Conference seminar discussion #2 - Online Revenue

The second seminar I went to at the conference was on tapping into online revenue streams. In other words, making money writing on the internet. The speaker mostly talked about writing articles for online magazines, or e-zines.

First off, there are several different pay structures. Some websites buy the articles outright, usually paying between $10 and $20, although some pay more. A few sites pay a salary (the one she mentioned was About.com) but they are harder to get into and usually require you to spend 20 hours a week writing. Some sites pay based on the number of views, and some pay per ad click. Those are the basic ones, although there are a few alternately structured sites as well.

For most of these sites, you need to learn about SEO - Search Engine Optimization. That's how to write so that search engines like Google will show your article in the first two or three pages of a search. Most readers find articles via web searches, not by going to the e-zine and looking from there. For a good post on how to write for e-zines, check out this page:

http://articlecomposition.suite101.com/article.cfm/layout_for_ezine_and_internet_magazine_articles

Be careful of "poison words" or "stop words" when writing for sites that pay based on Google ad clicks. There are certain words (no one knows for sure what they all are) that will cause Google to not place ads on your article's page, meaning you won't make any money off of it. These words tend to deal with sex, death, profanity, drugs, gambling - things like that. This can make it difficult to write articles about subjects like breast cancer or date rape. The advice is to use the words you think it will find offensive as little as possible in the article.