When you start researching different ways to make money on the Internet, you'll find all kinds of different systems. Some work, some don't. Some are easy enough for almost anyone to implement while others need all kinds of specialized technical skills to be successful.
Of all those methods, one of the simplest and easiest to implement is writing.
And by writing, I don't mean writing the next best-selling novel, or some kind of "textbook" teaching all about some complicated topic.
The type of writing I’m talking about is easy to learn and can be done in just a few hours a week if that's all the time you can budget for it.
There are several ways to earn money by writing, which we're going to go through in this report.
Let's get started…
Content Is King
One of the biggest clichés in Internet marketing is the phrase "Content is king."
Basically, this means that no matter what else you might be doing on the internet, you're going to need content to be successful.
If you build a website, it has to have content on it. How effective is a blank site going to be, even if you can manage to get people to visit it?
If you run ads to send visitors to an offer of some sort, you'll need content on the page they wind up on - even if it's just information about the product or service.
If you're connecting with people on Facebook or Twitter, you'll need content to share with them - links to interesting things, your own opinions, etc.
Basically, anything you read, watch or hear on the internet is a form of content.
And regardless of what new technologies bring, the written word is still by far the most predominant type of content.
Because of this, lots of webmasters are always on the lookout for good content that they don't have to create themselves. This fact plays an important role in making money by writing articles, a role we'll get to shortly.
Before we get into a more detailed look at how this all works, let's just something out of the way:
You don't have to be an award-winning author to make this work.
In fact, you don't even need to be much of a writer at all. It doesn't matter if you remember anything about grammar rules, spelling or anything else that you learned in high school English classes - none of that stuff is critical to this strategy.
This type of writing is more conversational in nature - grammar rules aren't going to matter.
At all.
See? That last "sentence" wouldn't pass muster in Mr. MacDonald's English 10 class, but I'm willing to bet that you didn't even think twice about it.
And if you're not going to win any spelling bees, don't worry - computers are very good at spell-checking things these days ;-)
With that out of the way, let's get into the nuts and bolts of putting this into action.
Affiliate Promotions
One of the ways to earn money writing content is to promote products or services from companies that will pay you a commission on any sales you refer their way. This is known as affiliate marketing.
You can write articles and post them to various places online, and include those affiliate links either in the article itself or in a short bio or "resource box" at the end of the article. Anyone who reads the article will potentially click on those links, and if they buy something you earn a commission.
The article should be something that is closely related to what you're promoting through your affiliate link:
A review of the product itself
Tips & tricks for using the product
How to do something manually that the product will help automate
You can even write a more general article on a topic that is related to the product, but this won't be as effective.
Let's look at an example of how this might work…
Let's say you're promoting a web hosting service for which you're an affiliate. You could write an article comparing that service to several other popular alternatives, explaining why you've chosen this one over the others.
Or you could write something like "5 Things to Look For When Choosing Your Web Host." Give the reader useful information that they could use to help identify good hosting companies, but include a link to the one that you recommend (and checks off all five things, of course).
Where can you post these articles for people to read them and click on your links? There are lots of places available to you:
Your own website or blog
A free blog on WordPress or Blogger
Squidoo, Hubpages or another service that lets you create web pages of your own
Most of these are completely free to use, so even if you have absolutely no money to spend on getting started, you can still use this strategy.
Your Own Website
Your own website is the only one that will cost you something. If you want to have your own domain name (yourdomain.com) where people can find your website, it will cost you about $10 per year to register the domain.
Note: Our preferred registrar is Namecheap.com
Once you have a domain, you can either host your site for free on a service like Blogger.com or WordPress.com (be warned that this version of WordPress, hosted by WordPress, tends to frown on marketers) or you can sign up for web hosting through a company like HostGator.com for as little as $4 per month, and then you could install WordPress on your own domain name without any problems.
Once you have your own website set up, you can post all your articles there. Ideally, you would want to focus on a particular market or niche rather than post all kinds of different unrelated things, but that can work too if you do it from the perspective of stuff that you're personally interested in.
The advantage of posting the articles to your own website is that you're building an asset that you control. You don't have to worry about another service changing their rules or shutting down completely and potentially wiping out all the work you've done.
Facebook has a huge potential audience - over 900 million users at the time of writing this report. They have an advertising service that could potentially reach all those people (or any subset of them) but that's going to cost money.
When you're first starting out, you may not have money to spend and even if you do, you'll probably want to get some experience under your belt before going down that road.
Fortunately, there are ways to use Facebook as a venue for your articles absolutely free.
The first is Facebook Notes. You can post "notes" on Facebook, which essentially means an article. You write your article and post it through your Facebook account, including links to the product or service you're recommending.
All your Facebook friends will see your note in their news feeds, and if they "like" it all of their friends will see that in their feeds. Because of the way things can spread on Facebook, you can reach people who you have never actually met yourself.
Another method for doing this on Facebook is to create a Facebook Page about the topic you're writing on.
You can read the remainder of this post or download it in PDF format here.
If you find this content helpful, you can find lots more like it, that you are free to use for your own purposes, at my site: http://www.PLRContentSource.com