Today is the day that you’re going to start writing your first article. I expect at least one article to be done by the end of this first hour. Now, there are 2 groups of people at this point. The first group are the people who picked a subject that they know about and can readily write their articles without having to do much research. The second group are people that don’t know a thing about the subject that they chose, but are interested enough to try and learn about it so they can write their articles. I happen to be in this second group of people.

When choosing my subject to write on, I found one that really piqued my interest; How to make beer. I know absolutely nothing about making beer, but I do know a lot about drinking it. Anyway, I thought it would be an interesting topic to learn, and then write about. Since I have a list of keywords from the last hour’s work, then all I have to do is learn about the stuff that is described in those keywords. That makes things a little easier now. The other thing that should bring you a little comfort is that several of those keywords are going to end up having a lot of similar content, just rewritten to sound different than what you’ve already written. That’s why the truly great article writers don’t mind jumping into brand new subjects and can write about everything.

In order to learn about my subject, I visited a site that is very popular among Internet Marketers who are trying to earn some money. That site is http://www.ezinearticles.com. While there content may not all be incredible, they do have a large number of authors that can product some quality content, so they are a great place to learn about a new subject. I read about 15 - 20 different articles on how to brew beer, so I learned enough to be able to start writing comfortably and actually make sense. I also visited some of the websites in the author’s profile box and used that information to fill some of the holes left from the various articles.

Anyway, after about 30 - 45 minutes of reading, I was able to nail out a pretty good 500 word article. Associated Content requires only 400 words, but they appreciate the longer articles because it allows them to have another page of content without having to pay much more for it.

When you write your article, just come up with about 3 - 4 points that you can write about. The first paragraph should be a nice little introduction, and let the reader know why they should check out the article. The next 3 or 4 paragraphs should sum up each point in about 75 - 100 words for each one. Make a final paragraph that nicely wraps up the article and you’re good to go. It really should take about 20 - 30 minutes at the most, and after this whole case study you should be able to do them even quicker. Some people even report that they can write articles about new subjects in 7 minutes or less.

You can also find articles and simply rewrite their content, producing a new, original article. This is very common too, and if done correctly can yield some quality content in a quick time.

Once you’re done with your article, simply follow the steps at Associated Content to publish your content. Chances are, you’ll want to just submit a General Article, and then follow the rest of the steps. If you have a picture that you can upload that is related to your article, then definitely do that too. Make sure you have rights to upload the picture, though, otherwise you could get in some serious trouble. Most of the stuff is optional, so don’t worry about it, but the one area you want to focus on is the tags. When you get to that part, simply enter 3 - 5 of your keyword phrases, separated by commas. For example, with my article I used the tags of “how to make beer, make beer at home, beer homebrew”. What this does is tell the search engines that if somebody is searching for those phrases, your article has a good chance of giving them the information that they need. This is what allows certain articles to show up higher in the search results, and will result in a lot more traffic to your articles.

Finally, you should make every effort to do a good job writing your articles. Your goal is not to just get a whole bunch of content out there and not worry about how good it is. Your goal is actually to get a whole bunch of great content out there that people want to read. If you can get somebody to link to your article from their blog, then that’s even more traffic that comes to your article. More traffic equals more money.

The one major thing that I want to point out is that this single strategy will NOT make you rich. There’s no way that you’re going to generate $1,000’s per month by selling articles for $3 - $4 each, unless you can become efficient enough and dedicated enough to write 10 - 20 articles per day. That’s very hard for even the best people to accomplish, so don’t plan on doing that right away. What this WILL DO, however, is give you the skills to do basic keyword research, learn how to write quality articles, and earn a little bit of money to be able to start your business with. Most people don’t have an extra $100 that they can use to buy domain names, pay for hosting, and cover other incidentals that pop up when they start their business. With just 2 weeks of working an hour each day, you’ll actually have that little bit of seed money that you need to get started. The best part of this whole project, however, is the residual income that you will be creating. It’s not much, but once you get 25 - 30 articles online, you should be able to start making a nice $5 per month, assuming that you did your keyword research properly. Even if you top out at only $3 per month, then that’s still better than before you did it. My website hosting plan costs me $4.99 per month, so $3 per month from my articles means I only have to come up with an extra $2 for hosting. That’s a piece of cake! Then, spend another 2 weeks, make some lump sum cash and add another $3 - $5 to your residual income. Do this 3 or 4 more times and you may end up getting enough residual income to go out to dinner guilt-free every month. That’s the most exciting part of it, is the ability to continue to make money on something that you’ve already done, even 2 years ago or more. No, it’s not much, but it gets you into the mindset that you should have when you’re building your business. Focus on active income at the beginning, especially when you have specific needs, like paying a bill, or buying a computer, or that kind of stuff. Always be working on your passive income, however. That’s what is going to let you retire from your day job and work online, enjoying your time at home with the family.

Now, get back out there and write some more articles! I have one uploaded, how many have you done?

I’m going to title this Case Study “Article Money”, simply because we’re going to earn money by writing articles.  There’s nothing fancy involved, and even the most basic beginner will be able to do this.  The articles don’t have to be exceptional, but they do have to be fairly well written, especially since we hope to earn a little money up-front from them.  Our biggest concern is establishing a small residual income, though, and that’s why we have to do this first step.

Keyword research will tell us what terms and words people are entering when they perform their searches in Google.  Determining your main subject will be up to you, but I’ll show you what I did in order to figure out what articles I want to write.  If you have any passions, or interests, then I suggest you try writing about them first.  This will make it easier, and will also allow you to write even faster.  If you’re allowing yourself an hour each day, then being able to write 3 instead of 2 articles per hour will mean a difference of about $40 at the end of our study.

The first thing I did was go to the Google Keyword Tool.  You’ll see a box that says “Enter one keyword or phrase per line:”.  In that box I entered “How To” and clicked  the button underneath that says “Get Keyword Ideas”.  This brought up several different subjects that I could choose to write about.  Among them were “How To Smoke Weed”, “How To Grind”, “How To Make French Toast”, and many more.  While deciding on a niche to write about, I also paid attention to the numbers in the Approximate Average Search Volume column.  The higher the number, then the more that keyword is searched, which means that we could possibly get more page views to our article.

I’m going to state the goal of this case study, and make sure to repeat it in every post that I make about it.  This case study will be to write articles that generate residual income by targeting keywords that are more commonly searched in Google.  Does that make sense?  That’s why we’re interested in that Search Volume column of the results.

Anyway, I looked through that list and found about 5 subjects that interested me, and also had searches of around 20,000 per month.  Since I’m planning on writing about 26 - 30 articles during this study, I figured that I should easily be able to write an average of 6 articles per subject.  The first subject that I chose is one that I’m actually pretty interested in learning, and have no experience in.

Step 2 in our keyword research is to expand from our main keyword and find several other keywords to use in our articles.  Take your main keyword and put it in the textbox, along with any other variations that you can think of.  Let’s say you want to use “How To Train Your Dog”, for example.  Put that in the text box, hit enter, and type in anything else you can think of.  Other phrases would be “dog training”, “train dogs”, “train a dog”, “dog training tips”, “train dog tips”, you get the idea.  Don’t spend a lot of time on this, maybe just a minute or two trying to come up with more stuff to enter.  Once you’re ready, click the button and do your search.  You may find other fairly generic terms in the results that you think would be good to enter into your search.  If you do, just enter them in the textbox under all the others and search again.

With your results on the screen, click on the “Average Search Results” column to sort the results.  We want the higher numbers at the top.  When they are in order, read through them and click on the “Add” link at the right of the keywords if you feel you can write a 300 - 400 word article about that topic.  You’ll notice that many of them seem the same, but we’re going to target those keywords specifically, so we will write an article for each one.  We’re also going to use them within the various articles we write too, which will be powerful for optimizing for the search engines.  You’ll want to stop when you hit the keywords that are only searched about 1,000 per monnth or less.  Go through the first list of words, and then scroll down and go through the second list of words.  When you’re done, you should have anywhere from 10 - 40 keywords, or even more.

Click the link under the keywords to Download them as a text file.  Open the text file and look at your keywords.  It may be a fairly large list, but we’re going to make it a little smaller in this next step.  Go through the keywords and if there’s a smaller keyword that exists in a larger keyword, get rid of it.  For example, if you have the keywords “Train Your Dog” and “How To Train Your Dog”, then you can eliminate the first one because it is going to be targeted in the second keyword anyway.

After you’ve done that, you should hopefully be left with several keywords to use for your articles over the next couple weeks.  If you don’t have at least 25 keywords in your list, then you will have use some keywords over, or find more on a different subject.  You can even go back and find more keywords for your current subject if you want, too.  Just make sure you have enough to do all the articles that we’re going to do.  I anticipate being able to do around 2 articles per hour.  Since our first hour is used with keyword research, then that leaves us with 13 days out of a 14 day case study.  As I said before, assuming we average $3.50 for each of the 26 articles, that will be a nice total of $91 that we can use to fund other ideas and ventures.  In fact, I have a whole list of ideas lined up, so we should be able to jump from this right into something else that should help us earn a little more income.  The reason we’re doing the keyword research is to find keywords that are more heavily searched, so we can earn even more money through the pageview bonus.  With 16 articles online I earn $2 - $3 per month and I don’t have to lift a finger.  I figure that with the right keyword research, which I didn’t do any of on those articles, we should easily bring in $5 - $10 per month in residual income.  This is money that we don’t have to do anything for, it just keeps coming for as long as the articles are out there.  Later we’re going to go over some methods to push your articles and try to get them more exposure, but for now we’re just going to submit them and let them season out there.  It took a while to start earning the steady monthly income, but now I’m still earning from articles that I submitted 2 years ago.

Ok, this is the first hour of the case study.  Once you’re done, you will have a keyword list and we’ll be able to start writing articles.  It doesn’t matter if you know the subject at all or not.  Part of the time will be spent learning about it, and the rest will be spent writing about it.  Google will be our friend here, so make sure you know how to use it.  Stay tuned for Hour 2.

Chris

When 99% of you visit this site, you’re probably wondering how to make money without investing a lot into courses, coaching, ebooks, etc.  I’m going to give you one tactic that you can use to start making money in as little as one week.  It will consist of writing articles for payment (small payment, but payment nonetheless), as well as earning residual money from your article performance.

The site that you’re going to be submitting your articles to is Associated Content.

The first thing you’ll want to do is get an account set up at Associated Content.  You also need to set up your own Paypal account.

Now that you’re signed up at both sites, we’ll begin.  There are two things that we want to keep in mind when writing articles for AC.  They pay an upfront payment for the article, as well as the pageview bonus.  Don’t expect a lot for the upfront payment, though.  My average payment is around $3 - $4 per article.  They will occasionally offer more money for certain subjects, so be on the lookout for those when they show up.  Generally, though, you should expect around $3.50 per article when starting out.  I have had a couple that earned me $8 in the diabetes niche, so certain niches may earn you a little more.  Anyway, back to the subject.  Along with the $3.50, you can expect to earn $1.50 per 1,000 page views.  This is the residual earning that they offer.  It may not seem like much, but I earn about $2 - $3 per month without having to do any extra work at all.  If I knew what I’m about to share, then I would be earning much more with the same amount of effort.  In keeping with the whole “Hour per day” concept, I’m going to track this as a Case Study, and will follow through with it for about 2 weeks.  I’m a decent article writer, and figure that 2 articles per hour should be reasonable.  If I can nail out 3 - 4, then that will be a good day.  I don’t expect you to do that when you’re just starting out, but using my techniques, you should easily hit 2 per hour.

The basic steps for each article are going to be the same.  We’re going to find a niche that we can write about.  This can be one that you already know, or something that you’re interested in.  If you aren’t interested in the subject, then it’s going to take you longer to write your articles, and you won’t earn quite as much.  Now, once you become good at it, you’ll be able to write articles on anything you want, but until then just stick with the easy stuff.

Step 1: Pick A Niche

Step 2: Do Keyword Research

Step 3: Write Your Articles

Step 4: Get Paid (Hopefully)

The nice thing about this is that it isn’t something you have to do all at once.  If you work an hour one day and then can’t do anything else for 2 more days, then that’s fine.  You just won’t earn as much money in the short timeframe, but you’ll still be able to do things on your own schedule.

I’m going to try to do all of this in a 2 week case study.  As I complete my steps, I’m going to show you everything I do, as well as show you the results of the actions.  If I can write 2 articles per hour for 13 hours (the first hour will be spent on keyword research), then I anticipate earnings of around $91, plus the performance benefits.  Proper keyword research should easily get us thousands of organic hits per month, which help keep us motivated toward that goal of earning a living online.  You won’t be able to retire from this strategy, but if you can keep it up for a month or two, then you should have a couple hundred dollars to use for things like domains, hosting, and everything else that you need.  Assuming that your keyword research is accurate too, you should hopefully earn anywhere from $5 - $10 per month completely on autopilot.  It may not seem like much, but you can get some decent hosting for $5 - $6 per month, so it would easily cover that cost.

Make sure you check back for the first step in my case study.  I’m going to pick a niche to write articles about, then do my keyword research to find keywords that I want to target.