The Internet is a wonderful place to get more knowledge (or doubt… don’t Google your symptoms when you’re sick!), and it has provided a large number of people with more or less stable incomes. Unlike any other venture, making money online can be done with a very minimal investment, and the payoff is potentially very high. Although a “sky is the limit” attitude is good when getting into any type of business or job, you need to still be realistic. Not every online entrepreneur, or writer using the Internet to their advantage, is the next John Chow, who says he makes over $40.000 a month from his blog.
For the rest of us, simply getting started with some blog networks or content networks can seem really appealing. The question is, can you really make money with them?
I’m going to find out!
Much like John Chow has documented his success with his blog, his way isn’t the only way to make a healthy (albeit not as much as John’s pay cheq $$ue) income from the Internet. I’ve been told perseverance and professionalism are the two main requirements for the gig, so it shouldn’t be impossible to generate some sort of result.
Here’s how I’ll do it
After some research, it turns out there are a few main promising online publishing houses that are both attainable goals for intermediate writers, and promise a decent return on your time investment:
If you have clicked on any of the links, you will have noticed that I’ve already started contributing to each one of these networks. I’m going to say I’ll count whatever potential success I might have from this point onwards, considering I have not contributed significantly to either one of these websites. Others who have gone before me have written about their success, and another person writing for both Suite101 and the Examiner has reported being quite happy with the results writing for suite101 and the Examiner.
My lofty writing goals
Considering the content produced for any of the sites I mentioned above remains my own property, and I can receive residual payback from articles that stay online for as long as the websites exist and receive revenue themselves, I am hoping to start building up a significant body of work on each one of them.
For the Examiner, remaining a writer in good standing requires you to write at least 3-4 articles per week. However, they are fairly lax on article length, and do not require a higher word count like suite101 does. The only downside of the Examiner compared to suite101 is that you are stuck with one topic. I’ve found, from my limited experience with TrendHunter.com and Suite101.com, that I enjoy being flexible and writing for several different categories. The Examiner takes advantage of a particular expertise you have, and in my case I was taken on to write about the economy. Albeit a good topic with endless streams of material, it can be creatively a little limiting as well, and that’s where my challenge will be.
However, we’ll see where this takes me, and I plan to keep reporting back what the payoff from my writing adventures are from these websites. I’m seeing this as something I can do for fun in my spare time, between freelancing gigs. It’s also a great creative outlet for articles that are too short for print, but are still interesting and fun to research and write about but do not fit within the scope of this blog.
If you would like to try this out with me, let me know how it goes! Anyone interested in applying to write for the Examiner.com, and if you found out about them through me, then please use my referral number in your application: 5918
