Article Writing - Why Do It?
Why write articles???
Good question. Some people write articles for the shear joy of it.
Let’s be honest. One of the reasons you’re reading this book in the first
place is because somewhere inside of you, you decided that you
wanted to be a writer. When you were a kid, maybe you wrote short
stories. I know when I was in school, I had no choice. Every English
class they made us write short stories, poems, and other tidbits.
But as I think back to those days, I realize that if it weren’t for my teachers cramming Hemmingway down my throat, I probably never would
have wanted to become a writer. Sometimes school is a good thing.
Others have not so purist intentions. Let’s face it. Writing is big
business. If you think I’m kidding, take a look at the New York Times
best seller list.
Those people are making a ton of money. Make no
mistake about it. Now, I’m not saying that you’re going to make a
fortune writing articles, but if you follow a structure for writing for
the Internet (I’ll explain that in detail later) and a plan for marketing
your articles (also in more detail later) then there is no reason why
you can’t make a decent living online, just from writing alone.
For our purposes, we’re going to write articles for two reasons.
1. We’re going to write articles for the purpose of getting
immediate payment for our writing. There are a number of
places online where you can submit articles for pay. Personally,
this is something I do each day. Not so much the writing for pay
(who has the time anymore?) but the finding of places to share
with my people. The list of places where you can submit your
articles and get paid is growing daily.
2. The second reason is to make an income from our articles in
what I call an indirect manner or “going through the back
door.” This is one of the most popular means of earning a living
on the Internet, which mixes article writing with affiliate
marketing and just about everything else you can think of that
has to do with making money.
But how? How is it that people can write articles and not only get paid
for them but also use them to earn money from other sources?
To understand that, you have to understand a little bit about how the
Internet works.
It’s actually a very logical process. A person who “surfs” the net, is
most likely looking for information about something. It doesn’t
matter what that information is. With today’s search engine
technology, you can find information on just about anything. Simply
go to your favorite search engine (Google will be fine) and type in
anything at all. Doesn’t matter what it is.
Let’s take…”Skydiving”
I just did that and came up with 5,420,000 results, or web pages that
contain the word “skydiving.”
Now, obviously you’re not going to go through all 5,420,000 results.
It would take you about 50 years of Sundays. Most people go as far as
page 3, if that, and then either find what they’re looking for or stop.
Experienced search engine users will know how to narrow that down
to what they’re looking for specifically.
Let’s say you just want information about “skydiving history.” Well,
you could either type that in, with the quotes, or you can type in
“history of skydiving.”
Let’s do both.
Typing in “skydiving history” we get only 13,700 web pages.
Wow, that is quite a difference.
Typing in “history of skydiving” we get only 1,800 results.
Now we’re really narrowing down our results a lot.
The point is, the people who are typing in these keyword phrases are
looking for something specific. Your mission, as the writer, is to give
them EXACTLY what they are looking for. To do that, you simply
write an article on that subject.
So, if you wanted to target people who are looking for information on
the history of skydiving, the “spin” on the article that you will write
will be to concentrate on just that specific topic.
We’ll cover all these things in more detail as we go one.
What you need to get out of this though is that as a writer, if you are
doing this for the money, you MUST first figure out what people want
to read. If you write on topics that are not “profitable” then you’re
simply wasting your time, unless of course you love writing that
much. Well, we’re going to teach you how to write for fun and profit,
because believe it or not, you CAN have both.
So in summary, we are writing articles, for the purpose of our book,
so that we can earn a small income, at first, from doing so.
Over time, as you get more experienced, you will earn more money as a
freelancer and the articles you’ve written for search engine lookups,
as I like to call them, will be bringing you even more money because
of all the backlinks and visitors they’ll be getting you. Don’t worry,
we’ll explain all this in detail later on in the book.
The next thing you need to learn is what I call the not to do’s.
