Making Money Online: What I've Learned in My First 3 Months

Anybody wanting to make money online must learn and learn fast, or they will become rapidly discouraged and move on.  I am certainly not going to call myself a professional when it comes to making money from my online content.  But, I can say that I have learned a lot relatively quickly and that I am making some money.  I have also seen the trajectory of my earnings increase relatively quickly considering that this initially started as a hobby.  But, as I delve deeper into my knowledge of making money online, I am discovering that this could easily turn into a decent income that might eventually supplement my other income.  Furthermore, the knowledge that I am gaining could easily turn into a part-time retirement career.  So, what have I learned?

This is something important to figure out from day one.  It may seem obvious to everyone but when people start writing content online, they think they can write 1 or 2 articles and start making their internet fortune.  You gotta be kidding me!?  I write for HubPages (makes sense since you are reading this on HubPages), and I am 1 of over 92,000 Hubbers currently.  That is just one website!  How could anyone possibly find my one article when there are hundreds of thousands of articles on just that one site?  Figuring this out leads to the next major point.

Who do you think makes more money?  Bob’s coffee shop with one outlet or Starbucks?  Duh!  Because the world is so big, Starbucks puts up lots of shops to get people to notice their place and drink their coffee.  The same holds true for your content.  People aren’t going to notice your one article.  You need lots of articles.  You also need them in lots of different places.  In my first 3 months online, I have published 70 Hubs and 30 articles on eHow.  That is 100 articles and I am just getting started.  To make serious money, I will have to have lots more.  And that doesn’t include blog posts that I am using to provide links to my articles and also write on the theme of making money online.  Not everyone will see this article, but they might see my blog with a summary which might lead them here.  Or they may just look at other blog posts.  Who knows?  I just have to keep writing and eventually people will find my stuff if I am in enough locations.

It is not enough to post stuff everywhere.  It has to be valuable to searchers and advertisers.  Writing content comes down to serving as a middle man between someone with a need or problem and an advertiser with a product or solution.  Just providing information makes me no money at all.  There must be someone wanting to click on an ad.  Since the number of likely clicks is limited, I need to get the most out of each click as possible.  That is where keywords become crucial.  The content needs to be decent, but it needs to point to keywords that pay nonetheless.  Sometimes it is simply a matter of modifying the keyword phrase or using a synonym that can make or break the amount of income earned.  Paying attention to keywords is a must for anyone making money writing content.

You really need to follow a step wise progression to get making money on the internet down.  You need to produce quality content with relevant high CPC keywords, put it in lots of different locations, and then get some traffic.  Traffic can come from backlinks or from search engines.  Backlinks can be easy to get especially if you have multiple sites where you link to your other content.  This takes those people who might see your article on one site and check out your work on the other site where they might not normally go.  You can also place backlinks in forums attached to useful comments.  Again, because the internet is so big, the more places you appear, the more likely you are to get noticed.

SEO can be a little more difficult if you are working in a keyword that is highly competitive.  Getting more backlinks can certainly help.  Publishing on a reputable site that already commands respect from the search engines is probably the easiest way to get started.  That is why I like HubPages and eHow.  They show up fairly high in the Google rankings and get indexed fairly quickly, giving the new article writer some instant SEO boost.  This has helped me greatly while I continue to learn as much as I can.

The last thing that I am learning is how to become more efficient at writing and publishing.  I am not writing for a Pulitzer Prize.  I am writing for ad clicks.  Initially, I would fret about sentence structure and using the proper word combinations.  Who cares?  Certainly not the people reading my articles and even if they do, I won’t know about it.  In order to get the amount of volume that is necessary, I need to learn to work more quickly.  Some of my best articles in terms of traffic so far were written in about 20-30 minutes.  I need to be able to do more of these articles.  This one has taken about 30 minutes so far.

That about sums up what I have found out.  I am sure that I have much more to learn and will learn a lot more in the coming months, all the while writing more and more and earning more and more as well.

PS-Save all your work to your own computer before publishing.  That way, if a particular website goes down or deletes your content, you have it for another content site.  No sense losing all your hours of hard work.