by Moe Zilla

Created on: July 22, 2010   Last Updated: August 12, 2010

Imagine earning $4.00 a day, every day of the month. That adds up to $120 each month, or $1,440 a year! That's the secret to earning money online. Every month, your online articles can keep earning more and more, because online advertising provides a continuous revenue stream. It may be just a few pennies a day, but with enough articles, those pennies can add up!

Obviously it helps to write quickly, so you can crank out of a lot of short articles. But even to earn that two cents per article, you still need to find someone who's willing to pay you. Helium.com is one place to start, and in fact the site's members have already published over 1 million articles. All those articles have given Helium a lot to work with, and there's now long-term deals in place with several online advertisers. Helium splits that advertising revenue with its writers, so they can just concentrate on the writing. And Helium even offers writers an additional "up front" payment for their articles, so besides the ad revenue, they can also pocket up to $3.50 just for publishing that article on Helium.

"Upfront payments" are the best way to guarantee that every article will earn at least some money - and it shows that to really thrive as an online article writer, you'll need to understand where the money is coming from. In this example, Helium is paying members partly based on the traffic received to their articles, and some Helium members have found a way to use this to their advantage. By doing some publicity on high-traffic web sites, they can sometimes send a stampede of visitors back to their Helium articles.  One Helium user earned $1,200 overnight for one clever piece of promotion.

But traffic isn't the only way to improve the earnings for your online articles. It's sometimes better to have just 20 people reading an article - if those 20 people are all interested in clicking through to the advertiser's web site. (Many online advertisers will pay much more if their advertisements actually result in a sale.) So what's the best way to attract people who are interested in advertisements? Usually it's people who have gone to a search engine to research a specific topic (which was mentioned in your article). They're not surfing the web to read articles; they're usually looking for one specific thing. And most online advertisers can display a different ad on your articles for these users, which has been customized to match the very things they were searching for!

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.