't be beat. Once you get the hang of it, you can quickly place the ads on your pages. I build a template with the ad code in it, so it is automatically a part of every page.

Where you put the advertising panels though, and how you format them, can make a huge difference. I made a couple small changes to my ads after learning a few strategies on this from an $80 e-book, for example, and started making hundreds of dollars per month more.

Affiliate Programs

I like the idea of recommending products that I believe in and getting a commission when they sell. When someone clicks on one of the links on TheUltralightBackpackingSite.com, and then buys a backpack, I get 5%. When visitors to my site, UnusualWaysToMakeMoney.com go to buy an e-book/course on how to buy and sell cars for profit, I get $22. This is a little more work than hanging pay-per-click ads on your site, but it is nice to have several types and sources of income.

If you want to make money with affiliate programs, I highly recommend the e-book Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate by Chris Rempel. I'm still learning from his advice each time I reread the book. Of course, you can also sign up to sell my own book (this one); You Can Make Money Writing if you like it, and get paid 50% of each sale. To get the details on that, see my Affiliates Page.

Sell Things

This is my least favorite way to make money online. However, I know people who are shipping as much as a million dollars of merchandise per year from their homes, all sold from their websites. Articles tie into this well, too. If you sold water purifier's, for example, an article on "What's in That Water You Drink," can bring people to your site ready to buy.

In any case, even though you will write for money, you will have to market too.

Continues here... Drop Shipping

Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters on the home page.

Writing Tips
Sell E-Books
Writing for Money
Writing an Article
Get Paid to Blog
How to Write Articles
Article Writing Software
How to Write Articles

What Is Traffic Worth?

I have a confession to make. Many website owners make much more per visitor than I do. When I started my sites (we have over 20 now) I noticed that people paid 40 cents-per-click (and much more) to get traffic to their sites. They must be making at least 41 cents per visitor, I figured, to be making a profit. Since many of my own sites made closer to 6 cents-per-visitor, I focused on getting free traffic.

There were reasons I made less, but I stopped worrying about that low "visitor value" once I passed 100,000 free visitors each month. So although you should try to increase your revenue-per-visitor, you can worry less about this if you get enough visitors. This is why I write articles.