by Rena Sherwood

Created on: December 20, 2009   Last Updated: December 22, 2009

There are two basic ways to earn money writing articles on the Internet – up front payments and revenue sharing.  You can also shop the article around to print publications as long as you carefully read the submission guidelines and a sample issue of that publication.  Online writing produces the fastest turnaround for beginning freelancers.

In the meantime, you can place your article on an article catalogue website such as Constant Content and hope that one day it will sell.  Or, you can place your article on a revenue sharing website like HubPages and hope that enough traffic will come to the article so that you can make some money off of it.  How do you get those web surfers to click onto your article?

Great Titles

You need to write short, sharp titles that are to the point.  Think about what an average person might type into a search engine like Google.  Write a title similar to that.  Although "clever" titles or use of puns and other witticisms work well for newspaper opinion and editorial sections, they do not work for web content writing.

For example, you want to write an article that you will shop around about the intelligence of horses.  Don’t title it "Horses: What's Up With Them?"  Granted, this is funny title.  In fact, I might use that in my next blog post.  But, anyway, the title would be inappropriate for a web article.  It does not mention what the article will be about and also lacks specific keywords.  A better (although less humorous) title would be "How Smart Are Horses?"

Evergreen Topics

Articles that make more money on the internet are based on subjects that people need to know all throughout the year (hence the term "evergreen".)  They also need to be suitable for people years from now.  You can do Internet searches to see what keywords or phrases are hot or take a clue from the headlines at your local supermarket.

Topics that are generally hot include sex, money and dieting.  People always want to loose weight, get more money and get laid.  Unless you are a real expert in a specific subject like computer programming or whatever, try to include some articles on sex, dieting or money in your portfolio.  These will help finance the article subjects that you are really passionate about.

White Space

The average person looks at reading as a chore.  Perhaps this is a result of a bad education, but people tend to want information in as few words as possible.  If the click onto an article and see a solid block of text running down the screen, they will click away and click somewhere else.

Use short paragraphs, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars (if possible) and subheadings.  Be sure to place spaces in between these in order to make white space.  This breaks up your article into easy-to-read bites.  When a reader clicks on, they think, "Ah, this doesn’t look so bad. I'll have time to read this."  Then, they may add it to their social bookmarking media or pass a link to it onto their friends.

Learn more about this author, Rena Sherwood.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.