by Ruth Belena

Created on: February 23, 2010

You can be a successful writer and earn a living writing for online content sites, if you write articles that are good enough to get a lot of traffic from search engines and which attract visitors from social networking sites. It can be a full-time job writing, submitting and publishing content online, and you will also need to spend time commenting, voting or rating in online writing communities, networking and promoting your own pages.

Different types of user-generated content sites include paid-to-write sites and content selling sites. The difference is that paid-to-write sites give you the chance to earn continuous passive income from page views, or to earn a share of ad revenue, while at content selling sites you only earn money when you sell an article. Some user generated content sites offer more than one way to earn a living.

♦ Page views at Bukisa, Associated Content and similar content sites.

These content sites pay for the number of page views your articles get at that site. The more articles you write the more money you can earn, provided you make all your articles search engine friendly and promote some of them individually.

♦ Ad revenue from Helium, Triond, HubPages, Squidoo and other revenue sharing content sites.  

You can earn a good share of ad revenue from Helium, the biggest online writing community, provided you have at least one rating star. Earnings are based on how much revenue your articles generate from ads that appear automatically within and alongside the text. These include video ads, banners, text ads and highlighted words. Each individual article will earn a different amount of revenue, and you can see just how much revenue you get from each of your own articles. Daily revenue can add up to a good monthly amount, depending on your article topics and the number of articles you write.  

Some content sites allow you to use your own ad account and affiliate links to earn money from the pages you create, where you publish your content. These are known as hubs, zones or lenses.

To earn a living writing for any of these online content sites, you will need to write a great many articles or create many pages of content. You should use keywords for search engine optimization, and actively promote your content.

♦ Upfront payments and article sales at Helium, Associated Content and Constant Content. 

Both Helium and AC provide upfront payments for good quality articles. To qualify for upfront payments at Helium you will need to gain one or more writing stars, based on your personal writing score. Associate Content will only make upfront payment to US residents who qualify under the terms of that site.

You have the opportunity to sell your articles, with full rights, or to get paid for stock content, at several content sites. Constant Content has a marketplace where you can submit articles for sale, but if your content does not sell you earn nothing. When you submit to an assignment in the Helium Marketplace, and your article does not sell, you can still earn ad revenue when or if it transitions to your article list at Helium. 

You can earn a living by writing for online content sites, when you write articles of a high enough standard to get upfront payments, combined with continuous ad revenue and regular article sales. You can do all of these at Helium, or you might prefer to register at several content sites and have multiple sources of income.

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