Write Like An author, Earn Like An Entrepreneur
Welcome to a week long blog series to kick of #NanoWriMo from Novel Publicity Bloggers!
By Lori Wade / Say you have a passion for writing…you just love to share your ideas and opinions on various topics in written form, and it is something more to you than just a mere hobby. You'd like to commit yourself to writing, but you still have bills that need to be paid.
Well, if you're confident about the quality of your writing, then you'll find that the Internet offers you multiple ways to earn some buck by writing. There are lots of options to consider, but today we'll start with three basic ones.
Write for Others
Google and other search engines are changing their algorithms (the ways to analyze the content of websites in order to decide how high a particular page should rank) in such a way that original content is what matters most for the search performance of a website. This is why original content is in extremely high demand, and companies big and small are ready and willing to hire writers for different topics.
Put out Your First E-book
Suppose that there is a field of knowledge that you feel confident in. Why not write a book about it? In fact, if you have a blog on the topic, you can combine the existing blog posts into an e-book. You can have your e-book for sale on your website, or on numerous specialized platforms, such as Kindle. Should the book be successful, it may attract the interest of publishing houses who will offer to pay you for the publishing rights.
Be reminded that you do not need to pick just one of these directions and stick to it. You can combine two of them or even all of them. However, regardless of which path you opt to take, there are still some common recommendations to follow to ensure the material success of your writing career.
Let us take a better look at some of those:
- Work extra hard on a good beginning. Online readers are impatient people. If they are not engaged instantly, they will not give the text a chance by reading it till the end. They will just click away. This is why it is crucial (much more so with online platforms than with printed issues) to get your reader interested in the title and first couple of sentences.
The effectiveness of a page is defined not only by the number of people having visited the page, but also – and more importantly – by the amount of time they spend there. So, you do want them to finish reading that blog post. - work on the text's appearance. As mentioned before, online readers are impatient and inattentive. If they see a plain piece of text of, for example, 500 words, they will most likely click away, because the text will seem a long read.
- To encourage an online audience to read the text in its entirety, you should “decorate” the text, make it look prettier. There are many ways to do that. You could add pictures, diagrams, and other illustrations. The text itself should be divided into smaller pieces – by numbered lists and / or bullets, subheadings. This all will make the page look nicer and increase its readability.
- Add links to other content. After the user has read the post, he will most likely want to browse on. Instead of letting this process go at random, you can actually direct it. This can be done by putting several links into your article. Naturally, these links need to be relevant. For example, if you blog about cooking, you can add links to articles about the nutritious qualities of certain products. It is best if you can have those relevant extra articles on your own website – this way you welcome your reader to stay a little longer on your site. Just remember to hold yourself up and do not let yourself get carried away by the process. There is no use in flooding your article with the excessive use of added links. I would suggest having about 1 link per 200-300 words.
Blog!
Pick a topic that you have a passion for, and blog about it. Just take care that your blog posts were regular, in order not to have your readership disappointed and not to drive them away. The more your blog grows in popularity, the more money you can earn on the advertisement. Many bloggers choose to use Google AdSense or similar ad networks to monetize their blogs because employing them does not involve any extra effort.
Alternatively, you can write paid content. For example, if your blog is dedicated to technological innovations, there should be a gadget manufacturing companies that would be eager to pay you for reviewing their products.
You can also learn SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it means a set of skills aimed at helping web pages to perform better at search engines. Mainly it revolves around sorting out the specific search terms that are most popular with users and using those search terms to make your blog more visible. By implementing basic knowledge of SEO into your blogging routine, you will make the process more conscious. Instead of randomly picking topics and blindly expecting people to go looking for an article like this or that, you know what your potential readers want to read about – and so, you can give them exactly that. There are numerous SEO tools to be found online, many of them are free.
However, there is a catch here. Once again, sometimes bloggers get overwhelmed by the seeming power of SEO and start writing about whatever is trending, thus letting the SEO take control over their creativity. And this has a negative effect on the quality of content, and thus, on its performance. Remember that you are a human being, not an SEO bot.
If you have made up your mind on dedicating yourself to writing and making it your job that pays your bills, you should treat it as such – seriously and respectfully. Do that and take our humble recommendations – and your blog will prosper.
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