How to write to earn online income
As most bloggers quickly discover, earning income online is all about writing. You quickly realize that in order to blog you have to write, and write a lot. Now writing isn't the easiest thing for many people to do, but don't worry it gets much easier as time goes on.
I was reading an article on problogger today, and lo and behold, it was actually useful. It was about how to write fast. This pertains directly to us Online Privateers as we write quite a bit. We write content for our sites, we write articles to submit to other sites and directories, we rewrite our articles, we jot down ideas, make lists, and lay down thousands of words every single day.
How in the world do we keep that kind of pace up? It can be mind numbing at times. Well, that problogger article had some good suggestions, and I'm going to tailor them to our own purposes as we don't just write for fun, we write to make money!
Step 1: Have an idea of what you are going to write about
This involves having done your research. You want to write about your niche, and you want your article to be keyword rich in whatever your chosen topic will be about. So think about it, draw inspiration from everything you are doing. Sitting at a computer screen isn't necessarily the best way to get inspired to write to make money. Walk your dog, wash your car, go shopping, watch tv (be careful with this one. TV numbs your brain and kills inspiration).
Step 1a: Perfect a few organization structures
This was a great suggestion I learned from problogger. Think about how you could format the article. As a Question/Answer format, a story format, a list, a step by step guide (as in the case of this article), or whatever else you can think of. This will help you organize your thoughts.
Step 1b: Start with a seed
Go on ezinearticles and find an article similar to what you are talking about. This will be your seed. Read it, and get ideas for how to organize your article.
Step 2: Do your research
Once you've got an idea, with a few phrases, do a bit of research. Use google adwords to see what people are looking for when it comes to your article. You may be surprised and find a whole new slew of ideas for articles to write by doing this. I regularly get inspiration from using this tool for my blogs, use it liberally and use it well.
Step 3: Outline your article
You've got the idea, you've found your keywords, now put together a simple outline for your article. Things to include in this outline are the main topics and the ideas within. The main topics should contain whatever keywords you are trying to target. They then become the Hx tags for your article. Keep this outline brief and simple, you don't want to loose your train of thought. It's chugging along and will leave you behind if you don't keep up!
Step 4: Stream of conciousness writing
Now just write. Spill your guts, pour out your heart, and type out whatever ideas you happen to have on the subject. Ramble on until you've got no words left. The more you put down, the more you have to work with when you go back over and edit it. Make sure you include a few instances of your keywords and variations in the text when you are crafting your article.
Step 5: Format the article
Now go through your article and add in the links and anchor text you want to target. Bold some of the keywords to get the most bang out of the article as well. Make sure you used Hx tags to get the main points across.
Step 6: Post it
You're done. Post it, and move onto your next idea that came to you while you were spilling your guts on this last one.
If you are serious about making money with your writing then you will want to rewrite your masterpiece. If you use a service like AMA, as I seriously recommend you do, then you will need to get proficient at rewriting. The more rewritten an article, the more juice it can get. One article rewritten will get you hundreds of backlinks and save you hours of work.
How to rewrite articles
Rewriting is where my brain starts to hurt. It takes some serious endurance and practice to get proficient at this. You now want to go through the article and rewrite the sentences and/or the adjectives so that they will produce another original piece. I have found some nice little free tools that help the process.
Use A Thesaurus
Using an online thesaurus helps a ton in finding adjectives and inspiration to rework the sentences. Just type in your word and use it to get ideas for what else you could say in that spot. It's a seriously invaluable aid to rewriting articles. I have one as a widget on my computer.
Googles translation tool
Also using google's own translation tool helps as well. Copy and paste a paragraph into the translator, translate it into a few different languages, then translate it back into English, and you've got yourself a new paragraph. It may take a little rewriting to get the paragraph making sense, but it is a very helpful tool.
Stick with it, you can learn to write and rewrite your articles quickly to produce the tons of content you need. What works for you?
