Writing content for one of the sites, which pay upfronts or give page views, may seem like a great idea at first.  Trust me it may appear like a good plan on first thought but as many content writers have learned, content sites dry up quicker than you will believe and there goes a stream of income.  

I have written for Associated Content long before it was Yahoo Voices or the Yahoo contributor network,  been writing for pennies on Helium, Mahalo, eHow, Demand Studios, and Bukisa.   I used to make good money on all of them, until Panda hit.

The bottom line is if you are writing content for any of the content mills, your income is suffering. You are lining the pockets of the sites and those who run it. On the most profitable site, I make $2 bucks per every 1,000 views.  Sometimes I made $300 or $400 there a month, before changes came about.  Now that site is down to about 30 bucks a month.  I am struggling these days to make decent money. In my struggles, I have learned one thing.

If you have adsence you could be writing blogs and making more money than you do at those on those writing content sites. As long as your blogs are focused, you could see big profits.   I suggest opening a blog in your niche, use Google adwords to learn the best keywords. Begin writing these posts.

You will still be writing content but instead of the pay being split between the site, google and yourself, the profits will go to you and Google. Splitting profits two ways is always moiré profitable for you.  Now imagine if you had five or more profitable goals running. 

Pimping Content Page Views

If you are sick of pimping page views for articles, you have written on the content mills, this is the blog post for you.  Take that anger and make something positive happen. Begin to get profits off blogging. Get an adsence account and put your articles on line.  Of course, you need to make sure your posts are SEO’d or you will be writing for free, and that is a bad thing.

Every niche out there has a golden key word or key phase that will bring in the visitors, which means more visitors to your web site.  Find that golden key word or phrase and you will be set to begin profiting off your blog. Chances are if you are interested enough in a topic to write about it, then these are others who also enjoy that subject. Make your content engaging and people will return and perhaps bring a friend.

Of course, not all the visitors in the world will mean anything if your blog is filled with typos and grammar mistakes.  Type all posts in MS word to insure they are typo free, write good content, and keep the blog updated often. If you do these things perhaps, you will begin to see profits off your blogs.

Blogging for free

If you are wondering how to blog for free, this blog post will give you some great ideas. You can blog free many places, but some are much better than others are.

Wordpress will allow anyone to set up a blog for free. You can write on almost any topic but you will not really profit from this type of blogging.  The site does get a fair amount of traffic so if you want to spread the information you wish to share with lots of people, go for this option.

However, if you would like to enjoy what you write and profit then head to blogger.com. The traffic here is good depending on the topic. Best of all as you share your passion you can earn a bit of money. When you allow your adsence account to display ads on your blog here you might profit if someone clicks that ad.

The way I see this is, if I am going to write anything I would enjoy the profit no matter how small from visitors who may click on my ads.  Trust me a penny or two adds up, and some of these topics bring in ads, which pay way more than a penny or two. 

Create a book quickly

Article writers who have a lot of themed content on various web sites have enough for a book, if those articles are nonexclusive to the site you first put them on.

 If you write parenting topics, I bet you could group them together in sections to provide a parenting handbook.  There is a lot of completion out there for parenting topics so you would need to focus on a specific topic such as parenting a special needs child but it could be done.

Did you know that Amazon would allow you to upload a file free in there Kindle section? Of course it has to be the right type of file but that file with the right info could make you some serious.  The beauty of a Kindle book is that it does not need to be the size of a regular book as far as word count goes.    20k is a good minimum to start for an ebook. 

Gathering article ideas

When you are trying to gather your article ideas, the task can be overwhelming at times.  Make it easy for yourself by grabbing a piece of printer paper.  Draw a circle in the middle and put a topic there.  Let us say you were thinking about writing parenting articles about kids. In the circle, write the word kids.

Now draw six or seven lines off your circle in any direction. It is best to space these lines out so you can write in there.   Now you can write things associated with kids on the lines. Your words could be parties, behaviors, gift lists, lessons plans, fun activities, and potty training.   It is a simple trick but it works to get those creative juices flowing when you are gathering article ideas.