Make Money Writing at Home

There are myriad ways to make money writing with your own home business, but not all are created equal. The first and most obvious way to turn your word-smithing talent into cash is to write for clients. That's a good way to start, because it allows you to develop your writing abilities while making money. The problem with this approach is that there are only so many hours in a day and there's only so much you can charge per hour -- especially if you're just starting out. So this approach is best relegated to beginners and as a back-up to other more lucrative ways to make money from your writing. If you want to pursue this avenue, a good place to begin is  Guru.com, a marketplace for freelancers.

Another way some people generate income with writing is to sell information that teaches other people how to make money with their writing. They use their talents to develop e-books that are sold, or are distributed free but contain links to affiliate programs that make them money. This can be a very effective way to make money from writing, as long as you know how to get traffic to the e-book. It also helps if the content is actually original and helpful. There are plenty of supposedly helpful e-books out there that are no more than means to line the writers' pockets. There's nothing wrong with them making as much as they can from these books, obviously. But when they just promote garbage that doesn't benefit the readers, that's when they step over the line and become spam or worse. Needless to say, you don't want to be part of anything like that.

The most sustainable and reliable way to make long-term money from your writing is to develop material for your own Web properties, get search engine traffic to them and then monetize them. Monetization can take many forms; the most common being the display of advertising, such as Google AdSense, Kontera, Chitika or other networks. Each has its own way of delivering targeted advertising, but the general idea is that they target keywords on your page and automatically display ads that are more or less in alignment with those topics. These ads can be implemented alongside affiliate ads, which require that you establish relationships with individual affiliate programs, either directly or through networks such as Commission Junction or Neverblue. There are literally thousands of companies that have Web affiliate programs, so there are many from which to choose. You can can also sell your own products on your Web properties, which can be quite lucrative if you do it right. Or, going back to the e-book idea, you can develop an e-book, which can be promoted right along with the other forms of monetization.

To actually make money with your own properties, it's obvious that you need to have site visitors. That's where search engine traffic comes in. So how do you get search engine traffic? The intricacies of that certainly can't be explained in one short blog post, but the basics are that you need incoming links from diverse sources to show Google and the other engines your site's popularity and keyword focus. To do that, I recommend using a combination of social media (including posting to Twitter using automated Twitter marketing software, because "tweets" now rank in Google), article marketing, link exchanges, guest posting and other linking strategies. To make these links effective, you need to do good keyword research to ensure your keywords match your site's focus. But that's another whole art and science. To learn how to do that, conduct a Google search for "The Keyword Academy" or "Grizzly Brears" and read what these sources have to say. They will help immensely when it comes to proper keyword implementation.