5 Creative Ways to Make Money as a Writer

Filed under Freelancing, Writing by on May 23, 2011 at 4:05 pm {5 comments}

Make Money as WriterThere are many ways to make money as a writer. The simplest of course is by simply working as a freelance writer. However, there are several creative things that you can do which help you to make some extra cash. You don’t even need to do these to make a living – these take little time but can help you make money as a writer online. So what are the creatives ways that writers can exploit to make money? Here are some –

1. Copywriting Redefined

Copywriting is a unique skill that not many possess, but if you are a writer and can pack a punch with your words, then this skill is certainly in high demand. It is not surprising that copywriting is increasingly becoming a coveted skill to posses. As more and more information moves online, it is important to get a point across in the minimum number of words, from an advertising point of view. The attention span of the online reader is very limited. Thus if an advertisement is to catch the attention of the reader, it must be perfect in its wording. That’s where you come into the picture.

Look for opportunities for writing good copy. There are everywhere if you look closely. Just Google for your favorite topic and see the Adwords advertising copy. I am sure you will find at least one that is very badly written. Simply contact the advertiser, offer him your services as a copywriter and tell him you can get far better conversions. How do you charge them? Just charge them some money for every ad that you write. Say $20? Of course it should depend on how big the company is. If you can improve the copy and hence conversions of a million dollar company, you might as well demand $1000 for every ad you produce.

It is not just with Google that you see copies. Look for people trying to sell their affiliate products. Look for people putting up auctions on eBay. Look for internet marketers with poor copywriting skills. You can find those everywhere.

2. Creative Domain Names

Website flipping was quite popular a few years ago and still is. People would create a website and make a very basic design and then sell it for a profit. For the seller, he does hundreds of such transactions a day and a small profit margin is great. For the buyer, he has a ready-made site which he can start using immediately.

However, writers are not exactly web-developers, so here is what you can do – flipping domain names. There is a huge market for domains and if you can come up with catchy domain names, people will be willing to pay you. You just register the domain in your name and then sell it to interested buyers at a profit.

Of course this is slightly risky because you might be stuck with a domain name if you fail to find a buyer for it. Thus, if you think you are very good at picking up good domain names, just register at PickyDomains and you can get $25-35 for every domain name of yours that is chosen by the site owner.

3. Look for Guest Posting Deals

Many websites offer writers a chance to get paid for guest posting on their blog. The blog owner gets great and fresh content which promotes his blog. You can find paid guest posting opportunities in plenty of blogs. One tip is to look for medium ranked websites. The very top sites seldom pay for guest posting (being featured on them is the motivation for people to write) and the very low sites seldom have the money to pay for guest posts, unless the owner is very serious about expanding and willing to invest money.

An added advantage of guest posting is that you get featured on prominent blogs and you can use it to build your brand as a writer. This is very helpful if you want to show your portfolio to someone.

4. Just Freelance!

There are many freelance sites for writers which have hundreds of job openings. You can simply apply to these and hope to start working on assignments. People are always looking for the best quality writers, so you shouldn’t have a problem landing some top assignments if you are good at writing. Sites like oDesk, Elance, Guru, etc. have plenty of jobs you can find.

5. Write Resumes

People will certainly pay for a well-written resume – after all, it is a matter of landing their dream job. If you can pick up all the basics and nuances of writing a resume, you can offer your services to career cells or just freelance on the internet. For professional resume makers, it is a very good use of their time and they can demand a very good price for their time.

Do you have any other ideas to share? I’d love to hear from you!

Photo Credit: TheTrial

5 Ways I Make Money Online from my Blog

Filed under Make Money Online by on May 19, 2011 at 7:34 pm {2,777 comments}

Make Money OnlineThere are many ways I make money online. This blog is a humble attempt to document these and tell you that it isn’t rocket science. If I can do it, so can you. After all, that’s the whole motto of my blog in the first place!

Anyway, here are the ways in which I made money in the past, and so can you. I am discussing these methods with respect to my other blog, which is on the topic of penny auctions. My Penny Auctions Blog is a blogspot blog which I started less than an year ago and I already make some good money off it. Here are the ways in which I have monetized it –

1. Google Adsense

This is the simplest method of monetization that I know of. It is simple because you don’t really need to do anything. To get an Adsense account, you just apply for it with Google with a blog or website and you should be approved very soon. Once you are approved, it is easy to earn money with Google Adsense. All you need to do is insert their codes in the blog and you are all set. The advertisements will show automatically.

The reason it is simple is because it is very straightforward. Google will crawl the blog and look for all the relevant keywords. Then it will show the relevant advertisements on the blog. Because Google has the largest database of all advertisers, you can get the best deals. When ads are relevant, people are more likely to click on them. Google Adsense is a pay per click system, so you get paid every time someone clicks on your ads. Remember never to violate their TOS, e.g. by trying to fool Google by clicking your own ads from a different computer, asking friends to click ads for you, etc.

Adsense is good, but it is not the most lucrative. For my blog, Adsense brings in some steady income but it is not the main source of revenue from my blog. There are several other ways to make money from blogs.

2. Direct Advertising: Banner Ads

Direct advertisements through banners is a very good way to make money for bloggers once they get enough traffic to their blog. The more the number of visitors, the more the advertisers will be willing to pay for the banners they place on your blog. How much money you charge depends on many factors. At my blog, the average rate of a 250×250 banner is $50/month, which is not too bad. Blogs that get better traffic will command higher rates.

The main disadvantage of direct advertising is that you have to do the searching. I write to many advertisers in the field of penny auctions and only a few are interested in advertising on my blog. Thus I need to send out multiple emails pitching my blog and if they like it, they will get back. Most of the times I don’t get any replies.

If a blog is more popular, you can always include a link which says ‘Advertise Here’ and you should get advertisers who contact you. I cannot do it for my blog, since it isn’t so big – at least for now! 🙂

I will write a detailed post on how you should find advertisers for banners and how to email them about your blog. For now, you should know that it is hard work but it is definitely lucrative.

3. Featured Blog Posts

Featured Blog Posts are an excellent way to earn money as a blogger. For advertisers, they get to publish on a famous blog in the niche with plenty of visitors. In addition, advertisers can get a good dofollow backlink from an authority blog in this area.

So how do featured blog posts work? Well, if a new penny auction comes up with a promotion or news or some other exciting feature that it thinks will attract bidders, it publishes this on my blog as a featured blog post. In return, I get paid for it. The average cost of a featured blog post on my blog is about $25/post but it varies – for regular advertisers, I like to combine banner + featured posts into a single package.

The process of finding advertisers for featured blog posts is similar to the process of finding advertisers for banner ads. You write to individual websites and ask them if they want to buy featured blog posts. You explain how awesome your blog is and what benefit they will derive from it.

4. Selling Backlinks

This is not directly from the blog but through article directories. I have articles published in top article directories like EzineArticles on penny auctions. I offer advertisers a backlink from these sites. Since the articles are already published, I can sell the backlinks as soon as I finalize a deal. Here again, the charge is about $20-25 per backlink. Advertisers know you write quality articles only through your blog and you should contact them as such. Show them the value of high PR backlinks, especially for the new websites.

5. Affiliate Marketing

This is my favorite because it brings in the most revenue. I promote websites on my blog which have affiliate programs. It is important to make sure that the affiliate products/websites that you promote are good quality because as a blogger, reputation is very important and priceless. So I select the best sites in the niche and promote them on my blog. Whenever they get members from my blog, they pay me a percentage of sales.

So here it is, the 5 ways through which I earn money from my blog. What are your favorites? How do you monetize your blog? Don’t forget to share your story!

 

5 Worst Ways to Make Money Online

Filed under Make Money Online, Online Scams by on May 18, 2011 at 6:35 pm {1,185 comments}
Worst Ways to Make Money Online

Beware of Online Scams

What are the worst ways to make money online? Actually there are plenty. It is not hard to make money online when you know what you are doing. However, the main problem is, many people who are new to this area are not sure how to go about it. Millions of people dream of making a living online but few accomplish it. Part of the reason is that they get caught up in these myriad different ways that promise to help them make money online but are little more than scams. As a beginner, it is very important to know the right approach and method that will make money for you. Do not make the mistakes of taking up one of these worst ways to make money online –

1. Paid to Click (PTC)

This is perhaps the worst way to make money online ever designed. The reason it is popular is because it requires absolutely no skill, no commitment, no investment, no risk taking and no real effort to learn. It is then not surprising that the returns are so low. The way PTC or paid to click works is that you need to click on an advertiser link and be on the page for 20-30 seconds, after which you will get anywhere from $0.001 to $0.01 per visit.

If this were a job, you would perhaps need to work 100 hours a day to feed your family. The amount of money that you can make is surprisingly small. The payouts are deliberately made to be high so that many people can drop out. Actually it isn’t that high – say $10 is the norm but then to reach $10 you need 1000 clicks, which is about 1000 minutes of your time, including the loading of the pages and everything else. That is about 16 hours of work for $10!

As you can see, all you need to do is just click on sites and visit advertisers. There is nothing else that you need to do. You don’t require any skill and there is nothing to work smart. They do have some incentives for referrals but that is a low and hard process in itself. Worse, many of them don’t even have Paypal payments but will instead pay you through AlertPay or Liberty Reserve which make it extremely hard to transfer even the $10 to your bank account.

What is surprising is that PTC is one of the worst ways to make money online, yet people flock to it very often, especially the beginners who know no better. I wish I could gather them all and teach them a thing or two about real ways to make money online!

2. Paid to Surf

Paid to surf is another pathetic way to try to make money online. There can be manual surfing or auto-surfing where you need to install a software. The reasons are similar to the ones given above – the amount of money you can potentially make is very less. Paid to surf pays less than paid to click, so you can imagine that you might need to spend an eternity doing nothing to get paid with these programs. It is not really a way to make money.

In rare cases, you might want to use paid to surf programs to drive traffic to your site (of course you must beware never to use programs like Google Adsense in these sites, otherwise you will be banned) for whatever reason. This traffic will almost never convert but you might want higher traffic stats for whatever reason. Even then, it is one of the worst ways to make money online.

3. Pyramid or Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) Schemes

These are nothing but scams. Pyramid schemes continue to flourish, especially on the internet in spite of their notoriety . I would say these are worse than the above two because at least in Paid to click and Paid to Surf, you don’t need to make any initial investment. In MLM marketing or Pyramid schemes, you are required to buy a worthless product and then promote it to your friends so they buy it and so on, and the people who join under bring you a commission.

There are very few genuine multi-level marketing programs but most on the internet are total scams. The products are inherently worthless and you are required to keep selling these worthless products to others. The point of pyramid schemes is that they are by design unsustainable and many people in the pyramid stand to lose a lot of money. The only people who really make money are people running it.

4. Online Data Entry Jobs

Don’t get me wrong, there are many genuine data entry jobs online, which is to be expected. However, most of the advertisements that you see require you to “buy” an initial package for say $49.95 only. This is ridiculous. If you really want genuine data entry jobs, try Elance or oDesk. These online data entry jobs will again need you to sell these packages to friends, which is kind of like a pyramid scheme again. Since these offer no real jobs and need you to pay upfront, these are one of the worst ways to make money online because it is totally misleading.

5. High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP)

These are classic Ponzi schemes. You would be surprised by the number of people who think they can get something out of nothing. All HYIPs are scams, without exception. If only people would think with a clear head before “investing” their money in these programs.

Anyway, the typical sales pitch for HYIPs is that they need to money to invest in some very technical and complicated investments or Forex trading. Then, they claim to give you extraordinary rates of interest. Many years ago, it was akin to “double your money in a month” but now it is more “believable” about 10-15% a month. Still, this is just a ponzi scheme and there are no investments that guarantee this return. After a saturation point is reached, the site will wrap up with all the money.

Bonus. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing microtasking platform where digital workers spend their time doing digital tasks … for a few pennies. Tasks typically take 10-15 minutes at least, and you’ll get paid about 10-15 cents on those on an average. You’d be lucky to make $1/hour, and $2/hour is probably the maximum anyone can make. As to why so many people actually work there, that has even baffled the experts who are actively researching this. Don’t become one of their subjects!

So these are some of the worst ways to make money online. If you are aware of other common newbie traps, do comment and let me know and I’ll include those in further posts.

Why Geeks Make Money

Filed under Uncategorized by on May 17, 2011 at 6:34 pm {2 comments}

Geek No, it doesn’t mean “Only Geeks can Make Money” but it means “Everyone Can Make Money”. It is not meant to belittle but encourage. The name of the site is inspired from a quote I remember from high school, “What one Fool can Do, Another Can“. This quote was used in “Calculus Made Easy” by Silvanus P. Thompson. Thompson made a brave attempt to teach Calculus to everyone and not have it confined to the Math majors at university. He wanted High School students to understand and appreciate the beauty of calculus. His way of motivating students was to use the above quote.

 

My aim, with this blog, is to tell you that it isn’t rocket science to make money online. There are plenty of people doing it, including me. I am here to teach you how this can be done, by one and all. You don’t need to have any special skill – just an open mind and a willingness to learn. Let me take you through this journey and lets work together towards the goal. After all, what one fool can do, another can 🙂

Photo Credit: jes5199

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