Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Writing For Profit - Squidoo, Blogger and More


Writing can be good fun but unless you can manage to get a book published or a good job with a paper or magazine then what is the point. "For fun" you say. Well yes but wouldn’t it be great to make some money at the same time?

Of course it would but how can you do this? Well you can use sites such as Squidoo and Wizzley to write great information and sales pages, or you can write factual or fictional pieces on yahoo contributor network. Ezine Articles is also another great site where you can write some great articles that you think need to be heard, but Ezine articles work best when you have another page to link to.

So let’s talk about Squidoo and Wizzley.

First my favourite....

Squidoo.

Squidoo is a very easy and user friendly platform for writing articles as well as being a great community full of lots of friendly people. When first starting with writing your articles, it is a great idea to search Squidoo pages on how to write Squidoo pages. I have written a previous blog post on Squidoo being my favourite. Here are a couple of examples of great Squidoo lenses to help get you started.

http://www.squidoo.com/fisher-price-walker

http://www.squidoo.com/squidtips

http://www.squidoo.com/experiments-magnets

http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-be-an-archer

http://www.squidoo.com/outstanding-photographers-from-around-the-world

http://www.squidoo.com/the-solar-system-planets

There are two ways to make money on Squidoo:

1. Is to create great lenses that get lots of visits and have a good lensrank. Having a good lensrank will determine what tier you end up in. What tier your lens is in, is important because it will determine what sort of payout you get from the Adsense pool. On each lens Squidoo apply Adsense ads and all the proceeds from the click-throughs go into a pool. Squidoo takes half of this pool and the other half gets split up between the lenses, but not equally. The lenses that are performing well will be in tier 1 and then mid performers in tier 2 and low performing lenses in tier 3. A good lens in tier one could sometimes get up around $50 on a good month, tier 2 possibly 50 cents or so and tier 3 possibly a couple of cents.

2. The other way to make money on Squidoo is by using sales modules such as Amazon and Ebay. You can add related products from these sites into these modules and earn commission when someone purchases something. Squidoo also take 50% of the commission on these sales as well, but since Squidoo traffic so many sales to amazon these modules attract about an 8% commission. This means you end up with about 4% of the sale, which as a new amazon associate with no sales history is the maximum you will get anyway.

Wizzley.

Wizzley is very similar to Squidoo, you create articles with all sorts of different modules that you need to add content to. If using sales modules the situation is pretty much the same as Squidoo. Whereas Squidoo has an Adsense pool on Wizzley you use your own Adsense ID number and anything clicked through on your pages goes towards your Adsense income. This could be a good thing if you have high traffic to your Wizzley page but if you don't then you get nothing.

Yahoo Contributor Network.

Another way to write online is by joining the Yahoo Contributor Network. This Network gives you a platform on which you can write about anything you want and get paid for it. People who live in the United States are able to submit articles in a couple of ways.

1. You can earn money for completing writing assignments usually between $5 and $25 sometimes for some yahoo partners up to $100.

2. You can also submit articles for upfront payment and if they are accepted the payment is typically between $2 and $15.

3. Articles submitted are also eligible for unlimited and ongoing performance payments. These payments increase as your popularity and traffic increases. The performance payments are relatively small and are around $1 per 1000 visits and can get slightly higher. Some people make hundreds and thousands of dollars from performance payments with the right type of content.

On the Yahoo Contributor Network you can write all sorts of content including fiction, reviews, politics, opinions and pretty much anything you can think of. If you have a look here you can see my first 2 articles on Yahoo Contributor Network.

Ezine Articles.

Another great site for writing articles is Ezine Articles and it is a very professional site. Each article goes through numerous reviews and quality control to keep the whole site and its content high quality and professional. You don't get paid directly by Ezine Articles or by the performance of your articles, but Ezine Articles is very good for sending targeted traffic to your other paid sites such as Squidoo. So although on its own there is no income from writing on Ezine Articles there is the benefit of possibly increasing your income on other sites.

Here are the links to 2 of my Ezine Articles:

Help Your Baby Learn To Walk

The Toughest Iphone Case

Blogger.

Then of course there is this amazing site, Blogger. This Blogging platform is very easy to use and as it is connected to Google it is very easy to monetize your blog posts by using your Google Adsense ID.

You can also use the other method of posting affiliate links in your blog to make commissions as well. Using a Google blog like this works well considering you can use your one log in for Gmail, Google+, Youtube, Adsense, Adwords and Blogger.

So many options to choose from!

I don't by any means think of myself as a good writer, in fact I am very bad with grammar, but I do enjoy writing. So if you enjoy writing as well and want to get it to work for you a bit, then in my opinion these are some of your best options.

Remember whatever you decide to use, Have Fun with it.

4 comments:

  1. I love making money with Squidoo! Also I use Squidoo as a backlink to my blog.

    I've used EzineArticle in the pass but hardly got any traffic to my articles so I slowly started pulling my articles out and adding them on Squidoo.

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  2. I haven't yet written a squidoo page that relates to any of my blogs but it is certainly in the pipeline.

    I have noticed "ok" initial traffic from Ezine Articles and was thinking that as I build up my presence on that site it will increase. Sort of like squidoo does as well. At first on squidoo I only got traffic from within squidoo and as the pages matured and I got more and more lenses I noticed they started bringing in external traffic as well.

    Thanks for reading Lou.

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  3. A nice selection of places to publish one's articles. Sometimes it gets difficult to keep up with all the changes they keep making (and updating the old/published stuff), though. That's why I love writing for my blogs the best.

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    1. Thanks for reading Daria. writing blogs is definitely the simplest method of writing online. I am yet to see what which platform is the most lucrative, but I am sure time will tell.

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