How to Make Money Online Writing Articles

Writing articles online can be a difficult process. To make it easier, I have broken it down into three segments, and written a step-by-step method of systematically going about writing the article. The three main points are defining your audience, defining your topic, and finally writing the article. With this three-step approach, articles become a pleasure to write!

The first step in writing an article online is to define your audience. It’s important to specifically define your audience when doing any sort of marketing – which is essentially what you are doing when you are writing an article. An easy way to define your audience is to ask yourself a few questions about your “avatar.” An avatar is the epitome of what your perfect reader would be. Knowing several key things about who you want to reach and targeting the article more to that person helps you connect with your audience. This, in turn, creates more of a response from the article. For example, my title is “How to Make Money Online Writing Articles.” I would assume the majority of the people who will read this article are not professional marketers and are looking to get started in the industry. Also, if they are looking to “make money online” they must be, in some way, looking to improve their life. Whether their goals are to be with their family more, make more money, or are just looking to start a business and be their own boss.

Your second step, once your avatar is created, is to define your topic. Remember to keep your avatar in mind when doing this. You’re topic should trigger the curiosity of your avatar. (Side Note: Yahoo is very good at this. I always find myself reading some article about Tyra Banks hair or something completely random and thinking “wow, why am I reading this?”) A question always works well, or a “how to” as it requires them to read the article to gain the information. If you have more of a statement like “Internet usage is up 30% over last year!” it mostly tells the story in the title. People are much less likely to read that article as they feel they already know the bulk of it. Your topic, or title, should also take into consideration the key words you are going to use. If your key words are going to be “how to make money online” (this is called a long-tailed key word, which is recommended) then you should make every effort to put that in your title. Key words, or tags, for this article could be “how to make money online “, “writing articles”, “how to write articles”, etc. The title directly plays into these key words.

The third step, surprisingly enough, is to write the article. Doing all the research in the world and coming up with millions of catchy, wonderful titles does nothing if you don’t write the article. Some people find this part the most difficult. I find that a lot of the time, in life in general, people are so concerned with doing something well, or efficiently, or perfectly that they forget to do it at all. If you are not a great writer, I can assure you that you will be a better writer after writing numerous articles. A few tricks to writing an article are as follows:

1.       Write out 3 main points you want to discuss in your article, make them 1 sentence long each.

2.       Write out several (3-5) sentences that go along with each main point. These three “segments” of your article will become the three paragraphs.

3.       Write 3-5 sentences to sum up your three main points. This will become your introduction.

4.       Write 2-3 sentences summarizing what you discussed. This will become your conclusion.

Writing articles can be challenging when looked at as a whole. Having success in anything is a matter of systems. Once you create a system, or use one that already exists, things become much easier. In articles, or in anything in life, break down big projects into the sum of it’s parts. I will end this article with a quote that will help validate my point: “Perseverance is not a long race: it is many short races, one after another.” Turn your article (long race) into many parts (short races) and you will succeed!